There wasn’t so much for Jon Stewart to laugh at in the unrest in Baltimore this week, but as usual, “The Daily Show” managed to find one bright spot: cable media.
Stewart noted that the events in Baltimore were another tragic example of intense clashes between civilians and police in a struggling inner city, no strange thing in American history.
“Like Watts and Detroit in the ’60s, Georgia in the ’70s, Miami in the ’80s, L.A. and St. Petersburg in the ’90s, these cyclical eruptions appear like tragedy-cicadas, depressing in their similarity,” the host said.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, on the other hand, was completely dumbfounded. Stewart rolled clip after clip of Blitzer covering Baltimore.
“Hard to believe this is going on in a major American city right now,” Blitzer said in one clip. “This is a scene that a lot of us never anticpated seeing in a city like Baltimore,” he said in another.
“This shit happens all the time!” Stewart said. “Ferguson was just a few months ago — and you were talking about it!”
Roll that clip:
“It’s hard for me to believe that in this day and age — 2014, so many years after Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement — we’re seeing National Guard troops on the street,” Blitzer echoed months ago. “It’s something I didn’t think we’d be seeing again.”
Stewart buried his head in his hands.
“I am worried about you.”
Watch the clip, courtesy of Comedy Central:
It’s kind of scary, really. There’s this play called King Lear where the only character with the wit and nerve to say how things really are, the only person with license to tell the king what he’s done wrong, is the Fool—the comedian, we’d call it today. The play does not end well.
There are exactly two words that explain why dense Wolf Blitzer doesn’t look like the most stupid person at CNN:
#1 Don
#2 Lemon
And that is perhaps why doltish Lemon is allowed to hang around!
If it bleeds it leads. By definition peaceful protests don’t involve much blood. Worse, the day to day work of improving conditions in American cities is hard and generally unglamorous in the best of circumstances and hard unglamorous work seems to be beyond our politicians who are only interested in making the evening news. It has been said that the very act of observing can change reality. Maybe if Wolf Blitzer started observing the day to day struggles of men and women trapped in low pay, low skill jobs their reality would change for the better. Nah, can’t happen. Only blood sells detergent.
The Fool is a standard literary device made use of heavily throughout the Elizabethan Era and beyond. The concept shows up in the modern era in the Discworld novels by the late Terry Pratchett.
Jon Stewart has been filling this role for decades now.
Don’t blame Wolf. Blame the teleprompter.