Jon Stewart: Gadfly

As I might have mentioned before, Socrates used to pass the time by accosting important and powerful people in the public square and annoying the hell out of them by asking them exactly what they meant when they spoke about things like justice, courage, honor, etc. Typically, the important person would start in on some explanation or another until they faltered under Socrates' questioning and contradicted themselves, thus revealing in humiliating fashion which bodily orifice they had been talking out of all along.

Predictably, this got Socrates executed. During the trial, though, he tried to explain to the jury why someone like him was beneficial to the state by likening himself to a gadfly that keeps a sleepy horse active and alert:

For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

Today in America, 2400 years or so later, the national gadfly remains an important position and one that is vital to the health of the state. I imagine that the press fancies itself in this role, holding leaders accountable and asking them the hard questions, but I think for some time now the press has been symbiotically subsumed into the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash of Washington, and has fully bought in to its Orwellian obfuscations of language and contrived narratives.

And so the gadfly role has been filled, I think, by someone truly outside the Washington establishment: Jon Stewart. Nobody else gets down to the Socratic nuts and bolts of rigorously exposing blatant contradictions or asking those in power what they mean when they say X. For example, during the Republican convention we heard a lot about Sarah Palin's "small town values"--but only the Daily Show had the good idea of asking people what these values were:



And could Karl Rove--who is perhaps the best exemplar of the revolving-door relationship between the political establishment and the punditry--have been eviscerated like this by anyone other than Stewart?



It's a shame that the Daily Show has been on hiatus during this pig/lipstick flap. The response to it probably would have been pretty entertaining--and pretty good for the country.