It's Not Really About Colbert and Kimmel

It's not even about sides.

Colbert and Kimmel will now likely have bigger audiences than ever. But if you don’t like them, I guess you can be happy they no longer have the increasingly popular platform of…broadcast network TV…?

I don’t have big personal stakes in who gets to have late night shows. I don’t even know that these are issues of free speech. ABC and CBS are part of massive conglomerates who fear losing a penny of profit over all else.

Perhaps that’s the kind of culture late-stage capitalism creates. Entertainment, art, whatever you want to call it, isn’t mediated by tastes or norms or political insights or even fidelity to things we used to agree on. It’s mediated and moderated by the almighty buck.

The same thing is happening in other spheres, too. Academia. Medicine. Politics.

I suppose there are people who will take the news about Kimmel as some kind of win. Imagine if he had suggested euthanizing homeless people against their will? No one with a national platform would ever say something like that, right?

And if they did there would be dire consequences, right?

If you’re reading this post and thinking it’s just some sort of screed for one side over the other I’m afraid you’ve missed the point.

It’s highly suspect that Kimmel is being punished for comments that are nowhere near as incendiary as Brian Kilmeade’s. But our vulnerable populations don’t have huge platforms. They don’t own affiliate networks. They don’t donate to election cycles.

But the people who care about them do at least some of these things.

Solutions will not come from winning arguments on Facebook or on late night television. But sometimes things just seem so incredibly stupid that we come here to vent, we come here to ask questions we come here to try to process the incongruity, the cognitive dissonance, the transparent unfairness. The misaligned priorities, the actions that don’t square with words.

But the antibodies we need? Those will probably only be developed in community and only if community includes people who don’t all look, speak, think alike; who don’t have all the same backgrounds and the same socioeconomic stories.

I don’t care who does or doesn’t have a talk show. I don’t care who wins an argument on Facebook or in general.

I do care that we stop getting rewarded with dopamine hits and that massive corporations stop getting rewarded with ad revenue in this death spiral race to the bottom.

And by the way, I do not think in terms of sides. I think about ideas and I think that some sets of ideas are better than others. Some sets of ideas are likely to produce a better, safer, healthier society. Other sets of ideas are likely to do the opposite.

As long as people are marginalized, pushed aside, treated differently for no justifiable reason I will continue to be pissed. I will continue to think about what it meant for Jesus to overturn a marketplace that had been erected in what was supposed to be a house of prayer. I will continue to think about what John Steinbeck meant when he said now that you don’t have to be perfect you’re free to be good, or about what Debs said about as long as there’s a lower class I am in it, or about what Carl Sandburg said about any of number of things, or what MLK said or what Howard Thurman said and above all about what the holy spirit is saying right now.

That’s it, that’s all, that’s enough.