Tag Archives: Court Jesters

When court jesters stop laughing at despots they expect you to stop too

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They’re funny, they’re clever, and their comedy can be dead serious, but it turns out when political comedians actually are dead serious they expect their audience to come to heel. Bernie Sanders was just a laugh, look at yourself, you fell for it. Court jesters pile on the ridicule of whoever’s the ruler, but when the diversion is over, the joke’s on you, now shut up. Said Sarah Silverman to heartbroken Bernie delegates: “Don’t be ridiculous.” Adds Seth Meyers: “We don’t have time for this.”

So Jon Stewart decides when an act of malice is too egregious to joke about? It’s called pandering, people.

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Jon Stewart’s monologue last night was a moving response to the racist murders committed in Charleston on Wednesday. Dylann Storm Roof’s shooting of nine African Americans was hate crime and racism pure and simple. I cheered along as Stewart declared a comic intervention: America needed to sober up to the reality of its self-perpetuating racist crimes. I’m not sure Stewart could have reacted any differently, but his comedic turn was also a reminder for me of the manipulative tool the Daily Show has always been. World events are always filled with tragedy, which Stewart highlights and lampoons, so why is the Charleston church shooting more egregious than the mosques Americans bomb every day? Is Roof’s racism any more “home-grown” than our government’s? Does Jon Stewart decide for you when the laughter starts or stops?

I applaud Stewart calling for Americans to stop laughing about racism. #BlackLivesMatter #GodDammit! #GodFuckingDammit! Now I hope in his last shows Stewart can ask his audience to stop laughing at court jesters who provide escape valves for the horrors of systemic state-sponsored injustice.

Stewart followed up his Andy Kaufmanesque cold-open with an interview of Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, the compelling child star of Pakistan, as balm for his being overwhelmed by the day’s trauma. Malala of course, the poster child for the machinations of the neoliberal globalists who need to enslave Third World young women to fill their free trade zone factories with Western-education-trafficked slave laborers. So if Stewart delivers the neoliberal agenda on a silver platter, who ordered the show-stopper?

NON, JE NE SUIS PAS CHARLIE. Charlie Hebdo publie des connerie racistes

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Might a satirist consider exercising SOME discretion in one’s pursuit of Freedom of Speech? AS IF that is Charlie Hebdo’s lofty ideal. Heralded as court jesters, I would submit they are weapons of cultural imperialism, the point men propagandists in a very real, genocidal war. Playing along with the corporate spin that the Paris gunmen simply had no sense of humor, I can hardly imagine that American Taliban, many of our armed soldiers among them, would stomach similar desecrations of their Lord Jesus. One has merely to Google “Charlie Hebdo” to see the paper’s unrelentingly racist attacks on Islam. I do not condone executing their cartoonists, but I’m not about to stand in solidarity with their foolishness and bigotry, or their condescending secular ridicule in promotion of Western fascism.

Jordan, an American-made ‘Arab democracy’

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The US, which hardly has any functioning democracy of its own, has a government that went on a Christian Crusade, a Christian Crusade to supposedly bring democracy to the Arab World. The American Empire of Torture, Inc. has a model ‘Arab democracy’ that it wants other Arab states to be militarily impelled (by our friends at the Pentagon) to establish, and that model is Jordan. Jordan even once had a queen, an American citizen named affectionately (by the Western press)Queen Noor, who was courted by a king (or at least a thug of one)! How romantic, right? But, Tony, what supposed democracy in the world is headed up by Queens and Kings?

The answer is, Not So-Great Britain, for example, so we cannot hold it against backward peoples (like the Arabs) if ‘their democracies’ too have kings, queens, and court jesters running the show. It just wouldn’t be fair.

But the peasantry really should be more respectful in these modern day, Made-in-America ‘democracies’, should they not? Especially peasants from abroad, like this slimy gay French citizen twit who insulted the King of Jordan. Isn’t Made-in America ‘Arab democracy’ just great?