Sunday and Monday the Net was abuzz with word of Stephen Colbert’s bracing, revelatory acts of lese majeste at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Videos were posted. Emails were exchanged. Word spread. This was, or at least felt like, a watershed event, an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of moment.
That, apparently, is not how it seemed from inside the Beltway bubble. Colbert’s highwire irony apparently left the D.C. press corps cold. It didn’t even merit a mention in the New York Times coverage of the event. Colbert “fell flat because he ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor: Make fun of yourself, not the other guy,” the Washington Post told us. It seemed that a silly routine that President Bush concocted with a Bush impersonator went over better with this crowd.
At Salon we’re well accustomed to this disconnection between the D.C. consensus and the view from beyond the Beltway. We felt it keenly during the mad Monica days, when capital insiders and mainstream media boffins puffed themselves up with outrage at an inconsequential presidential transgression while a significant portion of the rest of the nation sat there thinking, “Get over it — move on, and get back to work on the real problems we face.” Today, this dynamic is inverted: the outrage lies beyond the Beltway, where it’s almost impossible to believe how badly the nation has been run into the ground by the current administration and its allies.
In Washington, it seems, the emperor’s nudity remains a verboten topic, and our leader is to be feted with business-as-usual niceties. Meanwhile, beyond the corridors of power, the clothes vanished a long time ago, the folly is transparent, and we can’t believe the ugliness of the resulting spectacle. Our young people are dying in a war based on a lie, our national leadership reeks of corruption, our economic well-being has been sold out for a mess of tax-break pottage, the global environment is being wrecked for our children, the absence of a smart energy policy has left us powerless in the face of an oil shortage — and we are supposed to be nice?
Maybe the editors and reporters in that banquet room didn’t find Colbert funny. Watching his performance at home, I couldn’t stop laughing.
[Watch Colbert here (Videodog, Youtube 1, 2, 3); read Michael Scherer’s Salon piece; there’s a full transcript over at Kos.]
LATE ADD: Dave Johnson calls the absence of mainstream Colbert coverage an “intentional blackout.” Me, I don’t think it’s coordinated in quite that way; newsrooms independently reach the same (wrong) conclusion about what’s newsworthy — then see their choices reinforced by those of their colleagues at other outlets. Mostly I think they resented Colbert’s jabs at them — and cheered themselves up by telling themselves that he wasn’t really funny.
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