“Periodically, you feel a great surge of protest welling up inside. You want to run to the world’s leaders and yell, ‘Stop! Will you guys stop! Just cut it out!’ But each time you soon simmer down to ponder the real problems of the day. Like, should you or shouldn’t you get a haircut? (Real, because you can do something about it.)” — Paul Krassner, The Realist (December 1958)
Fifteen thousand according to the organizers, six thousand according to the police. The naked citation of the official number makes the first believable.
I hear noise. Protests can be fun. I go see who’s complaining about what.
Deep voices expressing pent-up power. Open-air freedom, sunny day, thoughts of Easy Rider. A temptation tempered by injured and missing friends. (Later, on the way home, a traffic jam with another reason not to ride).
I look for colours. I see pseudo-patches that turn out to be an initialism for the French Federation of Angry Motorcyclists. Today, they are upset because, soon, older bikes wont be allowed to pollute Paris.
A few years earlier they complained about daytime lights for cars. “Daylight headlights are for motorcycles. It makes us stand out in traffic.” Why is saving motorcyclists more important than saving pedestrians? At least they’ve stopped kicking cars that don’t give them wide berths for their tolerated road habits.
I spot gloves with an orange wrist band. “POLICE” it says. Off duty?
A few days later I came across Jonathan Coe‘s essay Sinking Giggling into the Sea which, in the guise of a book review, looks at British satire. It joined a few of the dots of my thoughts.
He quotes the introduction to a collection of scripts to explain the British satire boom of the early sixties:
“Conceivably the demand arose because after ten years of stable Conservative government, with no prospect in 1961 of its ever ending, the middle classes felt some vague guilt accumulating for the discrepancy between their prosperous security and the continuing misery of those who persisted in failing to conform, by being black, or queer, or mad, or old.” — Michael Frayn, Beyond the Fringe
This explains nicely the persistent popularity of satire in France and it also works for The Daily Show’s.
Coe sums up the message of one skit with:
“Laughter is not just ineffectual as a form of protest, but that it actually replaces protest.”
I didn’t like the first conclusions I was drawing from this. Is The Daily Show‘s popularity a sign of the pacification of a malaise without any actions to cure it? Maybe. But the early sixties led to the protests of the late sixties and Jon Stewart does not limit himself to satire. He’s actively organizing, participating in, and promoting many events (e.g. the demonstration Rally to Restore Sanity).
Hmmm. What new paths for my thoughts to wander down will tomorrow’s news bring?
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”– Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences
Yahooey's Blog 