Jon Stewart is wrong about Truman and here's why

Alright, alright. Jon Stewart has always been a Keynesian Statist. Fair enough. But he's pretty damn funny and I enjoy watching his show -- not for informational content -- but for light entertainment. But when I learned he called Harry Truman a War Criminal I had one of those "Whaaa???" moments, wholly paralyzed by disbelief. Then, practically seconds later, I found out he retracted the statement. Take a look.





For a moment it was like a flashbulb of truth illuminating the faces of America. Yes, Truman was a War Criminal. No honest survey of the complete history of the Pacific Theater could lead to any alternate conclusion. But then Stewart equivocated and finally cratered beneath the religion of Nationalism. If needlessly dropping two Atomic Bombs on non-military targets is not the height of wickedness then what could ever qualify as evil?

Was it necessary? Well, not really, in fact, not at all. In the year leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan had by all calculations already been militarily defeated. The allies had surrounded the island and choked it into submission with sanctions, meaning the people were starving, no fuel or ammunition was permitted to enter the country and Japanese cities suffered heavy aerial raids which left the nation ruined.

"Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were 'driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age.' Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: 'It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.' This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: 'Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.'"(source)

According to no less of an authority than General Douglas MacArthur Japan even attempted to surrender not once, not twice but a whopping five full times nearly conforming perfectly to the terms the Allies had laid out. Still, America rejected the offers and these attempts were censored by the media until after the end of the Second World War. In the 40-page secret memorandum, that was never denied by the White House or the State Department, the terms of surrender included:

• Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
• Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
• Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
• Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
• Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
• Surrender of designated war criminals." (source)

This memorandum was received by President Roosevelt on January 20, 1945, almost a full 8 months before the decision to drop the bombs. Sorry, Bill O'Reilly -- wrong again.





But all of this obscures the human cost of Truman's actions. The number of casualties and devastation is beyond human comprehension.

The explosion utterly destroyed more than four square miles of the city center. About about 90,000 people were killed immediately; another 40,000 were injured, many of whom died in protracted agony from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians. (source)

A fundamental distinction many fail to acknowledge is the actions of the government should not result in the collective punishment of its citizens. The state is not the people. It is essential to understand that subtlety. The lessons of that day can be transposed quite readily over American foreign policy today. Imagine being a citizen of the Hirohito regime, having all of your information regulated, swimming in a toxic sea of zealous devotion to the Divine Emperor and at every stop your culture is designed to disrupt your ability to reason. It starts during the most formative years and continues onward regulating your entire inner life. A little empathy on the part of Americans and the Allies toward the Japanese and accepting the calls for peace would have prevented one of the most vile atrocities man has every inflicted upon man.

"Yoshitaka Kawamoto was thirteen years old when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, in a classroom less than a kilometer away from the hypocenter:

'One of my classmates, I think his name is Fujimoto, he muttered something and pointed outside the window, saying, "A B-29 is coming." He pointed outside with his finger. So I began to get up from my chair and asked him, "Where is it?" Looking in the direction that he was pointing towards, I got up on my feet, but I was not yet in an upright position when it happened. All I can remember was a pale lightening flash for two or three seconds. Then, I collapsed. I don t know much time passed before I came to. It was awful, awful. The smoke was coming in from somewhere above the debris. Sandy dust was flying around. I was trapped under the debris and I was in terrible pain and that's probably why I came to. I couldn't move, not even an inch. Then, I heard about ten of my surviving classmates singing our school song. I remember that. I could hear sobs. Someone was calling his mother. But those who were still alive were singing the school song for as long as they could. I think I joined the chorus. We thought that someone would come and help us out. That's why we were singing a school song so loud. But nobody came to help, and we stopped singing one by one. In the end, I was singing alone.'" (source)

Can Stephen Colbert save America?

A new book argues that Colbert, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are good for democracy. But is it taking late-night comedy too seriously?

By Louis Bayard

(View Original)

April 5, 2008 | Asking an academic to explain humor to you is like getting Kenneth Starr to explain the sex act: The explainer has already waged war on the thing being explained. And so anyone looking for yuks in Russell L. Peterson’s "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke" will have to get past the following hurdles: extensive endnotes; a killjoy thesis, relentlessly iterated; and, most deathly of all, repeated references to Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson.

The funny bone, in most cases, is no match for the pointy head. Peterson’s head, though, is something a good deal more: zesty and contentious and sophisticated -- and capable even of coughing up a good line or two on its own. An American studies professor at the University of Iowa, Peterson is a former stand-up comic and political cartoonist who wants to know how we’re changed by the act of laughing. Not just any laughing, either, but the kind that happens late in the evening, when the Lenos and Lettermans and Stewarts and Colberts are making merry with the day’s carnage.

The combined ratings of all their programs may be less than Johnny Carson in his heyday, but late-night TV matters now as never before. For all its parodic inflections, it has become one of the main news sources for Americans, particularly young Americans, and politicians of every stripe happily perch themselves in whatever dunking booth they can find for the chance of an uninterrupted 10 minutes with the 18-to-29 demographic.

Four years ago, John Kerry was so eager to ride his Harley onto "The Tonight Show" stage that he agreed to follow Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Arnold Schwarzenegger used the same forum to launch his 2003 gubernatorial bid. John McCain announced his most recent candidacy on "Letterman," and with every change of season comes Hillary Clinton, brandishing a new Top 10 list. These appearances tend to follow the same arc of humiliation. Candidate takes good-natured ribbing from host; host claps candidate on shoulder, ushers him or her offstage ... and then carries on joking about candidate as if person had never been there. Ain’t America great?

Well, on that last question, Peterson is suggestively mum, but he’s quite voluble on another subject: the jokes themselves. "In spite of the fact that comedy about politics is now as common as crabgrass, political comedy -- that is, genuine satire, which uses comedic means to advance a serious critique -- is so rare we might be tempted to conclude it is extinct."

Go ahead. Think back on the monologue you heard the other night on TV. Chances are good that, whether it was delivered by Jay or Dave or Conan O’Brien, it was nothing more than a theme-and-variations spin on the same old equations: Bush = dumb; Clinton = cold; McCain = old. Oh, boy, is he old! His Secret Service name is "Enlarged Prostate," and the two State Department employees who were looking into Barack Obama’s passport file were also inspecting McCain’s Civil War records, and John McCain is so old he remembers when Iraq was called Mesopotamia, and hey, have we cracked a Monica Lewinsky joke lately? No?

"Topical comedians," says Peterson, "keep finding new ways to tell us what we already ’know’ about politicians." And because they harp so remorselessly on candidates’ individual quirks -- ignoring the hard, complex, often maddening substance of policy -- they declare, in effect, that every choice is equally bad and that the system itself is "an irredeemable sham." "Election after election," Peterson writes, "night after night, joke after joke, they have reinforced the notion that political participation is pointless, parties and candidates are interchangeable, and democracy is futile."

There are good and sound economic reasons for this, of course. Someone as focused on numbers as Jay Leno is not about to sacrifice half his viewers for the sake of bringing down George W. Bush’s immigration policy. Johnny Carson never even mentioned the Vietnam War. True satire can take root only in the exurbs of cable, where comic pioneers smoke out the vipers in democracy’s den. Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert -- in Peterson’s cosmology, these are the true heroes of late-night, because they ground even their harshest commentary in "a faith in the political process." And on that score, nobody has ascended higher than the "Lincolnish" Colbert, whose Gettysburg Address coincided with the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a normally inane and self-congratulatory affair prodded into fretful life by Colbert’s assault. Afterward, the dragoons of the press corps (Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, Richard Cohen) fell over themselves declaring that Colbert had bombed. In fact, he’d been throwing bombs. Right into their laps.

"Here’s how it works," Colbert explained. "The president makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home ... Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!"

Colbert’s address perfectly meets Peterson’s criteria for genuine satire: It causes its targets either to take umbrage or to "adopt a studied silence." Pseudo satire, by contrast, is often embraced and even co-opted by its purported victims. Think of Bush père inviting Dana Carvey to the White House, Janet Reno bopping around with Will Ferrell, Al Gore competing with David Letterman to tell the best Al Gore joke. The lampooned pol can safely join in the bloodletting because no blood is actually being let. "Real satire," growls Peterson, "means it."

So, under all this funny and not-so-funny business, a decidedly moral argument is being advanced. And yet I would argue that personality and aesthetics enter into it, too. Dennis Miller meets at least some of the criteria of true satire: real, albeit retrograde, convictions declaimed without fear of offending. Peterson slams him for being too beholden to GOP talking points, but it really boils down to this: He doesn’t like the guy. "Like Holden Caulfield, [Miller] is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is too full of himself to notice."

No one, though, comes in for quite as much scorn as the glad-handing Leno: "more of a salesman than an artiste ... less like a political joker than a politician in his own right ... willing to stoop to almost anything." If you’ve ever wondered why Leno’s production company is called Big Dog, Peterson says, just watch him bounding onstage every night. "If he had a tail, it would be wagging."

This is spot on, and part of the fun of "Strange Bedfellows" is matching up your own likes and dislikes with the author’s. For my part, I think he undervalues Conan O’Brien, and I’m not sure why he feels the need to pound on performers like Sasha Baron Cohen, who have only a tenuous relation to the late-night world. Shock comedy, in general, brings out a latent strain of sniffiness in Peterson. Sarah Silverman, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, "Family Guy," even "Married ... With Children" are all lumped into the same unsavory stew of poo-poo jokes and mindless iconoclasm. "A society that has no taboos left offers nothing for humor to challenge," thunders Peterson. "If nothing is sacred, nothing is at stake." I would guess Lenny Bruce, back in his day, was whacked with that same dead fish.

As the late-night landscape continues to evolve, Peterson may well have cause to return to the subject, and if he does, I hope he’ll explore the tension that lies at the heart of his thesis. By his own reckoning, the democratically chosen entertainments of the masses are also democracy’s enemy, and the only ones who can save us from ourselves are a small and brainy elite that in fact looks less and less like modern America. It’s a strange irony that late-night comedy, at least since Dave Chappelle’s abdication, has become one of the most lily-white enclaves in TV. Are we still looking to white men to save the day? Is the rest of America, in Peterson’s estimation, just too dumb to be trusted with democracy?