Pragmatic Aesthetics II: Reality Keeps On Knocking

Matt Trueman in the Guardian's theatre blog has an apt criticism for some theater:

Time and again, I find myself watching a production that is a shadow of the show it wants to be. Props and furnishings stand in not for their fictional counterparts, but rather for the props and furnishings that would have been bought had the funds been available. Actors, too, are widely miscast – often the wrong age or physical build – in the hope that we'll see through them to the ideal cast and beyond to the characters. It feels unfair to name and shame, but recent symptomatic examples include an Ikea-heavy noughties living room for a play set firmly in the 90s, fancy-dress maid's uniforms worn by the staff of a glossy five-star hotel, and the fluffy halo and tulle angel-wings combo used as a travelling player's costume, despite the play's 1936 setting.

In short, far too much fringe theatre begs our leniency and forgiveness. To do so, however – to apologise in advance – is inexcusable. Theatre cannot make excuses for itself, no matter how tight its budget or how short its rehearsal process. If materials don't suit the aim, either change the materials or change the aim. Find another way.

When the artist's focus is the work of art itself, then dreaming big may seem like the right strategy. After all, the theater-going audience will, sometimes, suspend their disbelief and use their minds to give you the props, special effects, etc. that you need. They see what you're trying to do, imagine it being done, and see whether they think that would work. And when a play is in development hell, this is an ally; this is what allows a staged reading to attract people's attention to the play's potential.

In play development, the focus of the event is the play itself. And that's why play development workshops and play-readings tend to be an insider thing -- because they're invested enough in arts to want to spend their time watching a play that isn't ready yet.

But for the average audience, they want to be effected, directly. They want the artist to do their own work. And therefore, when you're creating a work for the real audience, not the insiders-there-to-help-you-make-that-work-happen, the focus should be on the effect the play has on the crowd.

If you focus on the goal of the work rather than on the work itself, you will be forced to, rather than gesturing at the solutions you wish you had, think creatively of solutions that still work towards your goal. I get it; you can't set off fireworks in your 99 seat black box. But there are a thousand ways to fill in for that act. You have to choose the one that most effectively works toward the original goal in that moment, rather than the one you think would be most effective when the work is fully realized.

There's no reason why a bare-bones production can't be effective; but if you try to evoke a form you can't fulfill, the audience will simply desire to go see a work that can fulfill its desires. When you present a work to an audience, you're trying to transmit knowledge and experience to them. But in order for that bridge to be formed, they have to trust you. You need to have legitimacy (an idea which is very important to me).

The problem with unfulfilled work is not that it asks the audience to imagine -- you can get a lot out of asking the audience to imagine. The problem is that you ask them to pretend that something is true that isn't; you're asking them to pretend your work is fulfilled. Asking the audience to accept an untruth will make the audience more skeptical of the truth of the other knowledge and experiences you're putting forward.

Jon Stewart once said that the reason he likes Obama is that whether or not they agree on everything, he gets the sense that Obama isn't bullshitting him; "He doesn't tell me that it's not raining when it's clearly raining outside."

Don't tell your audience it's not raining. Given rain, figure out how to make the rain work toward your goal.

"Bloggery"

Over at Drama, Daily, there's another defense of theater bloggers in the face of "traditional" critics and their backers. It brings me the same fatigue as Health Care Reform had in the last stretch -- there are some people who are set in their ways, and there are other people who are moving forward with the times. The snippet that's being responded to is:

“Contrary to appearances, there are no “I’s” in “critic,” there are only “eyes.” That is not as needle-pointy as it sounds. You don’t often see first person singular in professional copy. Its unbridled presence in Miss Ellis’ work is the surest indication that there is bloggery afoot.

A critic attends an event as a representative of the reader and keeps the hell out of sight. He’s on assignment, not an adventure. To interject oneself is to create competing lines of focus, one towards the stage and another back to the writer. There are several reasons someone might do this; none are legitimate.”

This view of the critic as disembodied voice reminds me of the debate around CNN's stance as the "objective" network, trying to remove their voice and instead winding up losing in the ratings among those who frequently watch the news.

Jon Stewart is not the most trusted name in news because he injects no personal narrative into his cultural criticism. He is the most trusted name in news because his bias is clear, and because his statements are easily compared to reality -- independently verifiable, and proves reliable.

People should not be trusting cultural critics because they don't use the word "I." They should trust them because they have a trustworthy history.

But anyways, this is a blog. My opinion on this subject clearly isn't a surprise, and few people reading this blog will disagree, since my readers are largely bloggers or blog afficionados.

Really, the reason I wanted to link to this post is because of the phrase "bloggery afoot." I think I'm going to use that, while stroking my moustache, whenever Scott, Isaac, Don, or 99 Seats lays a great post down. It'll be my equivalent of the bat signal.

Diversity XXI: Race in the Theater. Or rather, Race in Conversation

Not much I can say on the subject except:

Part 1 - RVCBard

Part 2 - Thomas Garvey

Part 3 - 99 Seats

There's a lot of rage out there. A few brief thoughts:

1. Thomas Garvey says: "But please, try to skip the temptation to continue the "ongoing dialogue." Let's not "dialogue" anymore - let's just bring city services to Roxbury instead, okay? Let's just pass national healthcare. Let's improve education. Let's move forward."
   
   
   Sorry - you can't stop a dialogue, unfortunately. There will always be a dialogue about race. That's just the way it goes.
   
   
2. 99 Seats says: "Did I mention fuck you? Because, if I didn't, hey, pal, fuck you."
   
   
   It's a tough conversation we're having, and I believe you're pissed. And you make some good criticisms of Mr. Garvey. Imagine how much more powerful that post would be if it wasn't lost in a sea of fucking.
   
   
3. The part of RVCBard's original post that start all of this: "In contrast, my experiences with White people have been confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting in this regard. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I always feel a kind of pressure to perform around White people. It's like I have to prove I'm worthy of their presence. It's proven very difficult to get a White person's attention, especially a White man's. It's even harder to maintain it for more than about 15 minutes. And if you're White, and you met me in person, I'm probably talking about you."
   
   Time for some carefully chosen words.
   
   Well, as someone who I guess is white (half-African doesn't count for me because it's Jewish African... anyways) sometimes it is confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting for the White People too. That's what Chris Matthews was talking about. NOT THAT I AGREE WITH WHAT HE IS SAYING. But Matthews has been told a lot that he's racist (because sometimes he is), and he doesn't want to be, so he's relieved for a moment to escape that confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting feeling.
   
   If you've read good books on this subject like Blink or a million others, you understand that there's a difference between what I usually call hard racism, where like Strom Thurmond you actually believe that one race is better than all others and it should be raised to the top, or soft racism, which can either be stupidity/ignorance like Chris Matthews or institutional and unconscious.
   
   There's a study that shows that blind auditions can greatly improve the diversity of an orchestra. This is not a proof of hard racism -- it's a proof of soft racism. The problem is that seemingly open-minded people may, inadvertently, through tricks of their own unconscious mind, wind up mis-evaluating different applicants based on their race.
   
   The point is, we White Americans want to bridge this gap. But sometimes, we're going to screw up the way we screw up at a lot of things we want to do.
   
   Why am I rambling on this way?
   
   Well, from our half of the conversation, RVCBard, here's what happens. We show up to a meeting with someone who says that this is a White Supremacist country and is clearly on her guard to smell us out: are we the White man who's playing fair, or are we in the category of racists? And we know that we're open-minded, but we also know that
   
   So we want to be on our best behavior. We're nervous, and self-conscious. Like in sex, the more nervous we get, the less pleasant the experience is, and the more likely we are to screw up. It is, as you put it, "confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting." Then it becomes a Catch-22 -- we're confused, uncomfortable, frustrated, and you're confused, uncomfortable, and frustrated, and the chances we'll try it again are low.
   
   Does this mean I agree with Thomas Garvey, then, that it's Black people's fault, and y'all need to move on?
   
   NO.
   
   Thomas Garvey thinks the way to solve the difficulty of this conversation is to avoid it. It's irritating, and as all three players have demonstrated it can lead to incredible anger. But we can't avoid the conversation. I'm not so concerned about the frustrated/uncomfortable quality of the conversation as I am by the people who get up after 15 minutes.
   
   Part of it is we like to pretend that we're not having the conversation. White people meet Black people but they don't want to be talking about race. I don't like talking about it. And nobody wants our only dialogue to be "hey I'm black you're white let's talk about that" / "hey I'm white I don't really know what you're experience is like." And yet it may be necessary.
   
   

I don't know if I made the point I was trying to make (I thought I only had a few thoughts but it turned out to take a lot of words). I'm nervous to hit "Publish Post" because, well, it's so much easier for me not to post this and for me not to weigh in on this issue.

At least I'm not the only Jew who feels this way:

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A Defense Of Snark

In the vein of Alphacat, Andrew Sullivan has posted Roger Ebert:

Snarking is cultural vandalism. I have arrived at this conclusion belatedly. I have been guilty of snarking, and of enjoying snarks. In the matter of snarking, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But it has grown entirely out of hand. It is time to put away childish things. I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule. No doubt there will always be a role for snarking, given the proper target and an appropriate venue, and I reserve the right to snark when it is deserved, as in certain movie reviews. But in general I must become more well-behaved.

I responded:

Roger Ebert is against snark. You've quoted him saying that snark is "vandalism." Well, he's close. Snark is street art. It's graffiti. It's something anyone can do, with little more than a release of pent-up air, and it transforms whatever you put it on. If you take any boring, functional building, and introduce some snark, it will look different. If you're bad at it--you're just doing it to ruin a bit of property and put your own name, to claim a mark on your target, to prove your own superiority--then it's petty vandalism. It lowers the value of the property and makes the community uglier.

But Ebert is overlooking the wonderful world of good snark. A carefully crafted bit of snark, used in just the right way, can change the world. Think of Banksy's better works; some snark beautifies the community, some carries a strong political message. This is valuable snark, and I hope Mr. Ebert recognizes its role in our society. What would Oscar Wilde have been without his snark? When Winston Churchill heard his opponent saying, "If I were your wife, I'd poison your tea," he had the good sense to snark back, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it." He didn't say, "Well that's an upsetting statement" or some boring, unsnarky rejoinder. And thank God for that! Jon Stewart out there may be snarking, but his Pulitzers attest to the fact that you can snark the day away and still be providing a valuable service.

But there is a trade-off. How does one become witty and snarky, if one doesn't practice? Jon Stewart is the first to admit, he was a terrible stand-up comedian. As a matter of fact, if you go back in the archives and look at Jon Stewart's Daily Show in 2000, there's a lot more of the bad kind of snark--the petty vandalism of cheap jokes. But he learned on the job, and nowadays he can snark with the best of them. He snarked "Crossfire" off the air, and that's a public service to us all.

As a resident of New York City, I sympathize with your desire not to see that petty vandalism. But I put forward to you that some snark artists are quite worth waiting for. To be sure, there's much more bad snark than good snark. But there's much more bad painting than good painting, much more bad television than good television, and many more bad blogs than good blogs.

Why Art Springs From Discontent

Aldous Huxley's Orwellian dystopia, Brave New World, ends with a confrontation between a group of misfits who are at odds with the controlled, perfect utopia, and the Controller who keeps the world running perfectly. Each of them, for their own reason, can't fit into the mass of chemically-happy people they see in the world around them.

[Spoiler alert, I suppose]

The Controller is a friendly, understanding gentleman, as opposed to the rulers of George Orwell's world in 1984. Rather than disciplining them, he offers them a choice: they can return to their drug-ridden happy (and boring) world, or they can accept exile to an archipelago of islands where they will be surrounded by the other discontents in a suitably "normal" world--far away from the utopia.

The difference between Orwell's world and Huxley's world is that in Huxley's world, "counter-culture" is part of the plan. There are simply two choices: the utopia, or the islands. Orwell, on the other hand, creates a world in which the counter-culture is broken, reprogrammed, tortured until it fits in.

What is interesting is how agreeable this solution is to almost everyone involved. The book says of Helmholtz Watson:

"Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. 'I should like a thoroughly bad climate,' he answered. 'I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example.'"

This is a parody of the artisan, who thrives of pain and discomfort. But of course, there is no way to act without first feeling discomfort, or discontent. Discontent is the sensation that the world is not right; that there is some different state that would be better.

And that's what the urge to create is. An artisan--a painter, say--looks at something beautiful, but is not content. They feel that there is some response that is necessary, and is not content until that response is issued (like a capacitor, building up charge and waiting for a single moment of release). In the painter's case, the responsive urge is to create; thus the painter is an artisan-creator.

Another artisan--a conservationist, say--would look at that same mountain, and would not be content either. The conservationist would imagine hikers ruining the mountain, or an industrial plant dumping waste onto it. And the conservationist would create a society to get the mountain protected, saving the beauty for ages. Thus a conservationist is an artisan-maintainer.

Artisan-creators: here I'm unifying not just the conventional artists, but everyone who creates something new rather than just maintaining what exists. A computer programmer who comes up with new algorithms and computing strategies rather than just programming the way you were taught; a research doctor rather than a GP.

I don't mean to put artisan-creators in a higher category than, say, the artisan-maintainer (a groundskeeper, a GP). But the artisan-maintainer comes from a different impulse. The artisan-maintainer must be looking at the good, and must feel that it is in danger--it is, at the heart, a conservative urge (in the non-partisan sense of 'conservative'). An artisan-maintainer in the arts, for instance, might be one of those Shakespeare scholars who are always attempting to return to the ur-Shakespeare, the original Hamlet or Macbeth. The artisan-creator, on the other hand, can be seen in one of those twisted reinterpretations. And there is no reason why these two cannot be united (I think that Patrick Stewart's Macbeth was a unification these two approaches in a productive way; bringing new things to the text without throwing out the parts of the play which work).

So the artisan-creator is motivated by discontent with absence, the desire to excise the chaff and bring in more wheat. And the artisan-maintainer is motivated by a defensive fear on behalf of what already exists--the role of the Controller in Brave New World or O'Brien in 1984; the curator of a restoration society or a documenter.

Could an artisan be motivated by contentment? I don't think so. Because if someone felt true happiness, true contentment, there would be nothing to do. We are motivated to action by our discontent.

The lawmaker (as opposed to a politician) is motivated by the desire to see a better set of laws. You cannot think that America is perfect and does not require alteration and still write new laws. Something is not operating correctly, and you move to correct it in that law.

The happier we are, the more passive we are. Because we have to change less, we are less discontented. There is no reason to take a walk because we can be happy enough in our own home; there is no reason to create because we can buy the things we'd like to create. We work because without money we'd be discontent again--unable to provide to ourselves the things which make us happy.

And yet an artisan can be created from happy circumstances. But the artisan remains discontented, even in situations that others would be happy in. An artisan-creator can be born in the "idyllic suburbs" and can spend his life creating mockingly anti-capitalist work. Something makes him discontent. And others, who are content, will become irritated with that work, because his work increases their discontent.

The artisan-creator, or the artisan-maintainer, should not have the aim to spread discontent, however. This would be rather like a satirist trying to make worse government so he'll have more to poke fun at (something Jon Stewart has been accused of, and which he disavows). But they cannot lose touch with their own discontent, or they will lose grip over what makes their art.

I forget where I saw it, but there was some playwright who wrote that underneath everything--even the comedy--there is a current of vicious anger at the way the world is, an insistent demand that the world be different. That's the discontent that fuels even the most beautiful poetry.

A Post About Naturalism

I haven't done a theater post in a while, but, this seemed important.

(From American Theater, via TheatreForte)

We have to be very clear when we talk about naturalism in the theatre. It's a stylistic choice, and it's a deadly one for the theatre. Naturalism is a style that developed in the '40, '50, and 60's, that supposedly comes from the Stanislavski approach - but that is to misunderstand Stanislavksi. Naturalism is not suited to the theatre because theatre is about communication with the audience. In the end the only question in the theatre is: How does the play become alive? In fact, theatre only exists in the mind of the audience - it does not exist on stage, or in a play. It only exists because the audience brings it alive.

I've been thinking about this recently, and I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that all natural theater is deadly theater. But I will point out the key phrase: "Theatre is about communication with the audience." The actors have to remain in conversation with the audience.

What naturalism, and current "naturalist" methods of acting do, is they try to immerse the actor in the "world" of the play. But in order for that world to be "real" (in the everyday sense of reality), the naturalist actor has to shut out the audience. And if the actor shuts out the audience, the actor is no longer in conversation with the audience--and then it becomes awkward when the actors is forced to notice the audience (pausing for a laugh, for instance).

I have a problem that happens to me sometimes when I'm acting, which is that I laugh at things which look funny on stage. Not things that look funny to me; one director said that my laughing problem is that I always have an eye, watching the stage from the audience's perspective, and therefore, when I see something that would be funny to me in the audience, I laugh. Of course, this would destroy any "realism" in the situation.

On The Daily Show, of course, sometimes Jon laughs; sometimes Stephen Colbert used to crack up. This was acceptable--partly because it was comedy, and partly because it wasn't realism. There was no pretense at them not being themselves. Because they are being more honest to themselves, they are permitted to laugh, or to cry (see Jon Stewart on 9/11).

This is part of not shutting the audience out; they have the flexibility to respond to the audience. Barack Obama understands it; that's why sometimes when someone calls out "We love you Obama!" he responds, "Love you too." The freedom to be able to break the moment and acknowledge the audience requires you to be allowed to percieve the audience; naturalism fights that.

The quotation continues:

I saw kabuki theatre in Japan, where, in a given scene, weeping takes place on stage in an extraordinarily stylized form. I was transfixed, looking along the row of faces alongside of me and watching how everyone in the audience was weeping, too. The emotion at that moment on stage was real, in the same way as when Don Giovanni is led down to hell and he sings his last act of defiance. The emotion of that moment is also real--it's heightened, it's extreme, but it's completely real. Reality in the theatre is created by actors, and it occurs only in that moment--which is why you will find actors saying "we had a good night" or "oh, tonight wasn't so good." What actors really mean is that they have found that point of communication, so you can have a great production and you can go and see it and it won't mean anything to you at all if this moment of connection between actors and audience doesn't happen. Equally, I have seen pieces of theatre that are rough and appallingly overacted or rude--and yet I've been deeply moved by them. Sometimes, even with terrible performances, actors find a way to communicate with an audience. That's why theatre can't work on video. It's an imaginative act on the part of the audience. And that is theatre's appeal, that's why it continues.

Perfect, perfect diagnosis of why theater doesn't work on video, and returns to the same point. I just say that heightened and extreme emotion is not the only way of reaching that genuine emotion; minimalism shoots for a gesture at genuine emotion (and therefore is minimized, distilled emotion), and sometimes realism hits emotion on the right level. But I agree.

Everyone thought theatre would die with the appearance of cinema, just as everyone thought painting would die with the appearance of photography. But all photography did was to liberate painting to be itself. Without photography, we would not have Picasso or Rothko. Painting would still be trying to do what photography can do much better. We need painting to do what happened on the walls of caves eons ago - to record what we deeply feel, and the complexity of what we feel and imagine. In the same way, film has liberated theatre to be itself. Without film, we wouldn't have Jacques Copeau, who gave rise to Antonin Artoud. We wouldn't have the plays of Beckett or Pinter. So in the theatre, what you do is to create the language to communicate with the audience on that night in that moment.

This is a fascinating theory, and I love it. It goes back to Plato's criticism of art in The Republic as being three removes from truth (there's the ideal of the object, then there's its "imitation" as it exists in reality, then the "imitation of imitation" of artists). The role of reproducing images, is what landscape or portrait painting was about; photography took that over, and painting got at something else. The role of reproducing narratives is film; theater gets at that something else.

Now, what that "something else" is remains up for grabs. Is it delving into the emotion of it (as this author puts forward)? Is it the relationship to the audience (as this author always puts forward)? Is it a ritual? An artifact? Those questions remain. But this is the starting point.

Conversationalism + 2008: Humor: Response to Andrew Sullivan

(You can read the post I was responding to here)

As one of these newly emerging youth voters, and also am a huge fan of shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, I'd like to expand a little about what you said when you said "The next generation is deadly serious about this country but they also manage to have fun with it. That's the Millennials' real message, it seems to me." It's something a little more serious than fun: it's humor. See, one of the cores of humor is perspective: in order for things like irony or sarcasm to work, the joke implicitly creates perspective towards the truth. If you can remember the terrible rip-snorting fun that was the 2006 Press Correspondent's Dinner with Stephen Colbert, you'll know that it was funny (or really not funny, depending on your perspective) precisely because of the truth that was imbedded in every joke.

I'd like to point out that both Barack Obama and John McCain were frequent guests on the Daily Show (McCain was at one point--and may still be--the most frequent guest of the Daily Show). They both share an ability to laugh at themselves, to poke fun, to show a little bit of perspective. As the campaign marched forward, I was afraid John McCain had lost it completely, but at that dinner recently he showed himself able to. And how did he appear at that dinner? A lot more in touch with the truth than he has been lately. Comedy requires that self-awareness that you and I both look for in a candidate, and it also means a candidate has to give up their self-importance a little in order to make a self-effacing joke. After all, Stephen Colbert's Press Correspondent's dinner was far more effective than if Jon Stewart had done it because Colbert made himself an image of mockery, and then included Bush and others into that mockery. Note that Nancy Pelosi has, on a couple occasions, warned Congressmen not to appear on the Colbert Report lest they get a mocking that they can't recover from.

I want a candidate who'll have a sense of humor. I mean, I wouldn't choose humor over healthcare, but at the same time, the ability to laugh and joke and break the ice, to see oneself clearly and have perspective on the world around us, to be able to burst self-importance and relax the walls a bit--that ability gives me a lot of faith in their ability to pass healthcare. And in this pompous age of ideology, vitriol, and hatred from both parties toward each other, maybe the future of both parties needs to have a lot more humor. Like Reagan deftly joking about his age, Bill Clinton's ability to connect with people (he hasn't seemed very funny lately, though). Even Nixon's memorable "Checkers" joke separated him from a pact of less worthy candidates. I'm not saying Nixon was a great candidate, but if you look at the way that Nixon and Mao were joking around together, you'll see why it was that it took Nixon to go to China.

Of course, in 2008, there is a limit to the sense of humor I'll take. As someone who wanted McCain to be a different candidate than he turned out to be, I feel pretty "punk'd."

Conversationlism + Pragmatic Theater + 2008: Sarah Palin And Tina Fey

I don't think I have to make a very long post here. Tina Fey's satire of Sarah Palin is a revitalizing moment for Saturday Night Live. I hope they can keep the satire up this sharp and fresh. It might strike you that Tina Fey's satire of Sarah Palin is fairly straightforward and basic. I just want to highlight the reason it's working so well.

Required Viewing

What can you notice about this side-by-side comparison? Tina Fey has discovered something about satire. Sometimes, all you have to do is present the truth in a frame of satire, and the laughs will come in themselves. It takes me back to an old South Park episode which mocked Scientology. All they had to do was tell the tale at the basis of Scientology, with a disclaimer at the bottom: This is what scientologists actually believe.

I sometimes see or hear the same thing out of Jon Stewart: "I'm not making this up!" All the satirist has to do sometimes is present the absurdity of the moment, shrug, and say, "That's reality."

To see members of the press--serious members of the press--still arguing on behalf of Sarah Palin as a serious candidate is ludicrous. And all you have to do is introduce perspective. Sometimes that's all that comedy has to be: perspective.

One Example 1

Example 2

Those two examples, I think, exemplify Jon Stewart's role as the satirist providing perspective.

Politics: Conversations about Politics

In my last post, I discussed the way in which John Cage converses with a commercial audience, as a model of how artists should converse with popular culture and wider audiences. The idea of using the rules of polite conversation as a model for how to deal with culture has been growing in my mind, and I can trace at least part of it back to a very influential source of mine: Jon Stewart.

Although I originally came to Jon Stewart because of the jokes and the commentary, the interview portion of the show has become stronger and stronger the longer I've watched. Part of this has been the increasing number of fascinating and important guests. When I first watched, it was largely actors and unknown authors; but in 2004 John Edwards announced his candidacy for the Presidency on the Daily Show, and the show has been graced by Senators (Obama, Clinton, Specter, Santorum, Lieberman, etc.), former Bush Administration members (Fleischer, McClellan, Snow, Ashcroft, Powell, etc.), current world leaders (Musharraf, Fox, Morales), top-tier journalists (Geraldo, O'Reilly, Matthews, Williams, Russert, Rather, etc.) and many more.

What was most fascinating to me was the high level of discourse. One of the moments which solidified Jon Stewart's transition from 'merely' a comedian into a powerful social force was his memorable appearance on Crossfire. He appealed to hosts Tucker Carleson and Paul Begala to stop hurting America and bring a dignified level of discourse to the realm of politics. It was clear that this was not what they had in mind: the hosts (in Begala's defense, mostly Carleson) dismissed his concerns and tried to make the Daily Show look silly and discredit Stewart's concerns.

The state of discourse on the network news is fairly poor. An incident springs to mind where Robert Novak told James Carville that everything he had to say was bullshit, and got up and walked off the set. This is a slightly extreme example of a fairly onerous way of speaking which is more typified by Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity's notoriously rude interviews. ("Cut his mic!" the cliche goes...). So when I really started to watch Jon Stewart interface with politicians or journalists he disagreed with, I was incredibly impressed by his candor and polite discussion.

The interview which blew my mind the most was the one appended to the end of this post; that of Senator Rick Santorum. To begin with: let me say that I have a strong dislike of the policies and agenda of Rick Santorum, and was very happy to see him defeated in the 2006 Midterm Election. But I do have to respect that although in other public appearances, where he can be inflammatory and offensive, here he does earnestly complement the mode of discussion which Jon Stewart equally exemplifies.

1. Polite Greetings: The interview begins with Jon Stewart's usual greeting: "Thank you very much for coming here tonight." And that greeting appears to be genuine. This is pretty straightforward, human tactic, but you'd be surprised how often the simple pleasantries are abandoned when vitriol and acerbicism is much easier to sell.
   
2. Common Ground: Then Jon Stewart tackles an important place to begin: that most people were surprised that Santorum would be the guest, and there was a general assumption that they might not agree on a lot of things. He then very directly proceeds to lay some common ground. The tone is, of course, whimsical ("I believe ice cream is a delicious treat, but too much will spoil the appetite"), but it does serve an interesting purpose: it gets the audience (which, as Santorum notes, had booed him before he came on) to cheer in agreement with him. Santorum may hold negative beliefs about gays, but at least we all believe in the sanctity of ice cream. He returns to this point later, in a more serious way, when he agrees with Santorum's point of "character equals virtue"--even though this is a set-up for a point of contention (that sexuality does not equal character). It seems simple, but it creates a very human mode of discussion, rather than discussions between People as symbols, which is what a lot of politics becomes.
   
3. Acknowledge Complexity: Stewart begins talking about the fervor behind certain religous groups regarding positions such as abortion. After he mentions abortion, however, he is quick to say that "other than the ultimate extreme positions at both ends, that's a really difficult issue, a real moral quandry, and I think a lot of people understand that." This is another moment where Santorum gets to nod along with Stewart, proving to the audience that he is not the frothy-mouthed bible-thumping wacko that he can appear to be in the media. And it sets the tone for a debate in which the legitimacy of many different opinions and the inability to objectively establish one morally, absolutely correct position is important. He does this a moment later when, with his first question of criticism, he says, "Or am I mistaking your take on it?" which gives Santorum room to speak for himself, rather than responding to Stewart's impressions of Santorum.
   
4. Talk Impersonally: There isn't a point at which it is possible to isolate this, but at no point does Stewart or Santorum discuss each other or themselves (except in the adult manner in which Santorum's background in psychology is brought to play).
5. Recognizing the impasse: This is the biggest point for me. The interview truly becomes memorable and defining when, just before the commercial break, Stewart says: "Ultimately you end up getting to this point, it's like this crazy stopping point. Literally, like, we can't get any further. I don't think you're a bad dude, I don't think I'm a bad dude, but I literally can't convince you..." and then goes on to outline his own opinion. Can you imagine O'Reilly acknowledging that sort of divide between him and Nancy Pelosi? It is an incredibly mature move to make, and it helps them continue the discussion even when both have made their points.
   

What neither of them say, but I think both of them are aware, is that the point of a debate is not to convince the other person they're wrong. It is, in the end, to educate the observers of both sides of the issue. Although I still don't agree with former Senator Santorum, I can understand the position a lot more clearly, and I can see what a solution to the debate would have to address. When Santorum discusses that government should be designed around the ideal, I can understand why someone would believe that--although I disagree (I think the strength of the Constitution is its pragmaticism) it lends me an insight into a view that I previously couldn't fathom. And this is not just because of the way that Santorum spoke; it is also because of Stewart's permission for Santorum to take his time, to explain himself, and the ways in which Stewart pressed against those explanations without attacking them. Stewart in turn led me to understanding of a position that I agree with that I hadn't understood.

Can you imagine if that was the level of discussion we had everywhere?