Colbert Report & Daily Show Roundup
Published by marco on
The essay interpreting Eric Cantor’s blatant religious censorship as an art statement is brilliant.
“This defunding threat isn’t some cheap exercise in mindless censorship; it’s an anti-paradigmatic revolutionary work of conceptual art-banning. And, while its point of departure may be Senator Jesse Helms’s admittedly ground-breaking defunding of the National Endowment of the Arts over André Serrano’s Piss Christ, it’s not a derivative “Oooh, I’m a Christian, I’m so offended” because, as the only Jewish Republican in Congress, Cantor’s outrage on behalf of Christians and Christmas is a liminal journey into the cultural ur-wound, exploding our narrow preconceptions of what it means to pander. He posits: in a post-metaphysical world, is there recourse to intersubjective meaning? Sans artifice, each identity is just a senselessly differentiated iteration of routinized tropes. But Cantor’s meta-reification mirrors our own incontrovertible passivity, which thrusts back upon us, reframed, and, in a Habermasian twist, we realize the final affirmative gesture of his solipsistic negation. Thus, Cantor’s art is about the art that isn’t there, making the inaccessible literally inaccessible.”
Tip/Wag − Art Edition − Brent Glass (The Colbert Report)
The whole show was more or less based on art, wrapping up with “Frank Stella, Shepard Fairey and Andres Serrano helping Stephen sell last year’s portrait to Steve Martin.”
Steve Martin Pt. 2 (The Colbert Report)
And finally, there’s John Oliver explaining American politics to John Stewart. The John Oliver bit starts at seven minutes in:
“The rich are above us. And if we allow them to drink from the fountain of wealth long enough, wealth can’t help but trickle down in a fountain of oddly hot champagne”
John responds:
“But the Bush tax cuts have been in effect since 2001 … so why hasn’t the wealth overflowed its buckets and trickled down yet?”
Good question, actually. It’s almost like trickle-down doesn’t work.
Oliver sums up the state of politics in America with an answer to John’s question on movement on other issues, like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
“Well, that depends […] on what’s in it for the wealthy. The Republicans might – might! – be willing to allow homosexuals to die openly for their country if anyone making over $500,000 per year is allowed to park in handicapped spaces.”