#1603 Satire and the American Experience

it's a different clientele to a certain degree,

they're often set in very beautiful places, I'm in this one now near Cooperstown. that is just fabulous, and they're friendly, and you know the facilities aren't quite what they are at the majors, but there's less craziness and less of kind of the rigidity of the corporate homogeneity of American life, every Starbucks is the same, every Pizza Hut is the same, every Applebee's is the same, every Costco is the same, every Walmart is the same, there's a kind of a bleary, wearying homogeneity to American commerce, and so I like getting away from that. Today's program is again with David Horton, my friend from Radford University, his suggestion that we talk about satire, and satire means a great deal to me. I love satire, I've loved it from the beginning, I taught courses in satire when I was a college professor, and there's something about it that really works for me, and of all the satirical books ever written, and there are of course scores of them, hundreds of them, many amazing satires, but it's Jonathan Swift above all that I admire, 18th century, I think. Gulliver was published, I know it was published in the 1720s, but also a modest proposal about cannibalizing the infants, the babies of Ireland, a tale of a tub about the Reformation, the Blickerstaff papers, Swift was amazing, and I know many people have read book.

one of Gulliver's travels, Gulliver, a giant amongst the Lilliputians, and you probably remember that god-awful Jack Black movie, in which he plays Gulliver, I'm not an enemy to Jack Black, but I'm not a friend of that version of it, the Ted Danson miniseries is outstanding, and I suppose a little less entertaining at times, but it is more faithful to the world of Jonathan Swift than any Hollywood production has ever been, it's worth reading the whole thing, and it's marvelous, and satire is so important to civilization, because we have to criticize, but you want to criticize, not with just a lash, you want the criticism to be funny, and entertaining, and satire at its best is highly entertaining, think of Saturday Night Live at its best, think of the Naked Gun movies, or Airplane, when satire works, it really works, it can fall flat. of course, the word actually means a dish of things, it comes from a Roman word, satire has a Roman base, and it means kind of a dish of hors d'oeuvres, or a dish of different things, and so there's an unevenness in satire, it doesn't have the same literary unity of other genres, anyway, that's the program today, and it was a wide ranging conversation, and reminded me of all sorts of things, including the great Garrison, Keillor, Lake, Wobegon, anyway, I don't think we've ever done this topic before, and it's really interesting, Mark Twain came up, and Will Rogers came up, and Bill Maher came up, and Stephen Colbert came up, and Tom Stewart made an appearance, so tomorrow I go to the Baseball Hall of Fame, I've never been, I've never been to a Hall of Fame for anything, not rock and roll, not cowboy, not baseball, football, or basketball, this will be my first, so I'm excited about that, and I'll probably wind up tomorrow night at the Erie Canal, there's a RV site near Rochester, I'm going to go to Niagara, I've been there, I think, twice before, but, Steinbeck was there, so I will be there, and of course it's a great place, Thomas Jefferson said to Mrs. Cosway, and to others, that it's worth, he said it's worth a trip across the Atlantic to go to the Natural Bridge in Virginia, where I've been many times, to the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers at Harpers Ferry, I've been several times, and to Niagara, that a painter, Mrs. Cosway was a painter, among other things, a musician, composer, famous coquette, a woman who drove men crazy, including, to a certain degree, Thomas Jefferson, a collector of men, I think is the way to put it, and who eventually fell in love with Jefferson and wanted to come to the United States, at that point he sort of backtracked quite a bit on the principle that what happens in Paris probably had better stay in Paris, but he said Niagara is worth a trip across the Atlantic, the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac, and the Natural Bridge, and so I've been to them all, but I will be writing about Thomas Jefferson and John Steinbeck, two names that don't often come up in the same sentence, so this was fun, I very much enjoyed the programs that David Horton hosts, and he will be doing more as time goes on of it, so anyway, thanks for listening, bless you, I can't tell you how satisfying it is for me to be able to speak these words using 21st century technology in an Airstream trailer, somewhere in New York, and about to go see if Harmon Killebrew, my boyhood hero, is adequately represented in the Baseball Hall of Fame, so let's go to the show.

I think they are a wonderful part of American life, of really the entire world of satire, but let's talk, maybe in this edition of this program, about satire and the role of political satire in American life over the last 249 years. Well, let me ground you by saying that.

He really talks about Gulliver and the Lilliputians, and so it's more like a fable or a fairy tale for Thomas Jefferson. He's often said to have been humorless, and that's not quite true, but it is essentially true, that he was good-humored, agreeable, benevolent, enjoyed. other people, smiled. He was very agreeable and good-humored, but his sense of humor, as you and I would measure such things, was approach zero, and I discovered about 20 years ago that I can be quite funny, and I've made Jefferson funny because I can't help it, but that's probably the way I violate the character of Jefferson most, because he was very, very earnest. Well, and, you know,

My mother would say, no, there's not going to be that kind of talk in this house. And so imagine what has changed now, the level of sheer, unbearable vulgarity and slang and deliberate misuse of language, a refusal to believe that there are any language standards which ought to be admired or held up, even amongst senators and American presidents. It's just a different time, and I think the case can be made that we're more relaxed, and that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but I do miss it. And when I watch, say, British Parliament, you know, when they have question time, I watch on C-SPAN, I think, man, I would love to live in a society where people spoke in complete sentences, and they speak ill of each other in the way that we were taught in our civics classes. I disagree with the right honorable representative from Kent.

You know, I won't say it's the most foolish thing that I ever heard, but one could say such a thing. You know, there's that kind of euphemism and an attempt to maintain some sort of political decorum. That's just not—I mean, this very morning, we're recording this on the 17th of May, 2024, and I was listening to the almost catfight that occurred between two women in the House of Representatives, where you can't even believe how sad, how low, how icky it felt, like Jerry Springer had taken over.

And then I would like to get into Gulliver's Travels, because that is one of the more famous pieces of satire, particularly in.

And so this has been used for a very long time. Debates in the British Parliament were satirized in this way. In France particularly, which was still an absolutism, this form existed. And so that's one of the bases of it. And just to anticipate a little bit, David Gulliver's Travels, the greatest satire of the 18th century, was Swift's really savage attack on British mores and politics and European government too.

But he projected it in four episodes. So at first Gulliver is a giant amongst dwarves, then he's a dwarf amongst giants, then he goes to this zany world where rationality has trumped good sense, and then, in the final episode, book four of Gulliver's Travels, he goes to a world where there are humanoids, but they're vicious primates and they're disgusting and loathsome and excremental, and without any redeeming values whatsoever. But the civilized creatures on that island are horses, the Wynnums. The word Wynnum is onomatopoeia, so the way you should pronounce it is whams. That's what he was trying to get at.

So he projects his satire into four fictional universes, but there was nobody who didn't get it. But if the authorities came to him and said, how dare you criticize Robert Walpole, the prime minister, he'd say, I didn't. It's an island in Never, Never Land. It's a political dodge. Satire has always existed, but the Romans really invented it.

And in the Latin world, David, there were two fundamental types of satire. There was Juvenalian satire and there was Horatian satire. Juvenal was a poet who savaged the abuses and corruptions of the Roman world, particularly the early Roman Empire. He did not hold back. It's really grim, angry, belittling satire.

Horace, the great Roman lyric poet, Horace, preferred to deliver a kind of a genial satire, a kind of civilized satire. He didn't punch as hard as he needed to.

He tried, using a kind of a sweetness of temper, but nevertheless, some bite, to point to the corruptions and the problems of the Roman world. So you have the two paradigms here, savage satire and genial satire, and they continue. We can see them in our own era.

Welcome back to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I'm David Horton. I have the honor of serving as your guest co-host today. I'm coming to you from Radford University in Radford, Virginia, and joining me from the road, Cooperstown, New York, is your host, Clay Jenkinson. And we're talking about satire a little bit today in this edition of the program.

When we last left, we had begun with a look back at some of the history of satire, and we're going to talk a little bit about satire and mention Gulliver's Travels briefly. You gave a beautiful assessment of how that had come about and sort of how it was viewed. But one of the things I've always been fascinated about, this was likely a book that the learned people of the revolutionary period here in the United States would have known, at least to some extent, those that could read, those that had access to it. Can you talk a little bit with us about how Gulliver's Travels and some of the satire that was there may have influenced thoughts on colonialism and on the governments that were?

There's a very fine miniseries with Ted Danson as Gulliver, which is low budget, but it's absolutely outstanding. I recommend that people look at it. So Swift, let me put it this way. The world is corrupt. The things we're seeing right now in our politics, a seemingly elderly president who shuffles his rival, sleeps with porn stars.

When we're recording this, the Menendez trial is going on in New York, and, Senator Menendez, it doesn't get any better than this one, when the FBI finds gold bars in your closet. Not like checks or money orders, but gold bars. And then he wants to brazen it out and say, doesn't everybody have a few gold bars in their closet? You can't make this stuff up, is my point. And we're not unique, and this corruption has always existed.

Humans are hypocrites. Humans make promises they don't keep. Politicians, especially do so. People talk out of both sides of their mouth. One of the most interesting phenomena of our time is when a Democrat does something, the Republicans say, this is the end of the republic as we know it.

And look at this, the moral corruption. We can't survive if we allow this to stand. And the Democrats then defend that indefensible thing. And then, two years later, it's the exact reverse. People use identical arguments now to attack and now to defend.

And it just makes you cynical, and it makes you want to just throw up your hands and say, you know, a plague on both their houses and so on. And if you go back to Roman satire, they were just like us, except they were low tech. They didn't have automobiles, they didn't have airplanes, they didn't have the internet. But they had gladiatorial sports, they had unbelievable misuse of wealth, they had profound corruption and hypocrisy, and so on. And so a satirist like Juvenal hones in on that and really lets them have it, gives them the lash.

And Horace, his sort of counterpoint, is much more amused by this situation that humans are hypocrites and they seldom are consistent in the way that they see the world, and their values are different in practice from the ones that they preach, and so on. So Swift comes along and he writes a number of satires. So the most famous is Gulliver's Travels. But he also wrote A Tale of a Tub, which is a really serious satire on the Reformation, on the three branches. So Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism.

And I remember reading it when I was in college and again in graduate school and thinking, this is really strong, strong stuff. Most people, probably at some point in their life, read his Modest Proposal. His Modest Proposal is a tongue-in-cheek discussion about the Irish economy and what he proposes. Not Swift, of course, but the persona of this project proposes that, since the British are essentially destroying Ireland and occupying it and bleeding it dry and debasing the currency and, you know, systematically abusing the Irish people, and since Irish babies are born into the world where they will not probably survive because the Irish people are just so poor, so his projector, his persona, says, hey, I have an idea. What if the Irish begin to raise babies for the market, for food?

And then there will be incentives to take care of mother's health as they come close to birthing and the Irish will now have money in their pockets. This will be a great export. This will change the balance of payments in Ireland. And he goes through this fascinating, obviously disingenuous argument that, yeah, why don't we just raise babies for the way we raise beef or the way we raise chickens or hogs? And, of course, you're meant to be horrified by this.

And you are. It's a brilliant piece of work. If listeners haven't ever read it, it takes about 45 minutes. And then, at the end, though, David, you're supposed to realize, oh, I see his point, that the British are, in a sense, already cannibalizing Ireland, that this is not as wild as it seems. Of course, you're morally outraged by this idea, but hey, why aren't you morally outraged by the routine oppression of the British colonial service in the way that it treats Ireland and the Irish?

And so that's the most famous of his satires. But in Gulliver, as I said, there are four episodes. And so what Swift is doing, my friend, is trying to twist the knife in as many different ways as he can. In other words, he could have just written a single satire, but he added four. There are four imaginary journeys where Gulliver gets shipwrecked, or there's a mutiny, and he winds up alone on some island, and then things happen.

And this, of course, came during the age of discovery, the travels of people like Captain Cook and Magellan, and so on. And all these travelers are coming back with wild tales of indigenous peoples and places like Tahiti and the Philippines. Swift got in on that sort of fascination in that genre, but he used it for these satirical purposes. And founding fathers all knew this book. This was a universally read book.

But the thing about it is that it's not just Jefferson who was humorless. Probably John Adams was the person who could appreciate Gulliver's travels most, because he had an exquisite sense of humor and he was completely, I won't say, disillusioned about humanity, but without illusions about humanity. Whereas Jefferson believed that man is good. He believed that humans are not perfectible, but quite a bit. We can come close to the perfection of humankind.

And someone like John Adams just looks at Jefferson and says, are you nuts? Are you nuts? Have you looked around? Did you see the reign of terror in France? Did you see Shay's rebellion?

Do you see the way humans are? Don't tell me that humans are perfectible. But this is an argument, not satire. So the founding fathers were more like Jefferson than they were like Adams. They were high-minded.

They believed that we were creating something entirely new under the sun, that humans had kind of left human nature behind on the other side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Paine said, we have it in our power to begin the world over again. I mean, think of that, the boldness of that, that humans now have it in their power to begin the world over again. And this time the point is we're going to get it right. We're going to be reasonable. We're going to be kind.

We're going to be tolerant. We're going to separate church and state. There won't be heresy. There won't be burnings. There won't be pogroms.

There won't be anti-Catholic sentiment or anti-Muslim sentiment. And so most of the founding fathers, at various levels, fell into that camp of deep optimism and hopefulness. And a few, like John Adams, Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, were on the cynical side of the equation, particularly Gouverneur Morris. And then in the middle are people like George Washington. And George Washington was sort of instinctively drawn to Jefferson's utopian fantasies, but he also knew, I've seen too much to really surrender to that optimism completely.

And so the founders were not great about satire, because they were building an experimental new republic, but the book that they all read without question was Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. One of the things that I think is interesting, and you.

But then he discovers that they're at war with this other place called Blefuscu. I love Swift's use of invented terminology, but the Lilliputians, and they sound little, don't? they? The Lilliputians, are at perpetual war with the people of Blefuscu, and Blefuscu is across the channel. So it's France.

So Gulliver is kind of a naive character and he says, well, what's this thing about? I mean, if you've been at war forever, I mean, there must be a really serious business. And they say, yeah, it's the big Indians versus the little Indians. He says, oh, tell me more. He says, well, the question is whether you crack your egg open at the big end or the little end.

And he says, you're at war over this? And they say, oh yeah, this really matters. And then they tell the origin story of what happened, and so on. Well, obviously this is a satire on the Reformation. The Catholics believe that Jesus is in the wafer, is in the wine, that the priest can actually bring Christ into the mass.

And the Lutherans and the Calvinists believe, no, it's not that. It may be important. It's an important sacrament, but it's not quite like that. And there were wars and people burned at the stake over this. There were people burned at the stake over the nature of Jesus.

Was he always God, but kind of assuming manhood? Or was he a man who understood his Godhead? Or was he both or neither or both at once? And people were burned at the stake over these things, David. I mean, literally, these were issues that nations went to war over.

And so Swift wants you to realize the utter absurdity of this. And so he then places the nature of a completely artificial war in the big Indians and the little Indians. And when you see it, you laugh. And at first you think, how does this relate to anything? Then you realize, oh, I get it.

A, he's talking about the trivial differences that lead to human conflict. But B, he's talking about the Reformation, conflicts over the mass and stained glass windows, investments and everything else. And so this is his way of doing very serious work in a playful and, in this case, very amusing way. So that's more genial satire. I love Gulliver's Travels.

I read it at least once a year. It's one of my very favorite books. I love all aspects of it. I will admit that deep, deep, deep down, I am a Swiftian. Well, if you take a look at a couple of more contemporary examples, David, think of Gary Larson's cartoons, which I just absolutely love.

And what he was saying is there's a kind of a fundamental absurdity, hypocrisy,

imbecility at the core of us. And see what he did. was he normally cast his satire in Neanderthals or bears in Yellowstone Park or angle worms. But he satirized the human condition in quite a genial way, I think. He wasn't savage most of the time, but he satirized us by way of other creatures, which is another well-worn genre using, well, the most famous example may be George Orwell's Animal Farm, in which he casts the class system in Stalin in an animal farm into into hogs.

So this, this genre, goes all the way back. Aesop's Fables are, in some sense, part of that genre. It's in the interest of all satirists to project their satire away from a straight critique of their civilization into a more amusing form, so that people can enjoy being whipped by the satirist.

It ends in a bloodbath. But the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons have had this feud, and Huck is like the Gulliver, the naive persona, and he says, what's this all about? And they say, we don't really remember. I mean, I guess it's, I don't know. It's about something, but it's several generations ago, and it just is.

And so he's satirizing that. Of course, this is also a satire on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, because it leads to a bloodbath when a young Shepherdson and a young Grangerford run off together, and that's what leads to the final bloody, awful battle. And he's satirizing the hypocrisy of slaveholding and so on. So he's a great satirist. The problem with Twain is that he never found a gag that he could leave alone.

So even in a great, great, great book like Huckaberry Finn, if he sees a gag somewhere on the horizon, he goes right for it. And often this actually drains some of the profundity out of his work. My favorite of the works that are satirical is Roughing It, about his time out in the gold fields of Nevada and in California during the gold rush era. It is a hilarious satire.

There's a chapter on Mormonism, and I apologize to anyone who might be offended by this, but he goes to Salt Lake City and he encounters Brigham Young and has a really amazing and hilarious episode with Brigham Young. But he also has a whole chapter on the Book of Mormon. And it is just astonishingly funny. It's astonishingly funny, but it's also really a savage critique on the Book of Mormon. And at the end of it, he says, what is it?

It's chloroform in print. That's great satire. You know, my point is that he never saw a gag that he didn't go for. And they're often very funny, but at a certain point in Huckleberry Finn even, but in Roughing It and Connecticut, Yankee and King Arthur's Court, you sort of get to the point where you think, okay, you took it a little too far. You lost some of the integrity of the work of art.

And of course, it's tragic in Huckleberry Finn because the first two thirds of it are really the finest thing ever written in the United States. Ernest Hemingway said, if there's a great American novel, it has to be Huckleberry Finn. So now there's a double tragedy that the N-word is eating it and getting it canceled from lots of places. And that's a conversation we could have sometime. But also that when Twain got Huck and Jim far down the river, he couldn't really figure out how to end the novel.

So he just kind of goes back into more of a Tom Sawyer mode and it ends sort of in gags and silliness. And the silliness is actually kind of racist in structure. So it's a very great work, which was marred by this capacity of Twain. But when he's funny, he is very, very funny.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm David Horton. I have the honor this week of serving as your guest co-host, coming to you from Radford, Virginia. Joining me from Cooperstown, New York, is the host of Listening to America, Clay Jenkinson. And we're having a fascinating discussion about satire and humor and politics and all the pieces associated with it.

We've kind of moved throughout the 17 and 1800s. And as we move into the 20th century, I don't think you can talk satire, political satire, especially, without talking Will Rogers.

They take it a little too far. I mean, Bill Maher is one of my favorite satirists. Bill Maher modulates his satire pretty well, but then there are times when he gets so righteous that it becomes a little too much and he loses the breadth of a potential audience. In other words, you want conservatives to be watching that program as well as liberals. You want it to be equal opportunity.

And so Jon Stewart, for example, was, although we know he's a liberal, but he was more of an equal opportunity satirist. And so he knew that you satirize both sides, that they're all crazy, they all deserve whipping. And if you do that, you can broaden your audience and you can keep a more representative audience of the American people together. But if it's predictable, you know, just think of Keith Oberman towards the end of his career on MSNBC, where he had been quite funny as a more genial satirist. But when he, when, when Donald Trump came on the scene, Keith Oberman went so severe in his denunciations and his righteousness that he not only lost us, but he lost his job over it.

You know, Will Rogers better than I. Tell us a little bit about.

And it takes it to a less than an entertainment place. Will Rogers at his heart was an entertainer. He was a humorist. He was a philosopher. He was someone who wanted to truly connect with people and help them have a good time.

But his brilliance was in the simplicity of the way that he did it. Coming across as, oh, just, an old cowboy that may not know much about anything, but put out a little horse sense or a little common sense. And suddenly it's very relatable. And the way he talked about things resonated with people and allowed him to go down some paths that were a little more difficult at times, but because it was couched in such a wonderful way, because it had such a wonderful coding, it really allowed people to explore it in a totally different way and maybe be accepting. I think that's a crucial part of satire, particularly in the age of mass media.

It's one thing to read it on a page. It's another when someone's delivering it and you have all those levels of communication where they come across as genial and happy or they come across as angry and aloof and elite. And I think that's one of the real challenges with broadcasting in general is it is very different from the written word or even a drawn cartoon or something that is much more one-way, asynchronous communication. But what do you think? Because, you know, certainly Will Rogers has to be connected to Theodore Roosevelt in that romanticism of the cowboy and of the early part of the 20th century, late 1800s.

That's, you know, that's, you're laughing because it's good. He says, diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy until you can find a rock. The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. Make crime pay, become a lawyer. In other words, these are, you know, no one's offended by this.

The one joke you can tell anywhere at any time, we all need lawyers. Nobody likes them. It works every time. But, but just those few examples I gave, they, they're reminiscent of Mark Twain's humor. You know, Twain says, suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself, or there is no distinctly Native American criminal class except Congress.

And now that doesn't even seem so funny. But when you think of Senator Menendez, for example, or the two from Georgia who were doing insider trading tips on the floors of Congress, just before we shut down the economy during the worst pandemic since 1918, it's hard to satirize that kind of naked, open corruption. There's nothing genial about that. I want to turn to Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson was a genius.

He was clearly left of center. He was clearly a liberal of some sort, but he didn't rub your nose in it. It was equal opportunity, but he sometimes would be quite sharp. And I remember one to this day where he said, in news today, knowing that the Hispanic community has been quite critical of President Reagan, President Reagan invited a series of Hispanic leaders to come to the White House today for meetings, and he told them to leave their leaf blowers outside. So there's your punchline, right?

Absolutely. And it's, you know, it's a little edgy, but it's also shows you, I mean, clearly. what he's saying is that Ronald Reagan has no particular interest in being respectful of the Hispanic community. When he did that, this didn't happen very often, but when he did that, you realize. this is what comedy is about.

Comedy is transgressive. Comedy points to the foibles of the human condition. Comedy punctures our pretentiousness and our bombast and our self-love. And satire is the genre in comedy, which specializes in this. And even someone as agreeable as Johnny Carson knew how to use it, and he would not have been a successful evening monologuist if he hadn't had that capacity.

And by having that ability to punch holes in politicians or situations, it could be transformative to either make someone or break someone. A perfect example were the Watergate years. There was a study done not too long ago that looked at the results of Johnny bringing up Watergate so often in his monologues and the decline in public support for the Nixon administration. And certainly that was probably one of the first times in American history where you could track that type of behavior through the mere mention in a television show, in a monologue, in an opening statement that someone might make. And I think that was fascinating.

I don't know if you were watching much of The Tonight Show back in the early 1970s when this was going on, but it was a little bit different for Johnny, because you're right, he normally would comment on the day, an equal opportunity offender, so to speak, but didn't really veer heavily into politics. But during those Watergate years, that dominated that monologue.

That was a different era, a more streamlined television entertainment period. And so Johnny Carson had a centrality in American life that simply doesn't exist for anybody these days. And I think that's why he remains so beloved, I think, is that people really got to know him. Let me change the subject a little bit to Saturday Night Live. So I want to say two things about that.

It's had a very uneven history, as we all know. I remember the golden era, the first 10 years of it. Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, that era. And it was often very funny during that time, although it frequently fell flat. The only thing now that you can count on to be funny is the news update, Weekend Update.

If you only listen to Weekend Update, you're always going to be entertained and there will be joy in satire. The rest of the show comes and goes, and it's usually not there, in my opinion, because they're trying to do too much. So, Dan Aykroyd, he's a genius. And here's why. Because his persona was that kind of over-the-top, pompous person on the late night television ad, you know, and tonight in Washington, D.C., that kind of big voice.

And he mastered it. And Stephen Colbert was a genius at that. You know, he was at, I watch him now. He's clearly a liberal Democrat. I get a little weary of that.

You know, there's a sameness to it now. But when he was doing the Colbert show, he was portraying a kind of a Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity character. And it was much more funny. Why? Because he was projecting his satire through a voice that we knew he didn't actually agree with.

And once again, it's that displacement effect that's at the heart of good satire. When it just becomes an attack on Donald Trump, night after night after night, it gets weary. And I remember during the worst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Jay Leno did monologue after monologue. And one night I was watching, and it was about a 12 to 15 minute monologue. And there were 20 BJ jokes.

And I thought, Clinton's toast. I mean, when it gets to that point, where that's all you've got left, is that, you know, this guy, it also showed the vulgarization of American television. But, you know, Clinton deserved it, of course. But when it gets to that point where it's so predictable, and there's no projection into a different voice, a different persona,

But I think they have moments of brilliance that can impact even political elections. Gerald Ford has frequently commented, or did frequently comment, about how he thought that his portrayal on Saturday Night Live cemented him as a buffoon, or is less than capable of being the President of the United States. And that, had it not been for that, that he might very well have beaten Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. And one of the challenges I think we do face today is we are much more segmented. You mentioned Stephen Colbert, who now hosts The Late Show, after hosting The Colbert Report, a show that back in Johnny Carson's era, might have garnered multi-million viewers that were across the political spectrum.

Now a million viewers, perhaps, for a particular show, with segments being picked up on TikTok or other social media the next day. And the same for The Tonight Show, the same for Jimmy Kimmel, the same for Greg Gutfield. But the viewers of those shows are very specific and siloed. You have less of a broad swath and more of tuning into their own echo chamber. You know, one of the great things that you're doing with Listening to America and this wonderful trip is you're actually talking with people and communicating and listening to folks.

How does that help us? How does the siloing of our media and our national conversation hurt us in having that ability to understand each other better?

But the Agora in Athens was the central square and that's where things got worked out. And so everything happened in the Agora in Greece and everything happened in the Forum in Rome. And so the whole community gathered and they had to find a way, had to find a way to live together. But if you're just watching Greg Gutfield, whom I admire, I think he has some real comic talent, but you're never going to hear any serious criticism of the Republican right on his show. And when you watch Bill Maher, you're never going to hear any particular criticism of the liberal left, although he does break with the left on some questions, particularly Islam.

And I think he rightly believes that the political correctness movement has gone much too far. But this is dangerous and it's not helping us. So out here, it's a triumph of Thomas Jefferson. I should say I'm not meeting a whole cross-section of America. I'm meeting people on my travels.

I'm meeting people at convenience stores. I'm meeting people at gas stations. I'm meeting people at state campgrounds, county parks, RV sites, KOA campgrounds. I went to church last Sunday in Bar Harbor, Maine, because Steinbeck thought that's one place where you really see a little section of America. But Jefferson was right.

The American people have common sense. Most people that I've met are just weary beyond measure about the situation, and they're just tired of it. They're just turning away. But if you actually talk with them, they have good sense. They can see through hypocrisy and posture.

They're not dupes. I think that the left believes that people who are MAGA people or Trumpites are duped, part of a cult. They're smarter than this. Some of them, of course, are that, just as some on the left are part of a leftist cult. Most of the people who support Donald Trump are using him as a satirist, because he's like that crazy uncle at Thanksgiving.

who will say all that stuff that kind of you've been thinking, but you would never say. He says the outrageous things. He says the politically incorrect things. He's willing to call names. Just take one, Elizabeth Warren calling her Pocahontas.

So Elizabeth Warren took advantage of affirmative action by declaring that she had Native American blood. But the idea that a person of such privilege would identify as Native American for the purposes of advancing her own life, when you have several million Native Americans who desperately need a leg up and who are not people of privilege, that's offensive. There was a kind of a short national conversation about it, but it was Donald Trump who called her Pocahontas. It's a horrible, mean thing to say, but it also has that satirical edge, and everyone gets it. His ability to talk about people by a nickname has a certain level of genius to it.

With Ron DeSantis, sanctimonious Ron did not work for me, but when he called him Meatball Ron, now I was with him. Not that I agree with that, but Trump has it. And so Trump is a satirist, and I think that the liberals and people who care about decorum and civility.