"A Sweet Fool"

"Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool?"--the Fool, in Shakespeare's "King Lear"

Stephen Colbert is leaving "The Colbert Report" to take over David Letterman's slot on "The Late Show" on CBS.

I don't normally post about TV, but then again, this isn't a post about TV. It's about the value of satire in a democracy.

As an avid fan of "The Daily Show," going all the way back to the not-at-all lamented Craig Kilborn days, I can remember when Colbert was "the new guy." (Most people have forgotten that Colbert actually preceded Jon Stewart on TDS by two years.) I had always liked him, but never as much as when he developed the Bill O'Reilly-esque persona for which he is now famous.

By David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

I've been a devoted fan of the show. I may not have seen every episode, but I've probably come close (and may in fact have seen 100% since I got a DVR). What I've enjoyed the most is the relish Colbert takes in his satire. His talents (and those of his writers) have created what I consider to be the best satirical character in modern American history.

That's why this career move gives me pause.

Joan Walsh published a nice piece just the day before the announcement about Colbert's value to the progressive movement. That's true, but I'd go further. He is valuable to our democracy.

Humor, particularly sharply satirical humor, is incompatible with the totalitarian mind. It punctures holes in the immense pretensions of totalitarians. One of the lesser-acknowledged attributes shared by totalitarians of the right and left alike is their humorlessness. They are so deadly serious about not only their ideas but themselves that they cannot abide any mockery. As O'Brien says to Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984, under Big Brother "[t]here will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy."

By contrast, I think you can judge the health of a democracy by the extent of its self-mocking humor. The liberalism born in the 18th century had as a cornerstone its openness to critique--an acknowledgement that, however well-thought out one may believe a position to be, it is always subject to argument and new evidence--and mockery, which in the form of satire is, itself, a kind of argument that exposes unfounded assumptions and unacknowledged hypocrisy.

Colbert's satire has always been at the expense of the powerful, not of the "defeated enemy." Americans, at their best, have always seen their leaders as fit subjects for mockery. It is one of the ways we remind them that they are, after all, just like us: no better or worse, just temporarily entrusted with power. We have often loved best those leaders who show they have a sense of humor, especially of the self-deprecating kind (Lincoln most of all, FDR to a lesser extent), while judging harshly those who appear humorless (see Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon in particular).

But at the same time, Americans have also been--at least to my mind--insufficiently appreciative of good satire. Ever since the ridiculous controversy over Randy Newman's "Short People" in 1978, it's been clear to me if the general public could not see that Newman's song was meant to satirize prejudice, America must suffer from a severe irony-deficiency. That's why I've been so heartened by the success of Colbert's right-wing pundit character. People got it. That had to be a good thing.

Now that this success has catapulted the real Colbert to late night network stardom, however, that satirical character will be no more. He's a smart, talented man. I'm sure he can and will do other things well, and succeed in his new job. But his gain is our loss.

Colbert's combination of sharp intellect, courage, and human decency has made him ideal for political satire. (His 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner remains, to use his language, the ballsiest act of political comedy I've ever seen.) There is a deep compassion for the weak, the downtrodden, and the suffering that informs Colbert's satire. No doubt that quality will continue to inform his future work. But in the satire of "The Colbert Report," it combined with the swift sword of his intellect in a particularly effective way. It is hard to imagine it will be the same when he emerges from that character and has to entertain the broad, irony-deficient expanse of all of America.

He may prove me wrong.  I certainly hope so. And if not, America is still the better for nine years of Stephen Colbert's brilliant satire on "The Colbert Report."

Orwell on Hitler

A great writer will surprise you.

For the last few months, I have been intermittently dipping into George Orwell's collected Essays. A few pieces have seemed rather dated, most have been interesting and enlightening, and not a few (like his extended musings on Dickens) are extraordinary.

The other night, I was reading in bed, finishing his review of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (which is less a review than an examination of the role of literature now that World War II had come), and I turned the page to find that the next piece was titled "Review of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, unabridged translation" from March 1940.

"Well," I thought, "THIS should be interesting." I decided I could stay up reading just a little longer.

The first half deals mostly with how Hitler's image in Britain had changed over the last year. Then Orwell writes something that stopped me dead in my tracks:

"I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler."

I reread the sentence, certain that I had missed something, but I hadn't. How could Orwell, with his unremitting hatred of totalitarianism, not hate Hitler? Orwell spends the second half of the essay persuasively explaining himself, but the brief answer is this: simply hating Hitler is easy, lazy, and self-defeating.

Precisely because he despises totalitarianism, Orwell is interested in the reason that Germans have accepted Hitler's leadership. He starts by recognizing that Hitler's political success was due in part to the "attraction of his own personality." Orwell writes that while he has thought that, given the chance, "I would certainly kill him," he would "feel no personal animosity" because "there is something deeply appealing about him." That is, really, the horrible truth. Hitler otherwise never would have become so powerful.

Orwell argues that it is Hitler's portrayal of himself as a kind of underdog that is so affecting:

He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds.... The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

What makes Orwell's analysis so powerful is not simply that he identifies the source of Hitler's appeal, but that he admits that he himself is susceptible to it. He does not separate himself from (and thereby elevate himself above) the Germans who support Hitler. He identifies with and understands them.

Even more, he gives the devil his due. It is not merely that Hitler's personality can be attractive, Orwell argues. Hitler's appeal is also due to his ideology, which has at its foundation an important insight:

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude toward life.... Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

It goes without saying that Orwell finds Hitler's ideology repugnant; why then say that "Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life"? It is precisely because he finds it so horrific that he must recognize its power. Few people of his time knew better than Orwell the awful places that totalitarianism would soon lead humanity. He was able to see where it would lead because he understood its psychological power. He did not unthinkingly dismiss it as evil, he did not live in denial. He grappled with it.

In a passage I suspect will resonate with most of my friends who are parents, Orwell writes:

The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do.

His point is not that the parent need approve or encourage that part of the child's make-up, but rather that it is foolish and unproductive to ignore or deny its reality.

Orwell knew that merely demonizing the enemy is in fact doing the enemy a favor. Understanding the appeal of your enemy and your enemy's ideas does not mean abandoning one's own views, or excusing those of the enemy. It is, instead, key to defeating the enemy.

Orwell believed that Hitler's way was bound to produce "years of slaughter and starvation" for Germany. At that point, he writes, "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" would once again be "a good slogan." But, he says,

at this moment, "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

That's a lesson we all can take from Orwell's surprising take on Hitler.