Ah, the Huffington Post is abuzz with political blogs, Democratic primary blogs, national politics blogs. I tend to be more local - education, culture. But I'm getting into the spirit of this thing so here goes:
I confess. I'm a boomer. I'm an old radical. What they call old white men - Gen Prostate. But I think we just have to face it. Saturday Night Live is a bunch of old fogies. They haven't been cutting edge for a few decades but they were at least, you know, young and stuff. They cast that critical eye at everything that was hypocritical and ridiculous in the American landscape. Early on, of course, they were part of the social revolution, part of the debunking of Nixonian self-importance in the mid-70's. The humorists were always the most truthful and the most radical - and usually the voice of the marginalized. From Groucho Marx to Lenny Bruce, Richard Prior to Chris Rock, Gilda Radner to Wanda Sykes, they laid the smack down.
And, of course, in the dreadful interval of the last 25 years, comedy became the best way to obtain some real news. But this bunch. Tina Fey? Jim Downey? What are they about? You picture them driving their SUV's from the Connecticut suburbs and trying to jigger up something funny. And their politics. Blech. First they cook up the best spin to knock back the Obama juggernaut - the idea that he's getting soft-ball treatment from the press - and then fall back on the lamest excuse ever: "I'm just trying to make the sketches funny." Oh, right, the content is nothing, just going for the laugh. Of course, a possible moment in the sketch that would make fun of Clinton was dropped, according to SNL writer Jim Downey, because "Amy (Poehler) wasn't crazy about that. She said that was not fair." Oh, I thought we were only going for the laughs.
But really, folks, that was just the wild young ones who were for Clinton. SNL producer and head strangleholder on the culture, Lorne Michaels, supports McCain. You know, that funny guy McCain who cracks so many jokes. Lucky for him he's not still in prison for war crimes for bombing villages and cities in Vietnam. Oh, and they had to bring back the OBG, the One Black Guy, since SNL is always careful to have an OBG along with their stable of white folks. No one was on staff just now, though, so they had to go get Tracy Morgan, for a minute, to let us know they are keepin' it real. Pathetic.
Speaking of the presidential race, though, I must say that the issue is really not about who stands for women and who stands for African Americans. Well, the symbolic resonance of this is huge but it is not the key issue in the Democratic Party. Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton represents that centrist strategy forged by guys like Bill Clinton, that idea that we can never mobilize a progressive movement so let's just try to take a bite out of moderate Republicans. This is the Democratic Party that brought us NAFTA, the end of welfare, a vast expansion of the federal death penalty, and rule by Wall Street. Obama represents that mobilization of young people, African American and Latino communities, the disenfranchised, the marginalized. In other words, it's a campaign that can swamp the right by actually getting that 40% of working people who never vote to come out to the polls.
Much has been made of the sexist insults in the media against Clinton. Fair enough. But if this means that women are "more oppressed" than African Americans (a strange attempt at metrics any way you cut it), then we have to look at the media hilarity about old people - because they cut loose without restraint against McCain's old age. Does this mean old people are more oppressed than women or African Americans? Come on! And Geraldine Ferraro is so tone-deaf to the whole issue that she still does not get it. It is not that you can't talk about the real and symbolic issues, you just can't be a racist idiot. Would she claim John Kennedy ran a surging campaign because of his great advantage of being Catholic? I imagine she's grumbling that David Paterson only became New York Governor because he's blind and black.
Hillary Clinton's campaign, typical of the Democratic rightists, claims that they are not racist but the American people are, so what can we do? All those white voters just won't vote for Obama (which itself is patently untrue) and (here's the biggest untrue part) all those youth and African Americans who voted in the primary won't come out in November. Oh, but they will, and a whole new demographic of people who vote can be the result. Hillary Clinton: the politics of no-hope.
Now the odd thing is that many of those I consider comrades on the radical left are at a loss. They are upset with Obama. You can find position papers dissecting many of Obama's positions that do not correspond with some group's revolutionary platform. What a sell-out. But, you see, you must remember that he's a Democrat. He's a liberal. Yes, if you expect Barack Obama to hand you the revolution, he will surely disappoint you.
Quentin Young, the wonderful, radical doctor in Chicago, writes that he is upset with Obama because he does not put forward single payer health care. My response is: don't sit around and whine about what Obama has not brought you. Quentin should use his considerable insight, his many years of experience in health care, to help us reframe the debate to the real issues, the human core of the question. Organize a symposium, a demonstration, a movement for single payer health care. Obama's message is more radical than many on the left: if you want something, I can't bring it to you; you have to organize at the grass roots for it.
Obama is only who he is - neither more nor less. The exciting thing about the Obama campaign is not him but the base of support that has materialized. The far left has settled for the dreary notion that major changes will only happen if things get worse and worse - every new disaster is just a day closer to the glorious dawn. But, in truth, revolution does not happen that way. Consider the importance of rising expectations, of millions of marginalized and alienated people being drawn into political discourse. Consider the horrifying and ecstatic possibility of democracy. Yes, democracy, participatory democracy as we used to say, from the bottom up. Those drab fundamentalist preachers and their enthralled minions are not the majority. It turns out that the silenced African American urban communities, the silenced G.I.'s, the silenced working poor including all those waitresses and maids, the silenced Chicano Latino workers, the silenced immigrant and ethnic communities, the silenced young people - have been the silenced majority. Move them into political action and watch out.
Saturday Night Live has joined the ranks of the has-beens, the boring, the out-of-touch. But the possibility for culture, for humor, for creativity is just getting started in the US.
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