Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom

Prologue: On Truthiness

[ ∞ ] Prologue on truthiness On September 11, 2001, the radical Islamist group Al Qaeda largely succeeded in carrying out a plot to destroy the U.S. World Trade Center towers and embarrass a mighty power. The United States responded with two invasions. The retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan arguably made sense given that the country served as the main headquarters for Al Qaeda. However, the invasion of Iraq, even as it was staged as a war for freedom, struck most of the world as a case of imperial arrogance, and a risky one at that. The American government’s charges that Iraq was harboring terrorist organizations, including members of Al Qaeda, and was concealing weapons of mass destruction not only lacked su≈cient evidence but turned out to be little more than lies. Meanwhile, the invasion went awry, unraveling not just all semblance of order in Iraq but the international credibility of the United States as well. It appears that the rash decision of the ill-fated Bush regime has, sadly and with no small degree of irony, furthered key aims of the terrorist agenda. It has helped foster the appearance that the U.S. superpower is the bully its critics claim it to be, and thus damaged its international reputation and prestige. How could this American fiasco have happened? Two factors were p r o l o g u e [ ≤ ] decisive. First, a lackluster mainstream news media failed to do its job, that is, subject the administration’s foreign policy objectives to serious public scrutiny and critical analysis, or give any serious coverage to oppositional voices. At the time these voices were flippantly discounted as fringe or, worse yet, unpatriotic, and yet many of their predictions have unfortunately come true. This failure of the media rendered many Americans blind to the likely significance of the Iraq invasion and, ironically, undermined the liberal imperialists’ claim to bring basic rights, free speech first among them, to the Middle East. For how could we claim to bring free speech to the Middle East when there was a lack of meaningful political speech or debate at home? Second, the moral rhetoric of neoconservativism captured the national imagination and defined the terms of the debate . This moral rhetoric configured the world into a melodrama of good versus evil and targeted Iraq as a nodal point of an Axis of Evil. Such cartoon morality blocked any respect for the subtleties of international politics and set the United States up for ‘‘blowback’’ from its heavyhanded use of power. The mainstream news media, caught in a blinding force of moral pieties, thus shored up the radical foreign policy goals of the neoconservatives . At the time one had to wonder, where might one find an e√ective counterforce to the inflated moral rhetoric of such self-deceived deceivers? Enter the late-night satirists, featuring most prominently Comedy Central ’s dynamic duo, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. For what else to do when the mainstream media serves as a conduit for bombastic posturing but to laugh? And what more appropriate force for deflating rhetoric and exposing self-deception than irony? So when comedian Stephen Colbert was invited to celebrate an elite cadre of journalists at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, his satirizing pose as a right-wing stooge of the president hit right on target. Ridiculing both the president and the self-important reporters who have for the most part served only to insulate him from public debate, Colbert quipped: ‘‘Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality’. And reality has a well-known liberal bias’’ (April 29, 2006). In response to the spectacle of a visibly uncomfortable president, there were those who said that the satirist had crossed a line. There were others who thought he was doing what the press had failed to do, speak truth to power. The truth-telling of the satirist is not the same as that of the public moralist or political debater. In certain circumstances, it can be more p r o l o g u e [ ≥ ] e√ective. Consider Colbert’s notorious ri√ on the ‘‘truthiness’’ of the...