Arthur Chu, best known as one of the all-time biggest money-winners on Jeopardy!, is also a writer who frequently contributes to Salon. In a Thursday article, Chu saluted departing Daily Show host Jon Stewart for, among other things, keeping him sane during his college days. Unfortunately, recalled Chu, back then America as a whole had lost its mind.
“On election night in 2004,” wrote Chu, “more of us tuned in to Comedy Central than to ‘legitimate’ news sources, because none of the legitimate news sources would openly voice the one truth about the election — that the fact that the election was even close after the disasters in Fallujah and the exposé of Abu Ghraib and the lie about Saddam’s WMD proved that our country was mad…Jon Stewart felt like a Messiah. People told him he should run for president himself and were half-serious when they said it.”
From Chu’s piece (bolding added):
I’m one of the college kids who in 2003 and 2004 grabbed onto what seemed like certain cultural anchors of sanity in what felt like a world gone mad…Serious Pundit after Serious Pundit queued up to take their turn explaining why we absolutely had to cave into the neocons’ desire for a pointless war in Iraq, as every day revealed a new headline emphasizing that America was firmly in the hands of the religious right and the establishment left was enthusiastically welcoming our wingnut overlords…
On election night in 2004 more of us tuned in to Comedy Central than to “legitimate” news sources, because none of the legitimate news sources would openly voice the one truth about the election — that the fact that the election was even close after the disasters in Fallujah and the exposé of Abu Ghraib and the lie about Saddam’s WMD proved that our country was mad…
It feels weird today, in a world of a thousand contending voices on Twitter and Tumblr and YouTube, to talk about how much it meant that there was one dude back then telling the truth…to reject the asinine convention that the party in power had to be given token respect simply because they were in power and to openly call them out as evil lunatics.
Jon Stewart felt like a Messiah. People told him he should run for president himself and were half-serious when they said it…
When [Walter] Cronkite died in 2009 we marked it as the end of an era, acknowledging that an increasingly diverse and fractured America could no longer be told “That’s the way it is” by one trusted news anchor.
But in 2009 we apparently still thought that young, liberal, countercultural America could be spoken for by one comedian…
For better or for worse, there’s no way that Trevor Noah can ever feel as necessary as Jon Stewart did when he spoke out against the war in Iraq — just as Stewart’s antiwar stance, much as we rooted for it in our dorm rooms in 2003, wasn’t nearly the bombshell that Walter Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War was.
Jon Stewart was, in the end, a white savior. He was a better white savior than any of us had a right to expect, probably the best anyone in his position could have been. But it’s time for us to stop asking more from him than any one person can be expected to give — to stop asking any person to be the spokesman for all of us, because to lay a trip like that on anyone’s shoulders is to set them up for pain and ourselves for disappointment.
Meanwhile, in the August issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott gave props to Stewart for “all that he’s been through on our behalf, subjecting himself to a radiation bombardment of mostly right-wing idiocy and conducting a continuing tutorial on breaking news that blends angry incredulity, analysis, citizen passion, historical perspective, and scalding ridicule…[He] has seen his junior partners Steve Carell, John Oliver, and Letterman’s successor, Stephen Colbert, go on to glory while he’s held down the fort, forced to reckon with every mutated strain of sewage monster formulated by Fox News. Stewart has practically made himself hoarse shouting into the whirlwind, and if he sometimes looks as if he’s ashen from outrage fatigue, it’s a sympathetic symptom of how much our democracy has degraded.”
