You can’t help wondering what could pull the U.S. out of our dangerous political tailspin: the inspiring memory of strong Republicans during the Watergate scandal, the possibility of a more focused and politically shrewd Democratic Party, laughter, a wise judiciary? So far, laughter and the judiciary seem the most promising, but I wonder if a combination of laughter and the power of the press could be the key — yes, I’ve begun to count on the much-maligned mainstream media.
What set me to contemplating this heartening possibility was Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1990). He writes about the diminished influence of the biblical Ten Commandments in our time and their replacement by an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not lie. “The whole moral structure of our time,” Kundera says, “rests on the Eleventh Commandment; and the journalist came to realize that thanks to a mysterious provision of history he is to become its administrator, gaining power undreamed of by a Hemingway or an Orwell.”
Revelations in The Washington Post and New York Times about Donald Trump Jr. and Russians brought back fond memories of Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate at almost the same time I was reading Kundera. Plus, I was listening to an audiobook of The Daily Show: An Oral History, and I’d just finished Sen. Al Franken’s hilarious and informative Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. It didn’t hurt that the titles of two earlier books by Franken, The Truth (with Jokes) (2005) and Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2004), began to seem uncannily prescient in this time of Trump.
The power of laughter depends on context, as Franken explains in his Giant of the Senate book when he describes the unlikely success of a joke he told during a tense classified briefing of some 80 senators in 2015. Members of the Obama administration were explaining the Iran nuclear agreement that President Trump has seemed determined to cancel, and the Republicans, all of whom would ultimately vote against the agreement, were asking tough questions. When Mitch McConnell called on him, Franken said: “Yes, I have a question about the Supreme Leader. Who I like to call the Supreme Being.” He got, Franken says, “an enormous laugh,” including from McConnell.
Franken insists this was “barely a joke,” and he credits the tension in the room with the laughter. Timing was surely important, but I’m guessing there was also a momentary sense of fellowship in the room as the senators realized such irreverence would be dangerous in Iran’s theocracy, where the Supreme Leader has final authority over the Parliament, president, judiciary, and every other part of the political system.
People my age probably remember hearing younger folks around the turn of the century say they got their news from comedian Jon Stewart and his “correspondents” on The Daily Show. When cable news began to provide 24-hour coverage of slowly developing news like the Bush-Gore presidential election and the Florida recount, the tendency to invoke breathless drama when nothing of consequence had happened probably provided much more than fodder for satire on The Daily Show. It made Stewart and his correspondents seem more honest than the news shows.
Following Bush’s controversial election and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, The Daily Show voiced skepticism about the federal government’s use of fear tactics as the administration moved us into the war in Iraq before doubt began to grow in the mainstream media. Looking for reasons to laugh, Stewart found much that was foolish in the Bush administration.
Comedy is often risky, and satirizing the constantly manufactured drama in the 24-hour news cycle may have unintentionally prepared the ground for Donald Trump’s repeated shouts of “fake news.” But maybe now we’re beginning to distinguish between what is laughable and what is not. It’s one thing to make fun of CNN’s tendency to announce “breaking news” every hour or so. But when Trump or his underlings call facts “fake” that can easily be confirmed, we sense they’ve lost contact with truth itself.
When comedy is joined with hard facts like the Trump Jr. email chain revealed by investigative journalists, more and more people are likely to get the jokes and resist the lies. The wheels of justice turned by special counsel Robert Mueller and his staff will probably continue to grind slowly, as they should, but when more and more Americans see the absurdity of a president who puts no stock in truth and public well-being, as well as the pathetic farce of a political party that continues to defer to such thoughtless and imperious leadership, we are on our way to pulling out of our political tailspin.
Bill Nichols, who retired from the faculty at Denison University in 1998, lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.