"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."

David Barton: The Right's Historical Propmaster

David Barton is not a historian.

I know he calls himself a historian.  I could call myself an astrophysicist, but I would have no right to expect anyone to take me seriously.

The problem is that while just about everyone knows that an astrophysicist needs specialized training, most people think that anyone can be a historian--you just need an interest in history, right?

No.

When I came to Wofford ten years ago, my history department colleagues decided that we needed a course in historical methods which would be a requirement for all of our majors. History is a discipline, and it has methods.  There are specific skills the historian needs, and we decided we should teach them to our majors in a systematic fashion.

David Barton would fail that class.

When Barton appeared on "The Daily Show" last month, Jon Stewart helpfully pointed out that Barton is not an academic historian.  Barton replied: "No, I don’t have a doctorate in that, I’ve got all the documents."

Now, documents are important--they are the foundation of every good work of history. But this is the equivalent of claiming to be an architect because you have lumber.

The most important thing we teach our history majors about documents is that they must be interpreted responsibly. We do an exercise in which we present the students with an excerpt from a book, and then ten different examples of how that material might be interpreted. In at least one example, the original material is--technically--quoted accurately, but in such a way as to misrepresent its meaning.

This is Barton's specialty. When Stewart tried to challenge Barton's interpretation of a letter by John Adams, Barton replied: "I posted that online. How can I misquote him when I put the whole letter up?" The point is that one can misinterpret without misquoting.

When Stewart tried to make that point, Barton said: "Show me some documentations where it’s taken out of context. They’ve never done that."

I've done that. As I showed in my previous post, Barton's website accurately quotes Thomas Paine's speech, but the selective editing takes Paine entirely out of context, for the clear purpose of making an ideological point. In this case, he most explicitly did not post the entire speech (or even provide a link to the entire speech). I would not accept that from an undergraduate student.

Every historian knows that looking at one document in isolation can be dangerous and misleading. That's why I looked at other examples of Paine's writing on education to see what he thought about religious influence in the classroom. When I did, it threw an entirely different light on the excerpt singled out by Barton.

Regardless of what Barton says, history is not merely the accumulation of documents. "We have 100,000 documents from before 1812," he told Stewart, as if that alone proved something.  The important thing is what we do with the evidence.

Fortunately, Barton's slippery reading of documents was on full display in the Stewart interview. In arguing that the Constitution is a religiously based document, Barton says:

There are seven references in the Constitution to religion, whether it be Article Seven, and by the way, the Declaration is incorporated into the Constitution, Article Seven, so that’s four references to God.

Barton claims that there are seven references to religion in the Constitution. This is easy to check. The following words do not appear at all in the document: God, Creator, Christian. The word "religious" appears once ("no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States") as does religion ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"). That's it.

So where does Barton get seven? He refers specifically to Article Seven. Here's the text of Article Seven:

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same.

Confused? So was I. Then I kept reading.  After Article Seven, we find this final passage:

done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth.

Still confused?  Barton counts the date language ("Year of our Lord") as the third reference to religion. The other four, he says, come from his view that "the Declaration is incorporated into the Constitution." Where does he get that?

Because the Constitution refers to the twelfth year of independence, he says, that "incorporated" all of the language of the Declaration into the Constitution. And since the Declaration has the words “Creator,” “Nature’s God,” “Supreme Judge of the World,” and “divine Providence,” that makes four references, for a total of seven in the Constitution.

You could not ask for a better example of a dishonest reading of a document. And that reading is in service of a pre-determined political position.

Fortunately, Barton himself inadvertently admitted that in the extended interview with Jon Stewart.  Bragging about his access to conservative politicians, Barton said: "They call me and they say 'Is there anything in history about bailouts and stimulus?'"

Barton is the go-to guy when political conservatives need the quick quotation, probably ripped out of context, to give some legitimacy to a political position that they have already decided upon, regardless of what the Founders would think. They are not concerned with what the Founders actually thought.  They want ammunition, not truth.

Barton is nothing more than the historical propmaster for political conservatives. Barton supplies what they need for their political theater. They use the prop, and when they are done, they lay it back on the prop table, awaiting the next performance.

Barton calls what he does "historical reclamation."  A true historical reclamation requires that real historians expose Barton for the fraud he is, and call out cynical politicians like Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann when they call on Barton to teach Congress about the Constitution, and Mike Huckabee when they try to tell us that Barton is "single best historian in America today."