And now comes the moment in which many things that have been derided about Generation X -- our snarkiness, our reflective irony, our inability to take anything except as a joke -- matures into a brand of discourse that may, quite literally, save the world.
Unless you watch CSPAN or read political bloggers, you’d barely know that Stephen Colbert, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Saturday night, stood up a few feet from the president of the United States and announced that the emperor has no clothes. And you wouldn’t know this because the mainstream press is ignoring Colbert’s devastating blow, is pretending that the highlight of the evening was Bush’s good-natured ribbing of himself instead of Colbert’s “truthiness to power” performance that left the president scowling like a spoiled child who’s had his toys taken away from him.
(If you missed Colbert, you can watch his performance in three parts at YouTube: One, Two, Three.)
It’s very much a triumph of the geek moment. The quickly tossed-up blog Thank You Stephen Colbert says:
A president runs criminally amok, dismantling the American democracy.The press, cowering, forgets its obligation to the citizenry.
A comedian emerges as the Edward R. Murrow of our day.
Which harkens back to that photo illustration Newsweek ran with its clueless portrait of Colbert earlier this year. But Murrow, as Good Night, and Good Luck. reminded us, was a straight shooter. Colbert uses the weapons that geeks and Xers have always used to deal with a world that appears to be falling apart in front of our very eyes: sarcasm and mockery fueled by a deep and abiding cynicism. Michael Scherer in Salon pegs it:
It was Colbert's crowning moment. His imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. He reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke. It's a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called the "critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems." Colbert's jokes attacked not just Bush's policies, but the whole drama and language of American politics, the phony demonstration of strength, unity and vision. "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady," Colbert continued, in a nod to George W. Bush. "You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth.
And this isn’t just -- please God -- the beginning of the beginning of the end of Bush’s naked emperor: it’s the beginning of the beginning of the mindset of Generation X coming to the fore, reaching a point at which we really matter. It’s the moment we bitter but funny misanthropes have been molded for, even if we didn’t know it till now.
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