December 28, 2006

[HEARTLAND, USA] – You remember him - Chevy Chase.   He used to stumble over stuff, pretending to be President Gerald R. Ford.   Everybody laughed, because, after all, wasn't that what Ford was - a bumbling conservative?

          It was the mid 70's.   Nixon had resigned - the Progressives needed to take the stench away from what they had done in Viet Nam, and maybe Kennedy, too.   And so they played the Nixon card.   Still playing it.   Do you know anybody under 35 who remembers just how badly Lyndon B. Johnson screwed up in Viet Nam?   Do you know anybody, these days, who thinks the failure in Viet Nam is anybody's fault BUT Nixon's?   But, golly - gosh, the Progs still wanted to go back to when Johnson was Rex et Deus.   So, they played the Times and the Olsen & Johnson jokers from the Washington Post.   In the end, the pressure was too much even for Milhouse.   Rich Little made a mint formalizing the little lies into big ones.

          Comedy has ALWAYS been about politics.   (It's always been about sex, too, but that's another column.)   Aristophanes knew exactly what he was doing when he lampooned Socrates for being a pedophile.   Right or wrong, true or false, the comedy cost Socrates his life. And, bless his heart, Socrates, just like every "hip" U.S. President would 2200 years later, added to his political assassination by going along with the joke. In his work on morals, Plutarch quotes Socrates as saying, "In the theatre, when they make a joke about me . . I feel like I'm at a big party with good friends." (From Doug Linder's article on the trial of Socrates¹ - the Plutarch translation is mine.)   Remember "Sock it to ME?"   But when Aristophanes' play, The Birds came out (after Socrates had been made fun of in his play, The Clouds), it was enough to incite the people of Athens to call for the philosoper's execution. Socrates was imprisoned and forced to take Hemlock.

          The thing is, there was never any real evidence that Socrates was a pedophile. Like most Greeks of the time, he WAS, probably, bisexual, but that would have meant consenting adults, and you know where that argument goes. What he WAS guilty of was not being a believer in democracy - particularly the democracy of Pericles. And somebody that big could not occupy the same political space as, while opposing somebody as big as, Pericles.   So anti-Socrates news and comedy were not only tolerated, but possibly encouraged (See Linder).   Does any of this ring a bell?

          It was like the old joke - if you laid all the comedians end to end . . . it would be a good thing.   But we didn't know that, then.   We didn't have Mad-TV and Fox News Channel and Rush Limbaugh and Neil Borts and Tony Snow.   Occasionally, Newsweek or U.S. News & World Report would write something even-handed, but, not often enough.   You could always tell when someone was getting close to the truth.   The media, led by the sanctioned Comedians - in this case Saturday Night Live - would start to make fun of it, and that was that.   Even Johnny Carson could take a jab now and then at Ronaldus Magnus.   They still try to do it, today, but somehow, no matter how funny their writers are, Leno and Letterman ring hollow.   But we didn't know, then, like we do, now.   Look what happened when Rocky & Bullmoose made fun of President Johnson - Dana Carvey when he skewered Clinton: both shows pulled even though they had humongous numbers (http://Imdb.com).   If you can ever get him to talk, you should chat with Dan Akroyd about his Jimmy Carter impressions and some "advice" that was given to him by a "friend of a friend" during Carter's 1980 re-election attempt.   If what I just wrote isn't enough to prove the point, then think about the last 15 years - how a jest from Rush Limbaugh can cause liberals to scurry around playing the "righteously injured" party and calling him whatever politically popular liberal slur they could think of.

          But conservatives or Republicans?   Socrates knows.   He knows. The late Gerald R. Ford knew too, because he, too, had been a willing accomplice to his own political murder - the gun was Chevy Chase.

          So, my question is this: If Rich Little's career died a horrible, agonizing death when Nixon died, does that mean Chevy Chase's career dies, too?   How can a comedian, whose career is already in la toilette, so to speak, die twice?   (or are appearances in National Lampoon movies a sign of success?) Does it even matter?

          Is this about politics or comedy?   Groucho, Marxism, or Capitalism?   Maybe, it's about propaganda through comedy - Veritas Ludex.   For my money, I'm betting there is a special place in Hell for New York Times and Washington Post reporters.   And an even more special place for comedians who help them.

(For the Record, I didn't agree with one thing that Ford did.   His foreign policy of Soviet accommodation was embarrassing.   His domestic economic policy was awful - I was one of the ones who wore my WIN button upside down.   His tinkering with environmental policy wasn't even good for Detroit.   It was Reagn who brought respect back to the Presidency, not he.   So, I'll put him above Carter & Clinton, and Cleveland because he was a good and honest man - and no historian or pundit will ever be able to take that away from him.   But whatever were his failings, his political assassination, wrought by comedy, the media of the day, and his own unwillingness to call them on it, hastened his retirement, leaving him the only president never elected.)

- Dick Anderson

1. Doug Linder, University of Mo. at Kansas City, "The Trial of Socrates"
    http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/socratesaccount.html