Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart brushes his hands off, "My work here is done." 

Or perhaps even he's become tired of his own schtick. 

Lord knows I sure have, decades ago.

This is Molly Shannon, center, as United States news consumer between Jon Stewart's fake news and Brian William's hopelessly slanted news in an endless body slam of disco news and current events dance. That at long last ends.

They are both anachronistic, Stewart and Williams are, not Molly, she's timeless.

They both remind me of the restaurant owners that Gordon Ramsay and Robert Irvine try so hard to save from themselves who cannot change out of sincere loyalty to long term customers who are insufficient to sustain the business in changing times that left them behind. They both serve generations that are not so important anymore as they were. Young people don't care about either of these two. They see right through the smug sanctimony that buys them nothing and leaves them holding the bag.

I did catch a bit of Jon Stewart yesterday. That was odd, to submit to that. Rachel Maddow was explaining. She was over-explaining, actually, walking us by the hand through Liberallandia, sounding as if choking on reading her jarring copy. Her copy was ordinary, but her reading of it is choppy and jarring. She is a terrible reader, and I mean terrible and exceedingly difficult to heed. I was trying to test my tolerance to see how long it would take before I was driven off when she tossed out an example of what makes Jon Stewart so great. She showed a Jon Stewart video. Goodness, the man is impossible to avoid.

In the clip Stewart was saying something on his own show ostensively serious but with the background titled, "Mess-o-potamia." Nothing slanted there, he says something obvious, sensible, levelheaded on the personal level with no application on the geopolitical level, behaved comically nonplussed, then mugged for the camera, the audience applauds.

Ugh.

Maddow herself acknowledges Stewart offers satire "fake" news then asserts we must acknowledge Stewart is the legitimate source of valid news for a lot of people. She plays it both ways in a single sentence. *click*

An audience!

So which was it all along, Pumpkin, fake or legitimate? You cannot have it both ways, but of course you do, and that is why Jon  Stewart was rejected by sensible people as anything other than comedian from the start.

We love biting cutting wry life and world observations presented dryly as satire such as comedians provide. We do appreciate news analyzed and viewed as if from above, but it is impossible to appreciate analysis so meta that we are no longer part of it, elevated aloof on one leg, and told where to applaud as trained seals at jokes, jabs, and japes aimed at flattering our own sanctimonious, moral, ethical, intellectual self-regard.

Finally, today a young man asked for my ID and I handed him my opened wallet. He took the information he needed from the driver's license then remarked on another card identifying the holder as FRB employee. Now all the people in the room know he is a big snoop and our private conversation is that public. He read a tiny logo on a card. I told him I no longer work, that they shifted my status. He flipped them (the imaginary FRB) the double bird on my behalf. He has large hands. They formed two large menacing middle finger birds that fired like repeating mortar fire. I told him I actually liked working there a lot. It always surprises me when young people say something deeply insightful, he said, "They should be abolished. It's just that I am against fiat currency." And I thought, "Now, here's an interesting young fellow who is fierce." By using the word "fiat" he is saying money is make believe. He is saying that he does not have faith in U.S. currency, that is, no faith in the political parties that manage the government that backs the currency. It does get down to trust, and young people I talk to don't have it. A single random anecdotal fellow today, I doubt he'd care the slightest about Williams, Stewart, or even Maddow for that matter. Nor do I.