It’s not what you know; it’s what you feel.
Someone emailed me a copy of the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, held last Saturday, in which Stephen Colbert got to give the final speech.
If you’ve ever seen The Colbert Report, it’s a full-on parody of a typical right-wing talk show, and Stephen Colbert takes that know-it-all obnoxiousness and kicks it up another notch. Facts, Colbert claims, are not important. It’s what we feel that is. It’s things that are not so much truth as “truthiness,” a term he coined. (There’s some overhyped controversy about whether he really did coin it. Staying in character, Colbert says it doesn’t matter what the dictionary says. He feels he coined the word.)
Republicans are notorious for disregarding facts when they get in the way of the party line; just look at how they respond to global warming: “Not all the science is in yet.” Science is never definitive, but we have just enough of it to know there’s a problem… and why in hell are these idiots defending pollution anyway? Because polluters vote Republican?
To be fair, Democrats do it too. Privatization of Social Security is the only way the system will continue to viably exist in 25 years, but privatization is “greedy” and “short-sighted” because Democrats are afraid evil businessmen will take all their privately-controlled Social Security money and invest it in something like Enron, only worse. But whom would you rather have watch your money: Politicians who refuse to pass campaign finance reform laws and never get voted out of office for it, or businessmen who go to jail if they don’t follow the rules?
Okay, let me hit even closer to home: Pre-tribulation rapture. It’s not in the bible; I’ve looked extensively. The only way you could get the bible to support the idea of Jesus pulling the Christians off the earth before the really bad stuff at the End happens is by twisting scriptures—quoting half a verse and ignoring the other half, and flagrantly misinterpreting prophecies that aren’t about the End. It’s a viewpoint that appeared only a century ago, after the comfortable, overfed American Christian came on the scene and wanted to reconcile his comfortable lifestyle with Jesus’s warning that following him means persecution would happen, so the conclusion was to adopt the Pharisees’ attitude that riches meant blessings from God. Pretrib rapture is a very popular belief among these folks because they want it to be true, and don’t really care to do the research. I argue that it can’t be proven from the bible; they say they “know” it to be true regardless. Tim LaHaye says so.*
Anyway. At the dinner, Colbert went on about how facts are irrelevant, it’s what you feel in your gut that matters, and how he and the president are on the same page about this. The amusing thing is, it’s obvious the president doesn’t want to be on the same page about this. He looked noticeably uncomfortable throughout the speech, probably wondering if this guy was serious (and therefore insane) or kidding. Colbert, in essence, roasted the president, and it was fun to watch the entire audience get uncomfortable listening to it (although, to be fair, the video Colbert showed at the end was stupid). Say what you will about Colbert; that took balls.
*Ever notice that the folks who are taking The Da Vinci Code way too seriously—in spite of it being fiction—are the same folks who take Left Behind way too seriously?