A local radio station that I listen to on my way into work has been playing David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists in the morning for a while now. They usually do them right as I’m making the turn into my parking lot, so I just get to hear the whole thing by the time I’ve found a space and stopped the car. Last week, there was another list filled with jabs at Cheney and Bush. I found myself smiling and laughing, which is normal, but then I realized I was feeling something else, which was a little disturbing to me when I thought about it.
I was feeling surprise. Surprise and a little discomfort. What was causing these feelings? Well, I realized I was unused to hearing such jokes made about the pResident and vice-pResident on a mainstream show like Letterman’s. Even though he’s been doing it for some time now, I just still doesn’t seem natural somehow. I also had a twinge of fear for Letterman’s career, if not life (because I can’t help but be paranoid).
And that’s when it hit me that this was all part of Rove’s plan.
We joke around a lot here on DU and make some pretty biting and funny comments about Little Lord Pissypants on a regular basis. In fact, some people have complained that we do too much of that when we should be talking about something more important. However, I believe that being able to make fun of and laugh at the pResident is very important.
There are producers and writers of Saturday Night Live who credit (and yes, they think it is to their credit) themselves with bringing down the Ford presidency by their relentless (and not unwarranted) portrayal of him as clumsy. Politcal cartoons have been around since the invention of the printing press (and perhaps are scrawled on cave walls, for all we know). We have ALWAYS made fun of our politicians. And yet, somehow, with this administration, it seems as though it had in many ways become taboo.
As the Bushies are fond of saying, make no mistake: The Republicans are acutely aware of what humor can do. They saw what happened to Bush I, Quayle, and even their golden patriarch Reagan. They were more than happy to try to turn that against Clinton. That’s why they probably didn’t care that the Whitewater non-scandal didn’t go anywhere – they had all that “over-sexed” Clinton stuff to make jokes about. They did their best to turn Clinton into a punch line, although they seem to have failed miserably.
Still, they knew enough that when 9/11 happened, one of the many things they used that tragedy for was to make sure that it was no longer cool or proper to make jokes about Bush. Now he was a “war president” photographed with a saintly halo over his head while he presided over the War on Terror, in order to gain revenge for our stricken nation and ensure our safety from weapons of mass destruction. There’s nothing funny about that.
Humor is often a form of dissent, and that was what Rove was trying to immunize Bush against. The façade is cracking now and maybe a day will come when the humorists of the early 21st century will talk about how they had a small hand in taking down the most corrupt and vicious administrations our country has ever seen.
