While I watched The Daily Show, tonight, an absurdity struck me. It was not, however, Jon Stewart’s usual juxtaposition of distinctly crude humor—to which I am profoundly indifferent, as a genre—with incisive political satire. No, tonight’s small slice of bizarre, cosmic recognition involved recall of a news program I had watched earlier, on MSNBC, The Ed Show with Ed Schultz, a stocky, folksy Midwestern pundit and avowed proponent of the middle class. Stewart, an entertainer, a self-proclaimed “funny-man,” had a sit down panel to discuss the failed Zadroga Bill with four ill, possibly terminally ill, first responders to the terrorists attacks of September 11th, 2001. Mr. Schultz entertained a tall, bird-like woman with dark hair, one of his most frequent guests, to harp on whether or not Bristol Palin’s performance on Dancing With the Stars had been tainted by Tea Party Conspiracy. I do not remember which of Mr. Schultz’s cavalcade of irritating female comics this was. If it was Lizz Winstead, one of the co-creators of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, then I suppose the situation’s basic surreality was heightened, some, but when saturation in the ludicrous becomes opaque enough to obscure the reality of what one experiences then a little more doesn’t matter, one way or the other.
Stewart interviewed four men, each of whom dug through the rubble after al-Qaeda’s attack on America. Kenny Speck, a veteran of the Fire Department of New York, struggles with heart and lung problems. Bruce Fowlman, of the New York Police Department, is afflicted by heart, lung and brain problems, and is unable to get the health care he needs and deserves. Ken George, of the Department of Transportation, has debilitating heart and back conditions and John Devlin, an operating engineer, is dying of stage four throat cancer. Another of their friends, mentioned by Mr. Speck, is dying of facial cancer, a condition so horrific that it has cause the very nose to rot off of his face. These men, and so many more like them, men who sacrificed their health and lives to protect others, are the men who are hurt by the political wrangling over tax cuts which has enmeshed the Zadroga Bill, named for another civil servant who has already died of illnesses connected to September 11th.
Our culture, like these men, has been wounded unto the point of death. We are unable, anymore, to distinguish between fantasy and reality, between what is really important and what is nothing more than smoke and mirrors used to cloud our collective judgment, making us unable to make the moral choices which develop our finely tuned humanity. Our culture has become, as T.S. Eliot put it so eloquently in The Waste Land, “a heap of broken images.” There seem to be very few hermeneutic methods available for discerning what is essential and what is worthless, and even less impetus towards developing those methods. We divide ourselves into tribes of howling barbarians based on allegiances to celebrities—Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien, the New York Giants or the Green Bay Packers, Taylor Swift or Kanye West, Fox News or MSNBC, Sarah Palin or Kate Goesselin—and long for nothing more than ascent, god-like, into the ranks of celebrity ourselves where we might become, even if for just one instant of humiliation in thin tabloid pages, a scintillating being like the Lady Gaga we see, parading down a runway wrapped in bloody meat. Empathy and authenticity are devalued in place of simple visibility and rank notoriety. Worth is determined by your hit counter and your twitter list.
This mood has invaded our political process to an alarming degree. Politicians do not govern, but simply exist in a state of constant campaign theatre. Like sharks, they must continuously swim to survive. Each action is a piece of stage magic, calculated to provoke a response. The Zadroga Bill was caught up in this sort of political maneuvering, and these heroic, dying civil servants have been sacrificed on the altar of political celebrity. I watched Mitch McConnell, supposedly a public servant himself, moan tearfully about a retiring fellow Senator, his thoughts nowhere close to those whom he and his ilk proclaim as “American heroes.” Those on the other side, who promised to close Guantanamo Bay and other places like it, are no more worthwhile when it comes to human rights, and hundreds of men—many of them nothing more than frightened goat-herders guilty of nothing more than angering the wrong neighbor—languish in black sites.
I do not wish to appear partisan in these criticisms. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are, by and large, owned by the same corporations. Although one party appears to have a deeper commitment to empathy and the all important social justice it engenders, this commitment is a surface level phenomenon only. The Democrats, for whom I am ashamed to have voted in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010, are a peculiar species of gutless worm man, slithering from inoffensive position to inoffensive position, a slave to the political theatre provided each and every identity and interest group imaginable. The Republicans are nothing more than hypocritical hobgoblins and worthy of no more comment than that, save that they gleefully played with the political theatre provided by the terror attacks of September 11th when it was useful to them, and have proven unwilling to pay for the privilege.
I would presume to finish this comment by saying, to all, “good night, and good luck,” in an echo of Edward R. Murrow, but America deserves neither restful sleep nor providence, although I fervently hope we are provided with both. We have earned, through our action and inaction, societal damnation and, in all likelihood, are preparing to reap what we have sewn.
