…I really don’t write much about America these days, and the way the place I called home for 35 or so years no longer makes sense to me.
I don’t have the spleen to be filled with outrage 24 hours a day any more, only a deep kind of sadness and the quote from the R.E.M. song (via the Linklater classic Slacker, of course) perpetually pinballing around my brain: “to withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy.” I find my peace in a bit of grim distance from following every dismal development, and appreciating all the other ways life is still pretty darned good away from the bad news machine.
But this week, when they really started going after the court jesters, it made me feel like things are even a little more apocalyptic than the current end times vibe.
For decades, the late-night TV show hosts, the Carsons and Lettermans and Lenos and kindred spirit Saturday Night Live, they were the court jesters on the American political scene. They would mock mercilessly Ford, Reagan, Bushes and Clintons and the like, for their real failings and their merely human missteps. They were a central part of the culture, with entire books written about their doings and in-fighting, or one of my favourite TV shows being set entirely in the world of late night.
I caught the very tail end of Johnny Carson’s everyman years, and was a faithful watcher of David Letterman in his heyday, of SNL many years ago. I’ve watched a fair bit of Colbert and The Daily Show although I honestly don’t think I’ve watched more than a few minutes of Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers or Jimmy Fallon, the current crop of hosts.
Dave could make fun of George H.W. Bush vomiting at a state dinner or Johnny could dress up as a fumbling Ronald Reagan. It was taken as a kind of point of pride that in America where the right to free speech is the very first amendment to the Constitution that you could mock the dear leader of the day, without fear of being forced off the airwaves by a carefully orchestrated tsunami of outrage.
Let’s be clear – they weren’t always actually that funny, to be honest. Political humour of the day has a perhaps 25 percent hit rate that fades quickly over time, and Jay Leno’s Lewinsky ‘jokes’ had a shelf life of about .005 nanoseconds.
Letterman and Conan and the like were always a lot funnier when they followed their own weird muses rather than the headlines, but that wasn’t the point – the point was that they could make lame jokes about the man in the White House and the American political scene without fears the President himself would start screeching for their cancellation or calling the very idea of criticism against him “illegal.”
The center did not hold, and the culture now revolves around a million very different siloed off entertainments and satirists than it once did when Johnny, Dave and Jay strode around on network television, the very height of celebrity in a world where nobody knew what an influencer was. Their time is fading, not entirely due to the current US administration, but they’re sure helping shove the stragglers out the door.
Instead of court jesters, we’re getting satire only tailored to existing beliefs or dizzyingly insular memes as the world drowns in a sea of doomscrolling and performative outage. In all the old sci-fi films, we imagined the end coming in a million ways, but few of them imagined a culture subsiding into the sea as we were all off inhaling TikToks and YouTube videos whilst sucking on cherry vapes with an Ozempic chaser.
I’ve got absolutely no good ideas, no hot takes about where all this goes from here.
But when you clear out the court jesters, it usually turns all you can hear is the king chortling to himself, self-satisfied, in a court where the only other sound is his laughter being echoed right back to him by a room full of sycophants.
Nik Dirga 