James Wolcott on David Letterman, Jon Stewart, and the entertainment ritual of
the long goodbye.
It would be even crueler to want to keep Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart in studio captivity after all that he’s been through on our behalf, subjecting himself to a radiation bombardment of mostly right-wing idiocy and conducting a continuing tutorial on breaking news that blends angry incredulity, analysis, citizen passion, historical perspective, and scalding ridicule into a cross between Howard Beale’s tirades in Network and Theater of the Absurd. No shaman has ever worked as heroically as Stewart in trying to cast out the demons and demiurges from our moronic inferno, and, as I think he would readily admit, for all his coruscating takedowns, the political-idiot brigade has gotten only dumber, meaner, more rapacious, and more parasitically entrenched. He made The Daily Show an institution and has seen his junior partners Steve Carell, John Oliver, and Letterman’s successor, Stephen Colbert, go on to glory while he’s held down the fort, forced to reckon with every mutated strain of sewage monster formulated by Fox News. Stewart has practically made himself hoarse shouting into the whirlwind, and if he sometimes looks as if he’s ashen from outrage fatigue, it’s a sympathetic symptom of how much our democracy has degraded. Why would he want to put himself through the acid reflux of the upcoming 2016 campaign?
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—The "No Race" Superiority:
Ever since Charles Murray's racist nonsense "The Bell Curve" first posited that different races have different intelligence aptitudes (to the everlasting shame of The New Republic and its then Editor Andrew Sullivan, the book was treated as a serious work at the time), we have had to suffer too many "serious discussions" on this issue, and other related issues (Summers). Making racism respectable was Charles Murray's goal, and for a while it succeededed. But, as the NYTimes Ed Board points out, race is not an easily described concept genetically:
[A]t Pennsylvania State University, where about 90 students took complex genetic screening tests that compared their samples with those of four regional groups . . . [m]any of these students thought of themselves as "100 percent" white or black or something else, but only a tiny fraction of them, as it turned out, actually fell into that category. Most learned instead that they shared genetic markers with people of different skin colors. |
What amazes me about this, as I was amazed by the remarks of Lawrence Summers, is that even if the racist nirvana could be achieved: that intelligence could even be reduced to a measurable concept, that it could be proven that there are genetic differences between the races and genders that lead to different intelligence aptitudes, etc. - does anyone seriously believe that that hypothetical factor is even worthy of mention as compared to the very real, very well documented societal prejudices that have plagued mankind since the beginning of history?
What value these genetic studies may have for understanding diseases et al I can't say, but I am always skeptical when the science appears to be undertaken to discover whether there are innate differences in intelligence between races and genders.
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show,
David Waldman, who has worked on the campaigns of two indicted sitting Members of Congress, continues unimpeded.
Greg Dworkin recounts the Terror of the Return of the Revenge of the “CDC Whistleblower.” Stages of Gop Trump grief. Trump fans "explain" themselves. Why the Naysayers Are Wrong About the Iran Deal. And were wrong about Medicare, Medicaid & Obamacare. Aaron Schock faces more legal trouble. Cincinnati shooter/officer indicted for murder. "In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me." The experience of using force simulated for citizens. No, It’s not just like, your opinion, man.
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