Unfriendly Persuasion (yes, a cinema reference)

Roseanne is Roseanne.  Her shtick hasn't changed in forever.  She's been rude, crude, offensive, and intentionally provocative over her entire career.  One wonders whether she was like that before beginning her career, but it doesn't matter: we knew exactly what to expect when Roseanne was in the spotlight.  This is neither to condone nor condemn her recent tweets.  It is merely to note that, with Roseanne, "you get what you pay for".

Samantha Bee is Samantha Bee.  Although relatively new on the scene, her shtick hasn't changed either.  She clothes her insults in the vestment of political "satire".  Just like Roseanne, it's hard to separate Bee's political policy ridicule from personal insult.

America has always had "insult comics".  My personal hero is Don Rickles, whose act was all about making gentle fun of members of his audience.  But gentle fun: people loved being a target of Mr. Rickles because they knew that he wasn't being personal.  He was being funny.  He never used profanity, he never broke the wall separating "public" from "private", and he always ended his show by thanking his audience for being "in on the joke".  Always funny - but never truly insulting.

Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield - even Groucho Marx, whose ad-libs were both clever and hilarious - made us laugh without feeling uncomfortable.  Insult comics all, and all were funny.  How many of us walked away laughing after hearing their routines, and repeating some of the funniest lines to each other?

But over time, the separation between "political" and "personal" became blurred, and today we have people like Barr and Bee who intentionally offend in order to make a point.  It's instructive to watch their audiences.  There are a lot of uncomfortable laughs ("Should I find this funny?  Should I laugh?"), but not much else.  And those laughs are mostly the result of an inventive way of using some form of profanity.  Neither Barr nor Bee is truly funny.

I have a theory about that.

It goes something like this: "You're not listening to me and you won't agree with me, so I'm going to embarrass you in public to force you to agree with me and to force you to do what I say."

The problem is that the person who is being attacked is often not the person being embarrassed.  In point of fact, the person making the attack ends up apologizing.  Any political point of the attack has been lost in the meanness of the words being used.  It has been both hidden and erased by the ferocity of the words used.

And that, I think, is the point: to destroy any reasonable political discussion by poisoning it with personal animus.  The political becomes personal - and the personal becomes the point of the attack.

This is nothing new.  The use of "forcing the political to become personal" has been going on forever in American politics... or has everyone forgotten about Hamilton's duel with Burr?  Personal disgust between two political opponents ended up with one of them dead and the other's career destroyed.

(Heh - it's a good thing that dueling was outlawed hundreds of years ago. I can think of dozens of political opponents who would willingly face each other with single-shot flintlocks at 30 paces!)

One can make the argument that the election of Trump has changed the face of political discourse, but I prefer to think otherwise.  I think the election of Trump has uncovered the cross-party and cross-ideology hatred that has been simmering all along, and Trump's use of non-traditional media to bypass the left-controlled traditional media "wall" has only uncovered the pot.

It has been said that Trump is not the disease: he is a symptom.  In that, I somewhat agree.  But I think Trump is less a symptom than a result: after being ignored by those who espouse ideologies that play well in coastal liberal enclaves but not in "flyover country", and after a compliant media that assisted a leftist ideology while hindering a conservative ideology, the reaction was the election of someone who had no history in the political "swamp" (unfortunate term, but DC was built on a swamp after all) and who could not be easily "controlled" by either side.

Trump's election is not a rejection but an acknowledgement of the coarsening of political discourse, of which Barr and Bee are partly responsible.  But they are only two.  There are dozens of others who have been provided media platforms and encouraged to insult their ideological opposites, and who only make themselves seem silly and childish when doing so - while also failing to convert anyone on the other side of the aisle.

Barr and Bee are both the result of the "if you don't listen to me, I'll get personal" school of politics.  They both probably know that they probably won't convince anyone, as their form of persuasion is anything but gentle.  But they continue in the hope that "somebody will listen".

A word to both: to convince, cajole.