Reality is an Acquired Taste
Reality is an Acquired Taste
This week’s TBL looks at a sad example from our post-truth age.
We live in a past-truth age. Reality is harder and harder to ascertain, especially when people try to hide it from you.
This week’s TBL looks at a sad example.
If you like The Better Letter, please subscribe, share it, and forward it widely. Please please me and do that.
NOTE: Some email services may truncate TBL. If so, or if you’d prefer, you can read it all here. If it is clipped, you can also click on “View entire message” and you’ll be able to view the entire post in your email app.
Thanks for visiting.
Reality is an Acquired Taste
In 1984, what we now recall as Ronald Reagan’s triumphant march to a landslide reelection faltered as concerns emerged about the president’s age and mental acuity. President Reagan was then the oldest president ever at 73 (which, to be fair, seems sprightly today) and often seemed to have lost his fastball, “mastermind” claims notwithstanding. In his first debate with his Democratic rival, Senator Walter Mondale, the Gipper did not give his best performance, offering halting, wandering, and digressive answers. The apparent cognitive decline of the president became a hot topic of conversation, in public, private, and among media and entertainment types. It energized Mondale’s challenge and seemed to create an opportunity for Sen. Mondale to resurrect his campaign.
At a post-debate rally, Mr. Mondale proclaimed, “today we have a brand-new race, today everything is different.”
President Reagan responded to his sinking numbers by leaning into the issue and turning it into a punch line. In the second and final debate, Mr. Reagan, with the assurance and relaxed pacing of the professional actor he had been, joked, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
The line was met by laughter from all, including Sen. Mondale. And, in that moment, the president’s reelection was won. Mr. Reagan carried 49 states.
Fast forward to today.
Late night television has been beyond predictable for years now. Nearly all its hosts are reliabably in the pocket of Democrats save Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, predictably in the pocket of Republicans1 (talk radio turns that picture on its head). These hosts tell their audiences what they want to hear, by which they mean, what the “other side” needs to hear – far more clapter2 than humor – and bring on guests to reinforce the narrative. The overarching goal: to flatter and reassure the viewer. Yawn. Oh, and obfuscate when reality is less than ideal. Competition from streaming services notwithstanding, nobody should be surprised that advertising revenues for six of the top late-night shows has declined more than 60 percent from their highs in 2016.
Bucking that trend, Comedy Central has brought Jon Stewart – at his best, part jester and part sage, and once heralded as “the most trusted man in America” – back to host The Daily Show, his old beat, on Monday nights through the fall elections, obviously seeking a bump in relevance and ratings as its brand fades into oblivion.3 After mostly sitting out the Trump years, a time wherein politics got stupider, nastier, crazier, more toxic, and more chaotic at warp speed, Stewart has come back to a republic in disarray and a wholly unsatisfactory choice this November. He is without competition in the space of political humor that isn’t afraid of or unwilling to take on anyone.
He did not disappoint.
The oldest president in history’s age was once more center stage. After riffing on the special counsel’s obvious observation that 81-year-old President Joe Biden is a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Stewart pitched reality over partisanship and gerontocracy: “It is not crazy to think that the oldest people in the history of the country to ever run for President might have some of these challenges.... What’s crazy is thinking that we’re the ones, as voters, who must silence concerns and criticisms.” He cautioned against both indifference and false equivalencies while offering no reassurance. “If your guy loses, bad things might happen, but the country is not over,” he said. “And if your guy wins, the country is in no way saved.”
It isn’t bothsidesism to challenge everybody.
“Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump. He hasn’t been indicted as many times, hasn’t had as many fraudulent businesses, or been convicted in a civil trial for sexual assault, or been ordered to pay defamation, had his charities disbanded, or stiffed a sh**-ton of blue-collar tradesmen he’d hired. Should we even get to the ‘grab the pu***’ stuff? Probably not.”
Stewart did not even shy away from recognizing that he’s older now, too.
His conclusion: “Biden’s lost a step, but Trump regularly says things at rallies that would warrant a wellness check.... The stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny. It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny. If the barbarians are at the gate, you want Conan standing on the ramparts, not chocolate chip cookie guy” (referring to President Biden’s awkward TikTok debut).
Stewart is back to dunk on Trump and those he sees as the “bad guys,” but he also sees himself as free, and perhaps obligated, to take on things, people, and issues his core supporters and viewers might wish he wouldn’t.
Best of all, Stewart’s return was funny, although whether his schtick felt familiar or dated I’ll leave to you. Still, nobody cuts through political hypocrisy and spin quite like Jon Stewart.4 See for yourself.
As I like to say, reality is an acquired taste. Thus, I wasn’t surprised to see reality heavily criticized. Because Trump (“Even if we were to posit that Biden is impaired, and even if we were to grant that that impairment is a major issue, still, there’s no ethical choice to be made between these two candidates”).
Unlike President Reagan, President Biden and his surrogates have mostly tried to refuse to respond to the age issue but for the odd accusations of “ageism” and “ableism,” even ducking the traditional Super Bowl interview and its enormous audience for the second year in a row. His supporters would silence everyone about it if they could.
For example, Rolling Stone reliably reported that “more centrist Democrats, including those most likely to have appended ‘Blue Wave’ and ‘Resistance’ labels to their social media accounts in the Trump years, were appalled at what they saw as a betrayal by one of their own.” The magazine further listed a predictably long litany of liberal complaints.
“Liberal media figures were among those unamused by Stewart’s comeback episode. Independent journalist Aaron Rupar, for example, complained that his material was ‘basically the New York Times op-ed page in TV form,’ adding, ‘both sides are not in fact equally bad!’ Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called Stewart a ‘bothsidesist fraud’ and hoped that the talk show host would take another nine-year hiatus from the Daily Show. The hosts of daytime talk show The View faulted the episode for ‘ageism.’ And Bill Palmer of the anti-Trump website Palmer Report – not exactly known for wholly accurate coverage – denounced Stewart’s ‘false equivalence horse crap,’ vowing not to watch the show anymore.”
The Daily Beast chimed in. So did The Hollywood Reporter and Slate, among others.
The West Wing’s Josh Lyman had something to say, too.
Stewart dealt head-on with the criticism on his next show. “But I guess as the famous saying goes: ‘Democracy dies in discussion,’” he said.
Stewart then brilliantly skewered the easily skewered Tucker Carlson, and his “speaking ‘of course’ to power.”
Stewart’s implicit argument is a very good one, even though nobody connected to Joe Biden would ever make it. Here it is: a brain-dead Joe Biden would present less of an existential threat to America and the world than Donald Trump, a relatively energetic, aged, and manifestly unfit psychopath who attempted a coup d’état against his legitimately elected successor the last time he was in power.
That said, it is beyond curious that each major political party seems determined to nominate manifestly unfit candidates for the highest office in the land. That’s a reality none of us should be comfortable with.
Totally Worth It
She is, hands down, the best pop singer on the planet.
See all Caitlin Clark’s buckets here.
Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome.
Of course, the easiest way to share TBL is simply to forward it to a few dozen of your closest friends
.You may hit some paywalls below; most can be overcome here.
This is the best thing I read in the last week. The smartest. The stupidest. The most important. The most bizarre, unless it was this. The most inspiring. Not a bad idea. Flying economy. The age of the grandparent has arrived. He’s the same guy. Oldie but goodie. Critical thinking.
Please send me your nominations for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright).
The TBL Spotify playlist, made up of the songs featured here, now includes over 270 songs and about 19 hours of great music. I urge you to listen in, sing along, and turn up the volume.
My ongoing thread/music and meaning project: #SongsThatMove
Benediction
We live on “a hurtling planet,” the poet Rod Jellema informed us, “swung from a thread of light and saved by nothing but grace.”
To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers grace and hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Issue 167 (February 23, 2024)
Jimmy Fallon and SNL’s Weekend Update hosts, Colin Jost and Michael Che, mostly excepted, for different reasons (Fallon tries to stay above the fray while Jost and Che fight to be unpredictable). It is promising that when Taylor Tomlinson, the millennial comic, got her own late-night show, After Midnight, on CBS last month, she opted out of the topical-hot-takes-and-celebrity-interview format entirely to host a game show. The current culture seems oblivious to the commonsense idea that, to have a chance to persuade those who don’t share your priors, it is necessary to be willing to question your own priors in service to reality. Democrats who regularly and routinely insisted that John McCain and Mitt Romney were existential threats to “our Democracy” when they ran for president shouldn’t be surprised that they are seen by many as crying wolf when they make the exact same claim about Donald Trump.
This is an expression, attributed to Seth Meyers, that describes the kind of “comedy” that, instead of making audiences laugh, elicits applause by pandering to their priors.
Ironically, Hasan Minhaj was reportedly the network’s choice to take over full-time hosting duties until a piece in The New Yorker revealed that he had fabricated anecdotes about discrimination for his standup specials. In a response video, Minhaj purported to defend himself by asserting that “comedic storytelling” can have a loose relationship with the truth.
It remains to be seen how this gift will work against former President Trump, whose awful isn’t hidden, it’s right up-front. It’s essentially the point.
Bob,
Thank you for this.