We are pleased to have CATHERINE CRIER from COURT TV on our show Saturday, May 19 SATURDAY MORNINGS TUNE IN LIVE FROM LAS VEGAS and LOS ANGELES to our show BASHAM AND CORNELL PROGRESSIVE TALK
from 9 - 10 a.m. We broadcast live -- or go to our website and click on the link to hear the entire show in the archives.
"Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." That's what good preachers, and good journalists, do. It makes sense that comics, who sometimes preach and sometimes report the news, would follow this motto as well.
Imus "broke the power equation," Rogers says. He afflicted the afflicted, which made him a bully instead of a comic. That's not funny.
This happens a lot, not just with comics, but with journalists and preachers too. They get the motto backwards, they break the power equation. The journalists cozy up to the powerful, the preachers become bullying scolds. Both start to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. It's nothing new, Jesus described the same thing thousands of years ago, "They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."
The tricky thing -- whether you're a journalist, preacher or comic -- is that "the comfortable" and "the afflicted" are not immutable categories. Anyone, at some point, might be in either category. White House spokesman Tony Snow, for example, has had a lucrative career as a dishonest and thoroughly unprincipled apologist for power. That made him fair game for exposure, for jokes and jeremiads. But Snow now has cancer in his liver and the prognosis is not good. And jokes at the expense of a cancer victim just aren't funny. Kicking a man when he is down is the work of a bully.
This is, again, what I think Orwell was getting at in that essay on Charles Dickens I've taken to quoting a bit too often: Orwell on Dickens
Where [Dickens] is Christian is in his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has got to change sides when the underdog becomes an upperdog, and in fact Dickens does tend to do so.
Which underscores Rogers' point, that context matters. The transgressive humor of the underdog is funny. The transgressive "humor" of the upperdog is merely bullying. And that's not funny. (It's not even really transgressive, since the upperdogs make and enforce the rules.)
The dynamic at work here is, of course, justice. Comedy doesn't so much "steal" power as reclaim it. Undermining injustice is funny. Enforcing it is not. This is as true for preachers and journalists as it is for comics.
Posted by Fred Clark SLACKTIVIST
Fred Clark is a religious scholar and minister. Slacktivist is a wonderful website devoted to debunking the sinister and hilarious "Left Behind" novels by LaHaye-Jenkins.
Cartoon by Stephen Pitt: Rove-Gonzales-Abu Grahib
