Mar 11, 2022
The Problem with Jon Stewart: The Problem With… Jon Stewart
This is a comment from a YouTube
YOUR POLITICIANS WILL NOT ACT NOW OR URGENTLY because the voting public doesn’t want to do the hard work to make them. Western democracies act like they all have leaders but in a lot of cases they’re not leaders, they’re representatives. Their culture is around representing “the people” (but mostly they’re compromised by, and in service to, corporate or party interests because those have a bigger influence on them than the desires of individual voters.)
The US is definitely the best example of a democracy full-on lying to itself about how free and equal everyone is. Politicians in the US fight ineffectively with each other because the people in the US fight ineffectively with each other and THAT’S WHAT POWERS THE DEMOCRACY. Culture has shown this to us prominently over the years. Culture didn’t do this to you though, it simply showed you what you were doing to yourselves (and it also reinforced it.) No one at the level of the voting public is to blame because it’s systemic, but everyone is complicit in supporting or engaging with harmful aspects of the systems because things are so fully integrated and compromised now.
The solution to all of The Problems starts with each and every person, but it’s not some corporate greenwashing bullshit like an increase in personal effort to recycle that’s required (The line about recycling bins being made out of plastic was brilliant). What’s required is an increase in personal effort by every person to become more engaged with efforts to improve the world around us — instead of just consuming the things that deteriorate the quality of our world, and also information about the deterioration of the world. “I don’t have time for that because I work 7 jobs!” is a valid answer but doesn’t get any of the collaborative effort required AND ALSO highlights something important about this issue: The Problem starts with the economy. The things the US values are all fucked up. It’s all self deception and vapid nonsense built around something that, to some people, used to be substantive. The culture of the United States is incredibly performative in some significant ways and that culture is broadcast to the entire world as a result of corporate media platforms — including social media. You’re forced to survive through competition by the psychotic manifestation of late stage capitalism and the best you can do is share memes and feel like that’s contributing. It’s not, it just gives you the feeling of having taken action without requiring you to take action. That behaviour, at scale and manifested systemically, can kill you and everyone you know.
I like The Problem with Jon Stewart and I suspect the series finale will be called “The Problem with Jon Stewart: The Problem with… Jon Stewart” and it’ll be Jon lamenting not doing more work to solve things. This isn’t to say Jon isn’t doing a shitpile of work. He’s done so much good work and so much activism for such a wide variety of groups. It’s just an impossible task. I understand this very well and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why all of my heroes, people like Jon and Greta Thumberg, haven’t been able to deliver the world they’re telling us about. I’ve developed a number of innovative solutions to a bunch of the root causes of all of The Problems that Jon Stewart tells us about. I’m the unofficial Wizard of Canada and you can find me online.
Update: I deleted my YouTube account, including all the comments I’d left on videos, in February 2022.
