The difference between Carlin and Stewart is that Carlin was not beholden, he kept nothing as sacrosanct and by the time of his death had at one point offended the sensibilities of every demographic on the planet. He railed against the entire American political system and he did not apologize. Carlin is a comedian. Jon Stewart is a Fool.

Stewart will go on with an air of being the rebel, the outsider until it might possibly impose a negative image on the establishment. Voting is no laughing matter for the politicians Stewart regularly entertains on his show. It is their livelihood. Most of their careers will be spent telling people to vote, rather than helping them. If Stewart wants to remain in with this crowd, he must respect the careers these professional hype men have made for themselves — even if he’s smart enough to see past it. It’s why he had to apologize this week.

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The function of Jon Stewart in the eyes of many young people is to satirize the court, to make light of those in power and their media lapdogs. For awhile, this comfortable narrative of his position might have approached truth. However, Jon Stewart has yet again let this maverick pose slip. In a CNN interview covering the results of the American midterm elections, Stewart was asked if he voted, to which he responded, “I just moved. I don’t know even where my thing is.” Later, on The Daily Show, Stewart took out time to grovel at the feet of America’s greatest sacrament. Especially given the poor outcome for Stewart’s side, he thought that joking about not voting was nothing to joke about. He reasserted the importance of voting and apologized for being “flip” about such a serious matter.

First, I’d like to address the unimportance of Stewart’s choice to vote. Like him, I live in New York, though certainly a more red area of upstate NY. Even living around the few Republican lifeforms that inhabit NY, it is patently absurd to think Stewart could have somehow swayed the election away from the Democrats. New York, like Texas, is never flipping to the other side of the Color War. Moreover, the decision of one individual in deciding the results of any election is the great myth which fuels participation in this representative democracy. He and voters like him think far too much of themselves. They believe the story, told to them by the electoral system, that their vote does indeed matter. In all likelihood it does not.

Second, it is the job of the comedian to be flip. Stewart’s apology displays a subservience undue to a funny man post-Lenny Bruce. Stewart claims to be a devoted fan of George Carlin, and no doubt he is, like all comedians. George Carlin is a man who delivered one of the most blistering, debilitating rants against America’s democracy in his special “Back In Town”. He attacks the public’s obedience and inability to produce better results, then sees fit to end his rant and his special with a line about the superiority of masturbation to participation in the system. Stewart is of course his own man with his own opinions, but does he think Carlin was somehow being flip and disrespectful? Was Carlin responsible for the Republicans retaining the Congress in the 96 elections?

The difference between Carlin and Stewart is that Carlin was not beholden, he kept nothing as sacrosanct and by the time of his death had at one point offended the sensibilities of every demographic on the planet. He railed against the entire American political system and he did not apologize. Carlin is a comedian. Jon Stewart is a Fool. Stewart will go on with an air of being the rebel, the outsider until it might possibly impose a negative image on the establishment. Voting is no laughing matter for the politicians Stewart regularly entertains on his show. It is their livelihood. Most of their careers will be spent telling people to vote, rather than helping them. If Stewart wants to remain in with this crowd, he must respect the careers these professional hype men have made for themselves — even if he’s smart enough to see past it. It’s why he had to apologize this week. It’s why he had to beg for forgiveness for disrespecting Harry Truman, one of the great American mass murderers of the 20th century. Liberals can challenge actions like the dropping of the nuclear bomb until they realize that America IS the nuclear bomb, that the stars and stripes they pray to are kept above the rest of the world by mass violence. Then they will march in the streets next to the Republicans they claim to fear so much.

Is it any surprise then, that Stewart has also come out in support of a draft? Bemoaning declining youth involvement in their nation’s best interests, Stewart proposes, “There should be a draft where every young person has to do one year of something — military, public works — something so that we all feel invested in the same game, because that’s the part that we’ve lost.” This is a man who at least claims to have opposed America’s Iraq War, who criticized the Bush administration for its reckless foreign policy. This was all a veneer. Stewart really wants young people, otherwise known as his audience, to obey the orders of the nation state.

Stewart is a Fool. He will apologize to the King and his Court for disrespecting their most holy of political processes and go back to smashing pies in people’s faces as if that makes him different. He is in reality an integral part of the mechanism which maintains the legitimacy of the warfare state. His opinions differ in only boring, trivial minutia from your average Neocon. He must apologize because he realizes he doesn’t just mock the system but himself. He will never have to apologize for his comments on the draft. He will never have to apologize for his worship of Harry Truman. Frankly, as a fan of comedy and honesty, I wouldn’t want him to. Stewart has his beliefs and I want him to be open about them. I want to know who the warmongers are and who the fools are. I know now, like I never knew before, that he is a jester for murderers. Analysis of his comedy above that level is an insult to Carlin and to every revolutionary mind that made American comedy more than just a late night TV gag.

Throughout history, satirists have risked their liberty and even their lives using humor to engage in deep commentary about the reigning political system and its exalted political figures—they’re called leaders, though surely better terms are rulers and misleaders. But no satirist risks his life or liberty in America today, which makes the scarcity of good satire so puzzling. Is it fear that keeps it safely limited? Or is it simply that so few people today can see the fundamental flaws in the American political system, which trashes liberty in so many ways?

You tell me.

By now most people who pay attention to these things know that The Daily Show’s host, Jon Stewart, who is probably regarded as America’s premier political satirist, felt it necessary to recant after apparently uttering a heresy according to America’s civic religion: democracy.

In an election-day interview on CNN, Christiane Amanpour asked Stewart if he had voted. He said, “No”—to which Amanpour reacted with (or perhaps feigned) amazement, “No?!”

Stewart continued, “I just moved. I don’t even know where my thing is now.”

That night on his own show, Stewart, after assuring his audience that he has known where “his thing” is since age 13, acknowledged that his answer created “a bit of a story.” So he felt compelled to say,

To set the record straight, I did vote today.… I was being flip, and it kind of took off. I shouldn’t have been flip about that.… It sent a message that I didn’t think voting was important or that I didn’t think it was a big issue. And I do, and I did vote. I was being flip, and I shouldn’t have done that. That was stupid. So, I apologize.

Where to begin?

First off, how did his flip answer create “a bit of a story”? He’s a comedian for heaven’s sake! Several nights a week he makes fun of politicians and government bungling! He does flip for a living! Who got upset with his reply, aside from U.S. Secretary of War Amanpour? Whether one believed Stewart’s answer or not, how in the world was it the stuff of public controversy? Does no one have a sense of humor? Must he say “just kidding” after every sentence?

Maybe one reason political satire is so scarce is that Americans don’t get it. Paul Fussell, who wrote excellent books on how war degrades culture, said that World War II killed Americans’ sense of irony. (See his Wartime.) We have here good evidence for Fussell’s claim.

But even allowing for the irony-impairment of American culture, did Stewart really feel he had to apologize? Did he think he’d lose his audience if he became known as one who is “flip” about the holy rite of voting? I realize that ratings are a matter of life and death, but come on. I doubt that his career was in jeopardy. He might have even picked up a few viewers.

My son, Ben Richman, a fine rock guitarist who also has a keen eye for politics, had a different take on Facebook:

I don’t think he was giving into public pressure, either. I think he genuinely felt that joking about it was wrong. At the end of the day, Stewart loves the system.

I’m inclined to agree. Stewart can be funny when he pokes fun at politicians for their gaffes and indiscretions, and occasionally he ventures into a minefield. (He’s done some surprisingly good stuff on Israel.) But if you watch closely, you’ll see that he doesn’t plunge the dagger in too deep. He is a man of the system, a progressive, of course. Thus, he believes government is good, the more active the better. He rarely gets down to fundamentals, and on the rare occasion when he does, he quickly retreats.

Remember when in 2009 he called President Harry Truman a “war criminal” for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed or maimed nearly 200,000 Japanese civilians? Now, actually that statement was neither satirical nor ironic. It was the unvarnished truth. Truman’s victims threatened no one, and the war was essentially over. Yet those civilians were subjected to the most ghastly of fates. Some were vaporized on the spot, literally leaving only their shadows behind. And don’t forget that Truman dropped the second bomb three days later. He considered dropping a third, but decided he didn’t want to kill any more children. Reading about what the victims’ experienced will turn your stomach, if you have a scintilla of decency in you.

But, nevertheless, Stewart recanted a couple of days later. On his program he said,

The other night … I may have mentioned during the discussion we were having that Harry Truman was a war criminal. And right after saying it, I thought to myself that was dumb. And it was dumb. Stupid in fact. So I shouldn’t have said that, and I did. So I say right now, no, I don’t believe that to be the case. The atomic bomb, a very complicated decision in the context of a horrific war, and I walk that back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say.… Sorry.

Stewart did not bother to explain why the statement was “stupid” (he also called his voting remark stupid) or why Truman’s decision was “complicated”; that’s what every Truman apologist says. But we know what Stewart meant. In America’s civic religion, it is heresy to talk about an American war as though it was a massive series of crimes committed by “our” misleaders. You must not say that. Actually, that’s not it. You must not think that. Two and two is five. Never forget it.

Yes, it is permissible to say the war in Vietnam (never WWII, however) was a blunder, a colossal mistake. But don’t say it was mass murder and a humongous criminal operation. Don’t say the perpetrators should be brought to justice. Noam Chomsky did that and was thenceforth barred from publications that had regularly published him. It is a rare mainstream publication that would let you say that Bush 43, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Tenet, Petraeus, McChrystal, et al. should be hauled before the International Criminal Court to stand trial for their wars of aggression against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Has Nuremberg been erased from the history books? (Since writing this, I’ve been reminded of Stewart’s obsequiousness before court historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin.)

Getting back to Stewart and voting: his remark was actually pretty lame. All he said was that he couldn’t vote because he didn’t know where the polls were in his new location. He didn’t say he was happy about it. He could have said,

Did I vote? Of course I voted! Would I pass up a critical opportunity to add my one single drop of water to the vast ocean? Why, every vote counts! Had I stayed home, the whole country—heck, the whole world—might be different. You must be crazy to think I’d let that happen.

That would have been satire. But it also would have struck too deep at America’s civic religion, which holds that trudging faithfully to the polls every few years is the be-all and end-all of freedom. (That voting majorities by nature must violate the rights of voting minorities and nonvoters is curiously overlooked.)

What I wouldn’t give to see Americans react to Emma Goldman saying on television, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” No doubt she’d be burned at the stake.

Excuse me, but I grew up watching George Carlin. So call me spoiled. Jon Stewart is to George Carlin what Joe Scarborough is to H.L. Mencken.

Here’s how Carlin handled politics:

I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,” but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote—who did not even leave the house on Election Day—am in no way responsible for what these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

George, we need you.