honesty

By jp 21 Sep 2001

I thought honesty and pure, unfiltered, raw emotional discourse and uncensored opinion was something that our mogul-based push media enterprise had completely wiped out in the interest of spoon-feeding us controlled content punctuated by our loving sponsor.

<p>Jon Stewart proved me wrong last night. </p>

<p>I was on my way out of <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~npd1">Niles&#8217;</a> house, when I caught the beginning of the daily show, and stuck around to catch a few seconds of it. it was nothing short of incredible. he ditched his script, and recalled to his audience other times of great national loss and crisis, citing <span class="caps">MLK</span>&#8217;s assasination when he was in 5th grade, war news in his later years and whatnot. but the man wasn&#8217;t on a soapbox, he was pulling his soul out, word by word. he was crying. the man who usually is all shits and giggles was crying, and being completely and totally honest. </p>

<p>his message was that a &#8220;with us or against us&#8221; war such as the one proposed by Dubyah last night isn&#8217;t so much the answer. but that was almost besides the point. in an age where people paid to deliver us the truth always give us an almost robotic account of the days happenings, and no matter how obvious it is people never say what&#8217;s really going on (like those poor &#8220;analysts&#8221; who have to try and make Bush sound smart after every appearance, when they know full well he&#8217;s an idiot), this was the first and <i>only</i> time I can recall when a journalist, or at least a media figure has ever dropped his script and given me raw emotion, uncensored reaction, and the simple human perspective on a tragic happening, rather than an overanalyzed version that makes it completely statistical and dehumanizes it completely. </p>

<p>it may or may not be on comedycentral&#8217;s site later. I&#8217;ll post it if it is.</p>