They both look somewhat alike.... (Hint: Both have too much weight around the waist...)
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Me and Buddha Statue at Kamakura
They both look somewhat alike.... (Hint: Both have too much weight around the waist...)
Friday, June 22, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Rise of the New Atheists
This is an article on the New Atheist Movement in America
The original article is found here.
=====================================================================================
Rise of the New Atheists
By Ronald Aronson, The Nation. Posted June 16, 2007.
Ronald Aronson is the author of The Dialectics of Disaster, After Marxism and Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It. His latest book is Living Without God, to be published next year by Counterpoint. He teaches at Wayne State University.
An increasingly outspoken community of atheists and agnostics is getting fed up with being marginalized, ignored and insulted.
What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a chance on a gutsy, hyperbolic and idiosyncratic attack on religion by a graduate student in neuroscience has grown into a remarkable intellectual wave. No fewer than five books by the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller lists in the past two years -- Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and now Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great. The scandalized media have both attacked and inflated the phenomenon. After the New York Times Book Review, for example, ran a thoughtful review of Harris and then a negative front-page review of Dawkins, the daily paper published two weak op-ed attacks on the writers and a vapid article on how atheists celebrate Christmas, followed by tongue-in-cheek admiration in the Book Review for Hitchens's ability to promote his career by saying the unexpected.
Despite such dubious blessings, the four have become must-read writers. The most remarkable fact is not their books themselves -- blunt, no-holds-barred attacks on religion in different registers -- but that they have succeeded in reaching mainstream readers and in becoming bestsellers. Is this because Americans are beginning to get fed up with the religiosity of the past several years? It would be comforting if we could explain this as a cultural signal of the end of the right-wing/evangelical ascendancy. Such speculations are probably wishful thinking -- book buyers are such a small slice of the population that few sociologists would stake their careers on claiming that book buyers' preferences reflect anything like a national mood.
The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something significant among their audience. In the past generation in the United States, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid minority -- almost voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided, both warned against and ignored. As Susan Jacoby pointed out in her book Freethinkers, it is symptomatic of the situation that the most dramatic presidential address in generations took place in the National Cathedral three days after September 11, 2001, so filled with religious language that it sounded like a sermon. It was delivered by a President flanked by Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives, a model of religious inclusiveness, without anyone standing alongside them representing the tens of millions of nonreligious Americans. At this most important collective moment in our recent history, it was as if they did not exist. This is what the polls are telling us: Virtually everyone in America believes in God.
We know how zealously the conservative Christian denominations have politicized themselves in the past generation, how the GOP has harnessed this energy by embracing their demands -- opposing stem-cell research, gay marriage and abortion rights, championing government aid to religious schools and faith-based social programs -- and by appointing sympathetic judges. So effectively have they framed the issues that, according to the Pew Research Center's 2006 report on religion and public life, fully 69 percent of Americans believe that liberals have "gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government."
We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don't believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about religion. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults -- one in seven Americans -- declare themselves to be without religion. The more recent Baylor Religion Survey ("American Piety in the 21st Century") of more than 1,700 people, which bills itself as "the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted," calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair enough. But Baylor's own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons.
It counts anyone who believes in a "higher power" but not God as believing in God -- casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not believe in "anything beyond the physical world," leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists. Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme being.
A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs, namely, the "social desirability effect," in which respondents are reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm. What happens when questions are framed to overcome this distortion? The FT/H poll tried to counteract it by allowing space not only for the customary "Not sure" but also for "Would prefer not to say" -- and 6 percent of Americans chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans.
All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists -- Americans as a whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted. After all, unbelievers are concentrated at the higher end of the educational scale -- a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high school education or less). The percentage rises among professors and then again among professors at research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.
But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to "breaking the spell" cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming a situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to American life but exempted from serious discussion.
This does not make for restraint. Harris displays brash self-confidence, Hitchens and Dawkins angry intellectual bite and Dennett an inexhaustible theoretical energy and range of inquiry. Harris excoriates religious moderates, accusing them of providing cover for fundamentalists at home and abroad by refusing to contest the extremists' premises -- because they share them. More upbeat, Dennett is devoted to creating the intellectual conditions for future discussions, in which religion will be treated as just another "natural" phenomenon and accordingly subjected to critical scrutiny. Dawkins bulldozes his way through every major argument for religious belief, and a great many minor ones. And Hitchens endlessly catalogues religion's crimes and absurdities. Each man is at war, writing as if no others had preceded him, and with a passion that can only be described as political.
Above all, each sees himself as breaking a taboo. This explains not only the vigor and urgency of these books, their mainstream character and their publishing success but also the common refrain in reviews that they have "gone too far." Of course they have, because their many faults are often inseparable from their strengths. Self-indulgence is their common flaw: Dennett and Dawkins might have considered their readers more and disciplined their own need to follow out every line of thought, while Harris is so full of his point of view that he, like Hitchens, is unable to consider faith as anything but stupid. They show little understanding of religion or interest in it [see Daniel Lazare, "Among the Disbelievers," May 28]. Still, I am surprised by the hostility and bemusement expressed toward them by their fellow travelers in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The London Review of Books. In attacking religion the four have been breaking the taboo against talking about it seriously, and they may be forgiven for not being calmer, more expert or more measured. Doing battle with what they see as the most pervasive and bothersome phenomenon in American life during the past generation, Harris, Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens deserve praise for their courage and tenacity in shattering its spell.
Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? I hope they have roused a significant portion of America from its timidity. But to what end? Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions. Enlightenment optimism once supplied unbelievers with hope for a better world, whether this was based on Marxism, science, education or democracy. After Progress, after Marxism, is it any wonder atheism fell on hard times? Restoring secular confidence will take much positive work as well as the fierce attacks on religion by our atheist champions. On a societal level, as Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris point out in Sacred and Secular, living without God requires creating conditions in which people are free from the kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all human societies until the advent of Europe's postindustrial welfare states. Markedly more religious than any of them, the United States provides a life that is far more unequal and far more insecure.
The surprising response to the New Atheist offensive should thus inspire us to think politically as well as philosophically. As a first step this demands creating a coalition between unbelievers and their natural allies, secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to God, or belong to a church and attend services but are "tacit atheists," living day in and day out with only token reference to God. And I also include the many believers who accept the principle of America as a secular society. These include members of the liberal Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice in accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as the National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired by Genesis while not needing to take it in "literal, factual terms." Many of these turned up in the most significant finding of the Baylor survey, namely that more than one in four American "believers" does not mean by this a personal God at all but a distant God who has little or nothing to do with the world or themselves. This sounds very much like the deist God of "unbelievers" Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
These believers, along with those who think of themselves as "spiritual," as well as professed unbelievers, help to explain why according to the Pew study so many Americans -- 32 percent -- want less religious influence on government. Twenty-four percent say that President Bush talks too much about his religious faith and prayer, and 28 percent deny that the United States is a Christian nation. Most dramatically, a whopping 49 percent believe that Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious values on the country." This, then, is an unreported secret of American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has come to mark our society.
Until now the most vocal left-of-center response to the Christian right, for example by Sojourners, has been to call for more religion in politics, not less. In early June the group organized a nationally televised forum at which John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton testified to their faith, talking about the "hand of God" (Edwards), forgiveness (Obama) and prayer (Clinton). Few loud-and-clear voices have been agitating in the mainstream on behalf of the separation of church and state, for secular and public education, or demanding less rather than more political discussion of religion. Yet tens of millions of Americans worry about such things.
Whether most of them continue to believe in God matters much less than that they are comfortable with secular knowledge and America's secular Constitution. Barry Lynn, for example, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is a Protestant minister. Although Harris and Dawkins castigate all believers for sharing the premises of conservative Christians, the fact is that many believers could easily be working with out-and-out atheists and agnostics on key issues.
Such a coalition should take the offensive on behalf of American constitutional promises of a secular society, increasingly under threat from Bush's Supreme Court appointments. It will gain support in unexpected places: Judge John Jones III, a Bush appointee, delivered a devastating blow to the forces behind "intelligent design" in his December 2005 decision in the Dover School Board case. The first half of his impressive decision contains a crystal-clear reflection on what science is and why intelligent design, a refurbished form of creationism, is religion, not science. The second half reads like a whodunit, revealing how a minority on the school board conspired to impose intelligent design on the district. It should be a rallying point for the nearly half of all Americans who are disturbed by right-wing religious attempts to impose their faith on the rest of us. An immediate goal should be a call for the publication and widest possible distribution of the Dover decision. It could become another bestseller -- by a conservative judge no less! -- and a text for civics, current events, history, law and basic science classes.
A second goal of such a coalition might be a campaign to reorient American thinking about atheists and atheism. In recent polls, far more respondents have declared themselves willing to vote for a woman or African-American for President than for an atheist -- atheists are more unpopular than gays. Television news viewers are encouraged to nod in agreement with such ageless gibes as "There are no atheists in foxholes" without seeing just how nasty they are. This obnoxious remark, by Katie Couric on NBC's Today show, drew a few complaints and letters, but no wider protests or apology. A coalition determined to widen the range of socially acceptable belief could make a significant difference on such issues.
A broad secular coalition could also demand more nuanced discussion of the range of belief and unbelief in America today. Rather than consciously or unconsciously promoting religious belief, public opinion research should try to register a full range of beliefs, including the interesting and perplexing ways in which people live secular as well as religious lives and their sometimes contradictory combinations. These are rejected by Harris, Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens, and ignored by the media and mainstream politicians.
Finally, such an alliance could become one place where Dennett's goal of discussing religion openly and critically -- as well as atheism and agnosticism -- could begin to be realized. A number of questions might be explored: What, for example, is the common ground and what are the differences between believers and unbelievers? And -- I save for last the touchiest question of all -- shouldn't all Americans be instructed in the great religious and secular traditions, as well as their greatest books? After all, achieving literacy in both religion and secularism might allow us to discuss them more intelligently.
The original article is found here.
=====================================================================================
Rise of the New Atheists
By Ronald Aronson, The Nation. Posted June 16, 2007.
Ronald Aronson is the author of The Dialectics of Disaster, After Marxism and Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It. His latest book is Living Without God, to be published next year by Counterpoint. He teaches at Wayne State University.
An increasingly outspoken community of atheists and agnostics is getting fed up with being marginalized, ignored and insulted.
What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a chance on a gutsy, hyperbolic and idiosyncratic attack on religion by a graduate student in neuroscience has grown into a remarkable intellectual wave. No fewer than five books by the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller lists in the past two years -- Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and now Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great. The scandalized media have both attacked and inflated the phenomenon. After the New York Times Book Review, for example, ran a thoughtful review of Harris and then a negative front-page review of Dawkins, the daily paper published two weak op-ed attacks on the writers and a vapid article on how atheists celebrate Christmas, followed by tongue-in-cheek admiration in the Book Review for Hitchens's ability to promote his career by saying the unexpected.
Despite such dubious blessings, the four have become must-read writers. The most remarkable fact is not their books themselves -- blunt, no-holds-barred attacks on religion in different registers -- but that they have succeeded in reaching mainstream readers and in becoming bestsellers. Is this because Americans are beginning to get fed up with the religiosity of the past several years? It would be comforting if we could explain this as a cultural signal of the end of the right-wing/evangelical ascendancy. Such speculations are probably wishful thinking -- book buyers are such a small slice of the population that few sociologists would stake their careers on claiming that book buyers' preferences reflect anything like a national mood.
The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something significant among their audience. In the past generation in the United States, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid minority -- almost voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided, both warned against and ignored. As Susan Jacoby pointed out in her book Freethinkers, it is symptomatic of the situation that the most dramatic presidential address in generations took place in the National Cathedral three days after September 11, 2001, so filled with religious language that it sounded like a sermon. It was delivered by a President flanked by Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives, a model of religious inclusiveness, without anyone standing alongside them representing the tens of millions of nonreligious Americans. At this most important collective moment in our recent history, it was as if they did not exist. This is what the polls are telling us: Virtually everyone in America believes in God.
We know how zealously the conservative Christian denominations have politicized themselves in the past generation, how the GOP has harnessed this energy by embracing their demands -- opposing stem-cell research, gay marriage and abortion rights, championing government aid to religious schools and faith-based social programs -- and by appointing sympathetic judges. So effectively have they framed the issues that, according to the Pew Research Center's 2006 report on religion and public life, fully 69 percent of Americans believe that liberals have "gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government."
We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don't believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about religion. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults -- one in seven Americans -- declare themselves to be without religion. The more recent Baylor Religion Survey ("American Piety in the 21st Century") of more than 1,700 people, which bills itself as "the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted," calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair enough. But Baylor's own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons.
It counts anyone who believes in a "higher power" but not God as believing in God -- casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not believe in "anything beyond the physical world," leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists. Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme being.
A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs, namely, the "social desirability effect," in which respondents are reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm. What happens when questions are framed to overcome this distortion? The FT/H poll tried to counteract it by allowing space not only for the customary "Not sure" but also for "Would prefer not to say" -- and 6 percent of Americans chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans.
All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists -- Americans as a whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted. After all, unbelievers are concentrated at the higher end of the educational scale -- a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high school education or less). The percentage rises among professors and then again among professors at research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.
But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to "breaking the spell" cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming a situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to American life but exempted from serious discussion.
This does not make for restraint. Harris displays brash self-confidence, Hitchens and Dawkins angry intellectual bite and Dennett an inexhaustible theoretical energy and range of inquiry. Harris excoriates religious moderates, accusing them of providing cover for fundamentalists at home and abroad by refusing to contest the extremists' premises -- because they share them. More upbeat, Dennett is devoted to creating the intellectual conditions for future discussions, in which religion will be treated as just another "natural" phenomenon and accordingly subjected to critical scrutiny. Dawkins bulldozes his way through every major argument for religious belief, and a great many minor ones. And Hitchens endlessly catalogues religion's crimes and absurdities. Each man is at war, writing as if no others had preceded him, and with a passion that can only be described as political.
Above all, each sees himself as breaking a taboo. This explains not only the vigor and urgency of these books, their mainstream character and their publishing success but also the common refrain in reviews that they have "gone too far." Of course they have, because their many faults are often inseparable from their strengths. Self-indulgence is their common flaw: Dennett and Dawkins might have considered their readers more and disciplined their own need to follow out every line of thought, while Harris is so full of his point of view that he, like Hitchens, is unable to consider faith as anything but stupid. They show little understanding of religion or interest in it [see Daniel Lazare, "Among the Disbelievers," May 28]. Still, I am surprised by the hostility and bemusement expressed toward them by their fellow travelers in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The London Review of Books. In attacking religion the four have been breaking the taboo against talking about it seriously, and they may be forgiven for not being calmer, more expert or more measured. Doing battle with what they see as the most pervasive and bothersome phenomenon in American life during the past generation, Harris, Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens deserve praise for their courage and tenacity in shattering its spell.
Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? I hope they have roused a significant portion of America from its timidity. But to what end? Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions. Enlightenment optimism once supplied unbelievers with hope for a better world, whether this was based on Marxism, science, education or democracy. After Progress, after Marxism, is it any wonder atheism fell on hard times? Restoring secular confidence will take much positive work as well as the fierce attacks on religion by our atheist champions. On a societal level, as Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris point out in Sacred and Secular, living without God requires creating conditions in which people are free from the kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all human societies until the advent of Europe's postindustrial welfare states. Markedly more religious than any of them, the United States provides a life that is far more unequal and far more insecure.
The surprising response to the New Atheist offensive should thus inspire us to think politically as well as philosophically. As a first step this demands creating a coalition between unbelievers and their natural allies, secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to God, or belong to a church and attend services but are "tacit atheists," living day in and day out with only token reference to God. And I also include the many believers who accept the principle of America as a secular society. These include members of the liberal Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice in accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as the National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired by Genesis while not needing to take it in "literal, factual terms." Many of these turned up in the most significant finding of the Baylor survey, namely that more than one in four American "believers" does not mean by this a personal God at all but a distant God who has little or nothing to do with the world or themselves. This sounds very much like the deist God of "unbelievers" Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
These believers, along with those who think of themselves as "spiritual," as well as professed unbelievers, help to explain why according to the Pew study so many Americans -- 32 percent -- want less religious influence on government. Twenty-four percent say that President Bush talks too much about his religious faith and prayer, and 28 percent deny that the United States is a Christian nation. Most dramatically, a whopping 49 percent believe that Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious values on the country." This, then, is an unreported secret of American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has come to mark our society.
Until now the most vocal left-of-center response to the Christian right, for example by Sojourners, has been to call for more religion in politics, not less. In early June the group organized a nationally televised forum at which John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton testified to their faith, talking about the "hand of God" (Edwards), forgiveness (Obama) and prayer (Clinton). Few loud-and-clear voices have been agitating in the mainstream on behalf of the separation of church and state, for secular and public education, or demanding less rather than more political discussion of religion. Yet tens of millions of Americans worry about such things.
Whether most of them continue to believe in God matters much less than that they are comfortable with secular knowledge and America's secular Constitution. Barry Lynn, for example, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is a Protestant minister. Although Harris and Dawkins castigate all believers for sharing the premises of conservative Christians, the fact is that many believers could easily be working with out-and-out atheists and agnostics on key issues.
Such a coalition should take the offensive on behalf of American constitutional promises of a secular society, increasingly under threat from Bush's Supreme Court appointments. It will gain support in unexpected places: Judge John Jones III, a Bush appointee, delivered a devastating blow to the forces behind "intelligent design" in his December 2005 decision in the Dover School Board case. The first half of his impressive decision contains a crystal-clear reflection on what science is and why intelligent design, a refurbished form of creationism, is religion, not science. The second half reads like a whodunit, revealing how a minority on the school board conspired to impose intelligent design on the district. It should be a rallying point for the nearly half of all Americans who are disturbed by right-wing religious attempts to impose their faith on the rest of us. An immediate goal should be a call for the publication and widest possible distribution of the Dover decision. It could become another bestseller -- by a conservative judge no less! -- and a text for civics, current events, history, law and basic science classes.
A second goal of such a coalition might be a campaign to reorient American thinking about atheists and atheism. In recent polls, far more respondents have declared themselves willing to vote for a woman or African-American for President than for an atheist -- atheists are more unpopular than gays. Television news viewers are encouraged to nod in agreement with such ageless gibes as "There are no atheists in foxholes" without seeing just how nasty they are. This obnoxious remark, by Katie Couric on NBC's Today show, drew a few complaints and letters, but no wider protests or apology. A coalition determined to widen the range of socially acceptable belief could make a significant difference on such issues.
A broad secular coalition could also demand more nuanced discussion of the range of belief and unbelief in America today. Rather than consciously or unconsciously promoting religious belief, public opinion research should try to register a full range of beliefs, including the interesting and perplexing ways in which people live secular as well as religious lives and their sometimes contradictory combinations. These are rejected by Harris, Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens, and ignored by the media and mainstream politicians.
Finally, such an alliance could become one place where Dennett's goal of discussing religion openly and critically -- as well as atheism and agnosticism -- could begin to be realized. A number of questions might be explored: What, for example, is the common ground and what are the differences between believers and unbelievers? And -- I save for last the touchiest question of all -- shouldn't all Americans be instructed in the great religious and secular traditions, as well as their greatest books? After all, achieving literacy in both religion and secularism might allow us to discuss them more intelligently.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
A Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert Interview On Rolling Stones
Two of my favorite comedians interviewed a while back on Rolling Stones Magazine...
This is the original link.
==================================================================
America's Anchors
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert faked it until they made it. Now they may truly be the most trusted names in news
By MAUREEN DOWD
I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen. No doubt they would try to impress me with some weighty discussion about world affairs or the midterm elections. But when I walked into Colbert's office at The Colbert Report, just off Tenth Avenue in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, the two barely acknowledged me. Stewart, rumpled in a gray tee over a long-sleeved shirt, khaki cargo pants, black Timberland boots and a Mets cap, was sprawled in a chair with takeout coffee. Colbert, neat in a long-sleeved navy shirt, blue pants and wire-rimmed glasses, was sitting up straight next to him, holding a paper plate of fruit. They were already deep in a weighty discussion.
COLBERT: If honeydew is ripe, I think it's the king of melons.
STEWART: Nah, I think given the choice of melons . . .
COLBERT: You'd go cantaloupe.
STEWART: Oh, I don't think there's any question. The cantaloupe is far superior to the honeydew.
COLBERT: No, every night I hunt for the honeydew.
STEWART: The honeydew is almost a coconut; it's barely even a melon. I think you're making a huge mistake.
COLBERT: No, I don't care for it.
STEWART [in a stentorian announcer's voice]: Colbert and Stewart came to blows over the melon.
At last, they turn their attention to me. Their gazes are not, as I'd expected, full of respect. They regard with amused disdain the old-fashioned, phone-book-size Radio Shack tape recorder I'd put on the floor between them.
"I had one like that in 1973,'' Colbert notes.
"I thought it was a chaise,'' Stewart says. ?I was going to lie down on it. I suppose there are two gerbils in there slowly paddling, and that's moving the wheel.'' He asks if I also brought a calligrapher.
Other couples may disappoint. Jen and Vince. Paris and Nicole. Cheney and Rummy. But Stewart and Colbert have soared to hilarious new heights puncturing the Bush administration's faux reality, with Stewart as the droll anchor and Colbert as the puffed-up Bill O'Reilly-style bloviator. While real network news withers, Stewart's show has become the hot destination for anyone who wants to sell books or seem hip, from presidential candidates to military dictators. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf arrived at the Daily Show studio with bomb-sniffing dogs and a bulletproof facade for the anchor desk. For a Strong Man, Stewart said, he was "good people." At the Emmys, Colbert greeted the Hollywood audience as "godless Sodomites,'' and at the White House Correspondents Dinner, he proclaimed, standing beside the president, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." He hawks his own Formula 401 sperm on his show -- "the more Stephen Colberts in the world, the better," he assured me -- including a Spanish version, "para chicas''; wants Congress to build a wall and moat with flames, fireproof crocodiles, predator drones and machine-gun nests to keep out immigrants; and has a running "Dead to Me" list that includes New York intellectuals, the cast of Friends and bow-tie pasta. "I'm not a fan of facts,'' he boasts. "Facts can change all the time, but my opinion will never change." Truthiness, a word he made up just before going on air, has been hailed by New York magazine as "the summarizing concept of our age."
"Just understand," Colbert sometimes warns guests before the show, "I'm going to be a jerk out there."
They're the Cronkite and Murrow for an ironic millennium ? ?Stewart/Colbert '08? T-shirts are popping up all over the place. "Nothing says 'I'm ashamed of you, my government' more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08,' '' Stewart told New Yorker editor David Remnick at the magazine's fall cultural festival. When Colbert traveled recently to his alma mater, Northwestern University, to be the grand marshal at the school's homecoming parade, he noticed ?Colbert/Obama '08? T-shirts throughout the crowd. ("I can't tell Jon I'm dropping him to go with Barack,'' Colbert tells me later. "Maybe he'll read it in this article.")
Ben Karlin, Stewart's thirty-five-year-old production partner who oversees both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, says that "the biggest mistake people make is thinking that Jon and Stephen sit down before every show and say, 'OK, how are we going to change the world?' or any bullshit like that. They both really just want to get a laugh." Though the shows clearly have a liberal bent, Stewart claims that they are emotional but apolitical. He does not, however, hide his disdain for the media. At a New York Times lunch, when Stewart was asked how his show did such a good job digging up clips catching the president and other officials contradicting themselves, the comedian shot back, "A clerk and a video machine." A recent Indiana University study found that The Daily Show was just as substantive as network television news during the 2004 election. I'm not surprised that young people who watch it are well- informed. I read about ten newspapers a day and three newsmagazines a week, and I have my TV tuned to cable news all day, and I still find myself taking notes from The Daily Show.
Colbert, 42, is a meticulous sprite, a grown-up altar boy who still spouts Latin. "He's new to being the Man,'' Karlin says. "He's in that first blush of fame that's thrilling. Jon is over it.'' Colbert somehow grew up an optimist, even though, as the youngest of eleven children in an Irish-Catholic family from Charleston, South Carolina, he lost his father (a doctor) and his two oldest brothers in a plane crash on September 11th, 1974, when he was ten, and his hearing in his right ear from a childhood tumor. "His humor is an accumulation of the eccentricities, mannerisms and jokes of his ten older brothers and sisters, a medley that trickled down,'' says one Colbert staffer. He trained in serious acting and Second City improv and says his politics are a mix of liberal and conservative.
"Stephen is a happy man,'' Karlin says. "He goes home to a lovely wife in New Jersey with a new dog and three beautiful children. He teaches Sunday school and knows his way around the kitchen. And then he has this deviously brilliant comedic mind."
Stewart, 43, is an intense Manhattan smarty-pants who has the style and air of a man perpetually slouching toward adulthood. He's contentedly married with two small kids, but he still casts himself as repressed and anti-social. Stewart, whose parents went through a difficult divorce when he was ten, grew up in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, where he said he was bullied as a rare Jewish kid in his neighborhood. "Jon is driven by the forces of guilt and shame and fear of being on the outside that gives Jews their comic angst,'' Karlin says. "He's self-trained in stand-up. He learned in the wretched comedy clubs of New York.''
The two satirists, interviewed together and separately, are so in sync they sometimes say the same word at the same time, play off each other's pauses or slip in a deft punch line for the other. Stewart cracks up at every riff Colbert does. Colbert, his writers say, still has a bit of hero worship for Stewart, and, as a longtime little brother in his own big family, naturally falls into that role with Stewart.
Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the Odd Couple do not socialize outside the office. "In theory, I think Jon would be excellent company,'' Colbert says. "I just have nothing to back it up."
A fake news show, "The Daily Show," spawned a fake commentator, Colbert, who makes his own fake reality defending the fake reality of a real president, and has government officials on who know the joke but are still willing to be mocked by someone fake. Your shows are like mirrors within mirrors, using a cycle of fakery to get to the truth. You've tapped into a sense in society that nothing, from reality shows to Bushworld, is real anymore. Do you guys ever get confused by your hall of mirrors?
STEWART: I didn't know we were going to have to be high to do this interview.
COLBERT: I think we see it less as a hall of mirrors and more as one of those slenderizing mirrors you can buy that you see in catalogs that make you feel good about yourself before you go out the door.
Jon, you're from stand-up. And Stephen, your background is improv. How does that affect how you approach your work?
STEWART: On our show, the last thing I think about is performing. It's all about the managing, editing and moving toward showtime. Stephen is rendering a character in real time. Typically, he's improvising with people who don't know they're in an improv scene.
COLBERT: While my character's history may not be always perfectly consistent, if you, like, are Web-crazy, and there are a few of them out there, you go to Wikipedia. There's my bio and there's my character's bio, and then there's my character's history, which is slightly different than my character's bio.
It's got a lot of levels. My head hurts sometimes watching "The Colbert Report."
COLBERT: Then we've succeeded. We want people to be in pain and confused. I make up facts left and right. Liberals will come on the show and say, "Well, conservatives want this to be a theocracy." And I'll say, "Well, why not, the Founding Fathers were all fundamentalist Christians." And they'll say, "No, they weren't." I say, "Yes, they were. And, ladies and gentlemen, if I'm wrong I will eat your encyclopedias." And the person folds, 'cause they don't realize I have no problem making things up, because I have no credibility to lose.
I heard, Stephen, that you were concerned at the beginning that it would be hard to stay in character.
COLBERT: We had many conversations about this. I said, "I don't want to be an asshole." And Jon said . . .
STEWART: That you're not an asshole. It's one thing for an asshole to play an asshole. But your basic decency can't be hidden.
Actually, that's what [Fox News chairman] Roger Ailes says, that the camera picks up who you are.
STEWART: Oh, then I would think he would hire more inherently decent people. He doesn't have the ability to recognize that in people.
Stephen, do people come up to you in the supermarket and address you as though you are your character?
COLBERT: People generally don't. I come from a fairly conservative place, Charleston, South Carolina, and people have come up to me there and said, "Well, now I like what you do." They had a little trouble with our liberal, lefty bent over at The Daily Show. But now they're [in Southern accent] "Good fucking A, man, good for you!" And I'm like, "Well, I'm not sure. . . ."
Your show has thrived during the Bush administration. Will you miss it?
STEWART: I remember people used to say, "What are you gonna do when Clinton leaves?" And I'd say, "I'm really OK not having to make another intern blow-job joke in my life." And it'll be the same with these guys. I'd much prefer these guys to leave than to have to continue to make Lord Vader jokes about Cheney. I have great faith in institutional absurdity.
But wouldn't, say, a President Obama be harder to make fun of than these guys?
STEWART: Are you kidding?
COLBERT and STEWART in unison: His dad was a goat-herder!
STEWART: I'd rather make fun of somebody who is wearing their humble beginnings on their sleeve than somebody who has created a situation where casualties are involved. So the idea that somehow it's easier now -- it's not. Because right now it is a comic box lined with sadness.
Is there anything that's considered going too far now? The other night you were joking that Bush could woo CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux with a down-home combination of "wild flowers and date rape.'' And within seconds you did an imitation of W. calling himself "a dick."
COLBERT: Jon has Tourette's. It mostly gets edited out.
STEWART: Here's the way I look at it. President Bush has uranium-tipped bunker busters and I have puns. I think he'll be OK.
COLBERT: I don't know. The pen is mightier than the bunker buster.
STEWART: We rarely do ad hominem attacks. There's the occasional one -- Cheney, I guess we do a little bit. But in general it's based in frustration over reality. We almost never do the, you know, Bush is dumb.
COLBERT: Ashcroft is a douche bag.
STEWART: I think Novak is a douche bag.
COLBERT: I'm sorry. I apologize. It's Robert Novak who's a douche bag. That's just fact. I think it's his confirmation name.
STEWART: When he joined Opus Dei . . .
COLBERT: "You shall be Saint Douche Bag."
So it's impossible to go too far?
STEWART: No, too far is different for every person. I would hope that my sense of humanity prevents me from saying things that are exploitative or so denigrating and derogatory as to be offensive. But I don't understand how anyone can consider jokes about this stuff worse than the reality of it. We're not out to provoke. We're not out to shock. There is no joy in stepping over a line. I don't think there's any way to possibly offend in a comedic sense when reality has such a desperate foundation to it.
Do you think the country would be better off if the Republicans or the Democrats were running it?
STEWART: I have no idea.
COLBERT: I wouldn't mind finding out what the options are.
STEWART: Yeah. It's sad that there are only those two choices. I think we'd be better off if you had a sense that people were making decisions based less on their future political considerations and more on what they believed were in the best interests of the country and the world.
Do you think anybody does that on the political scene?
STEWART: If they are, they're disguising it pretty well.
Your producer, Ben Karlin, said that doing fake news has given him a new appreciation for the Bush administration's skills in faking reality. Do you feel that way?
STEWART: Yeah. No matter what happens, rain, sleet or snow, they see whatever they want to see. People criticize our show for breeding cynicism, but there's nothing at all disingenuous about what we're doing. If anything is cynical, it's suggesting that your policy has never been "stay the course" when we have thousands of hours of tape showing you using "stay the course" as a talking point. I don't worry about this generation of young people. They seem to be far more sophisticated and interesting than I remember myself being at that age. I'm more worrying about my generation. We're digging such a hole for these cats, they will have to be exceptional just to get out of it.
Stephen, have you met Bill O'Reilly? He says you owe him a royalty check.
COLBERT: I met him at the Time 100 Dinner. I turned around and he was right behind my chair, and he said, "Oh, it had to happen sometime." He was very nice. He said, "I like you. You know why? You're not mean-spirited like most of 'em." And I said, "That's nice, I'm glad you like it." He said, "Can I give you some advice?" And I said, "I would love it.'' He said, "Watch your guests. You have an Olbermann on, you have a Franken on, that's a pattern. Your audience may not think about it, but they have a sense of it." And I said, "But you saw how I played with Olbermann. I didn't take him seriously." And he said, "Not everybody watches your show as closely as I do." And I thought, "Take me now, Jesus." I was so thrilled.
You know, actually, I have a genuine admiration for O'Reilly's ability to do his show. I'd love to be able to put a chain of words together the way he does [snaps his fingers] without much thought as to what it might mean, compared to what you said about the same subject the night before.
STEWART: The other night -- this I loved -- O'Reilly said, "Here's why Kim Jong Il did the nuke test: He's trying to influence the American elections, the same reason Iran is ratcheting up." And I just imagine Kim Jong Il, in all his craziness, going, "Claire McCaskill's down by three points to Jim Talent. Launch the nukes! " O'Reilly's problem is not his ability to form rational arguments, because he's a very smart guy. It's his ego.
COLBERT: When he had Geraldo on, talking about Mel Gibson, they talked about Gibson for maybe thirty seconds. And then they go, "If you're rich and you're famous, everybody guns for you." And Geraldo's like, "Guys like us." And O'Reilly's like, "Exactly.'' And the next five minutes was just about them. I saw O'Reilly do an interview with President Bush, and he said, "Guys like us," and I said, "Shit, the most powerful man in the world and a guy with 2 million people a night watching his show." I keep that equation in the forefront of my character.
STEWART: The cornerstone of politics these days is grievance. It's really hard to keep that going when you're in power. I've admired their ability to hold on to that idea of being aggrieved while maintaining almost absolute control of all functions of government. I love it. And what are they most angry about? People who play the victim card.
COLBERT: Like Dennis Hastert saying, "I take full responsibility," and then, "I have done nothing wrong."
Stephen, you recently told "New York" magazine how much you liked Richard Nixon. Were you being sincere?
COLBERT: I have tender feelings for Nixon, because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted The Munsters.
STEWART: And Dark Shadows.
COLBERT [pointing to a Nixon poster above his desk]: Nixon was the last liberal president. He supported women's rights, the environment, ending the draft, youth involvement, and now he's the boogeyman? Kerry couldn't even run on that today.
Jon, you say you don't think Bush is stupid, but you think he talks down to people?
STEWART: The most emblematic characteristic that I think he possesses is competitiveness. If you read Karen Hughes' book, she talks about a note he wrote about the governor's race: "Fight fiercely. Yours in victory." That's what those guys are about: The operative principle is winning. But I don't think he is in any way remotely unintelligent.
COLBERT: I think the way you said it the other day on your show was "Bush is not dumb. He speaks to us like we're dumb."
But just before he ran for president, he was still trying to figure out why North Korea and other hot spots were important.
STEWART: That's being uncurious about the world, and self-involved. But that has nothing to do with intelligence. It just would surprise you that someone who wants to lead the free world would not necessarily know what that free world consisted of. And had only been to Epcot Center. It was sort of like his trip to Baghdad. He went for four hours into the Green Zone and comes back and says Iraq is making great progress. It would be like if we went to the Olive Garden and started going, "I understand Italy."
Stephen, I talked to you right after you did the famous White House Correspondents Dinner speech, and you seemed like you were in a state of shock. A friend of mine complimented you for being subversive, and you said, "I didn't want to be subversive. I just wanted to be funny."
COLBERT: I did not have a sense, as one critic said, that I was throwing a Molotov cocktail. One of my writers, Tom Purcell, said this very funny thing: "You threw a bottle of grape soda that happened to have a lit rag in the neck, and the room was soaked with gasoline."
For the first five minutes or so of the speech, President Bush looked like he thought you were defending him, but then he started to look irritated. Do you think he understood the irony?
COLBERT: We had a very nice conversation beforehand about that subject, actually. I said how nice it is that I, who am satirical and whose comedy can be critical of the administration, get to do this.
Did he talk to you after?
COLBERT: He said, "Well done."
STEWART: As in, how he would like to cook Stephen's hide on the barbecue.
When you came to lunch at the "Times," Jon, you said the lesson of the Oscars and the White House Correspondents Dinner was that you guys should not be talking to "the Establishment."
STEWART: It's not that we shouldn't be talking. It's that we shouldn't care.
COLBERT: We can't care.
STEWART: What people in Washington don't understand is that we're not running for re-election. We don't have to parse every word for fear that it appears in our opponent's commercial and suddenly renders us impotent.
COLBERT: We claim no respectability. There's no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don't have to defend anything.
STEWART: They believe everything has consequence in real-world terms. And what we as comedians understand is, you bomb one night, you go on the next night and you do a little better.
I don't understand why you always say, "I'm just a comedian," because from Shakespeare to Jonathan Swift, humor is the best way to get through to people.
COLBERT: Peter Cook was once asked if he thought that satire had a political effect. He said, "Absolutely. The greatest satire of the twentieth century was the Weimar cabaret, and they stopped Hitler in his tracks." It doesn't mean that what we do is worthless. It's hard to do, and people like it, and it's great. But it doesn't mean that it has an effect politically.
STEWART: Or that it has an agenda of social change. We are not warriors in anyone's army. And that is not trying to be self-deprecating. I'm proud of what we do. I really like these two shows. I like making 'em. I like watching them. I'm really proud of them. But I understand their place. I don't view us as people who lead social movements.
Is there any way to bring young people, or all people, back to news?
STEWART: Yes. Reinstitute the draft. Say it's your job to reinvent the nightly news. How do you make it relevant again?
STEWART: Whatever happened to editorial expertise? Remember 20/20 Downtown? It was 20/20, but John Qui?ones wore a black leather jacket? It was the same fucking show, but he wore a black leather jacket, as though kids would go, "Wait, hey, hold on, who's that guy wearing the black leather jacket? I'm interested in that. The guy dresses just like I do." It is that kind of absolutely transparent contrivance that makes this so much fun to do.
You both had really sad things happen to you when you were ten.
STEWART: I would not put mine in the same category. Is this one of those are-you-crying-on-the-inside questions?
Is it obvious why you would become comedians after that? Do you start it to try to make your mom laugh, or do you think life is so absurd?
COLBERT: I'm one of eleven brothers and sisters, and they didn't become comedians, though they are funnier than I am. It was valuable at some point to be funny for me. I don't think I know myself well enough to give you a succinct answer. I could talk for three hours about that and at the end of it go, "That's probably bullshit."
STEWART: People always seem to view comedy as an affliction as opposed to an ability. I think it is a wiring issue. I remember the first time I got up onstage to do comedy, I sucked. There was something about it where I went, "Oh, right, this rhythm feels like how my brain works, and I think I will get good at this if I work hard." But I don't view it as an affliction.
COLBERT: I had a similar feeling. I started as a straight actor. I'd go onstage and I'd think, "Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene, I don't care, I'll do it again." I took that as evidence that I would be a fool not to follow what was clearly the wise thing for me to do. But what the specificity was that led to that, I couldn't tell you.
Jon, you've been called a sex god by female fans.
STEWART: Let me put it this way. I know how women felt about me before television. And I know that I'm on television. And I know that I married up. When I was a bachelor, I did fine, but usually it had to do with the fact that I was bartending or had a show.
You gave up drinking and pot and smoking?
STEWART: Not all at once. They came in waves.
COLBERT: At noon, it was smoking, then at 3 o'clock . . .
STEWART: I'd say drinking and drugs went first. But drinking and drugs for comics -- people don't realize how fucking boring it is to go to a town outside Detroit from Tuesday to Sunday and stay in a Ramada Inn until 7 o'clock at night. I remember when I first went on the road. I'd go to, like, Lubbock, Texas, and I'd be like, "What do you guys have, a Prairie Dog Museum? I'm there." You explore every inch of that town, and by three years into it, you could be doing a gig in the Vatican and be like, "Nah, I'm not going out. I'm fucking staying in my room and drinking."
When you proposed to your wife, you got Will Shortz, the "Times" crossword-puzzle editor, to help you.
STEWART: He got me a guy who did a puzzle for me.
What were some of the clues?
STEWART: One of them was "1969 Miracle Met baseball player Art." We had a dog named Shamsky. We had a cat named Stanley, so "tool company." There were little things in there that related to her. She got the puzzle wrong. We never got married.
Stephen, how did you propose?
COLBERT: I asked my wife to marry me by having it spelled out in nuclear bombs.
You have a very broad range of interests -- you like "A Man for All Seasons" and "Jackass," hip-hop and T.S. Eliot.
COLBERT: Yeah, I'm an omnivore. I like everything. I was pretty much left to myself as a kid, with a lot of books.
How could you be left to yourself with all those kids in your family?
COLBERT: Because Peter and Paul died. And Dad died. And all the others went to college. And it was just me and Mom.
Was your name always pronounced Col-bear?
COLBERT: No. My father always wanted to be Col-bear. He lived in the same town as his father, and his father didn't like the idea of the name with the French pronunciation. So my father said to us, "Do what you want. You're not going to offend anybody." And he was dead long before I made my decision. I was flying up to theater school at Northwestern, and I sat next to an astronaut, actually. And I told him I was going off to a new school. I was transferring to Northwestern and I didn't know anyone in Chicago. He said, "Oh, wow, you could really reinvent yourself out there." When the plane took off I was Col-bert, and when the plane landed I was Col-bear.
Jon, I have to ask you about changing your name from Leibowitz to a variation on your middle name, Stuart. You've said it was because New York comedy-club hosts didn't know how to pronounce it, but wouldn't they know how to pronounce a Jewish name?
STEWART: It just felt like a mouthful. I'm sure there's some sort of Oedipal, psychosomatic something in there I could find, if I wanted to delve into my psyche, which I don't, because repression suits me. I'm sure it's familial, but I just used my middle name that night and that was it.
What were your political influences?
COLBERT: I was from this big Irish- Catholic family, and my dad was president of Physicians for Kennedy. So we had a picture of the president and my dad. I was sure my parents were Democrats but then later realized they only voted for one Democrat. The Kennedy pictures were more like religious icons.
STEWART: There was no "I remember hearing Hubert Humphrey speak at the Citadel while I was dating a Radcliffe girl." No moment of shaking hands with Kennedy at Boys Nation. I still don't consider myself political. People confuse political interest with interest in current events. The political industry is devoted to the electing and un-electing of officials, and that can be corrosive. If the Republicans don't lose either house, people will talk about Karl Rove's genius. There's no genius. It will be the triumph of machine and money and strategy over reality. I don't think that's anything to honor or enjoy.
OK: Seat of Heat. Jon, if you had to get an erotic instant message?
STEWART: Erotic or neurotic? Or autoerotic?
Well, let's start with erotic. Would you rather get one from Mark Foley, Ann Coulter or Sharon Stone, who you said alarmed you by going topless in your green room?
[Colbert leans over and whispers in Stewart's ear.]
STEWART: I'd go with Coulter.
COLBERT: Hey, you know what? Why don't you have Ann and Sharon fight? Then you stand up and stroke yourself gently.
STEWART: I'll rub my nipples while they go into Thunderdome, and whoever comes out gets to message me. Here's the problem. Coulter, I think, would destroy Sharon in a one-on-one. But Sharon Stone is one of those who won't forget. Like, Ann would be sleeping that night and the limbless Sharon Stone would crawl up the side of her building with a rock and beat her to death in her sleep. I have a feeling she's relentless. It's like The Terminator. Unless every circuit is out, she will regenerate and she will get a rock and she will haunt your fucking dreams.
Stephen, now it's your turn: dungeons or dragons?
COLBERT: Definitely dragons. Because there's nothing worse than an empty dungeon.
This is the original link.
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America's Anchors
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert faked it until they made it. Now they may truly be the most trusted names in news
By MAUREEN DOWD
I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen. No doubt they would try to impress me with some weighty discussion about world affairs or the midterm elections. But when I walked into Colbert's office at The Colbert Report, just off Tenth Avenue in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, the two barely acknowledged me. Stewart, rumpled in a gray tee over a long-sleeved shirt, khaki cargo pants, black Timberland boots and a Mets cap, was sprawled in a chair with takeout coffee. Colbert, neat in a long-sleeved navy shirt, blue pants and wire-rimmed glasses, was sitting up straight next to him, holding a paper plate of fruit. They were already deep in a weighty discussion.
COLBERT: If honeydew is ripe, I think it's the king of melons.
STEWART: Nah, I think given the choice of melons . . .
COLBERT: You'd go cantaloupe.
STEWART: Oh, I don't think there's any question. The cantaloupe is far superior to the honeydew.
COLBERT: No, every night I hunt for the honeydew.
STEWART: The honeydew is almost a coconut; it's barely even a melon. I think you're making a huge mistake.
COLBERT: No, I don't care for it.
STEWART [in a stentorian announcer's voice]: Colbert and Stewart came to blows over the melon.
At last, they turn their attention to me. Their gazes are not, as I'd expected, full of respect. They regard with amused disdain the old-fashioned, phone-book-size Radio Shack tape recorder I'd put on the floor between them.
"I had one like that in 1973,'' Colbert notes.
"I thought it was a chaise,'' Stewart says. ?I was going to lie down on it. I suppose there are two gerbils in there slowly paddling, and that's moving the wheel.'' He asks if I also brought a calligrapher.
Other couples may disappoint. Jen and Vince. Paris and Nicole. Cheney and Rummy. But Stewart and Colbert have soared to hilarious new heights puncturing the Bush administration's faux reality, with Stewart as the droll anchor and Colbert as the puffed-up Bill O'Reilly-style bloviator. While real network news withers, Stewart's show has become the hot destination for anyone who wants to sell books or seem hip, from presidential candidates to military dictators. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf arrived at the Daily Show studio with bomb-sniffing dogs and a bulletproof facade for the anchor desk. For a Strong Man, Stewart said, he was "good people." At the Emmys, Colbert greeted the Hollywood audience as "godless Sodomites,'' and at the White House Correspondents Dinner, he proclaimed, standing beside the president, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." He hawks his own Formula 401 sperm on his show -- "the more Stephen Colberts in the world, the better," he assured me -- including a Spanish version, "para chicas''; wants Congress to build a wall and moat with flames, fireproof crocodiles, predator drones and machine-gun nests to keep out immigrants; and has a running "Dead to Me" list that includes New York intellectuals, the cast of Friends and bow-tie pasta. "I'm not a fan of facts,'' he boasts. "Facts can change all the time, but my opinion will never change." Truthiness, a word he made up just before going on air, has been hailed by New York magazine as "the summarizing concept of our age."
"Just understand," Colbert sometimes warns guests before the show, "I'm going to be a jerk out there."
They're the Cronkite and Murrow for an ironic millennium ? ?Stewart/Colbert '08? T-shirts are popping up all over the place. "Nothing says 'I'm ashamed of you, my government' more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08,' '' Stewart told New Yorker editor David Remnick at the magazine's fall cultural festival. When Colbert traveled recently to his alma mater, Northwestern University, to be the grand marshal at the school's homecoming parade, he noticed ?Colbert/Obama '08? T-shirts throughout the crowd. ("I can't tell Jon I'm dropping him to go with Barack,'' Colbert tells me later. "Maybe he'll read it in this article.")
Ben Karlin, Stewart's thirty-five-year-old production partner who oversees both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, says that "the biggest mistake people make is thinking that Jon and Stephen sit down before every show and say, 'OK, how are we going to change the world?' or any bullshit like that. They both really just want to get a laugh." Though the shows clearly have a liberal bent, Stewart claims that they are emotional but apolitical. He does not, however, hide his disdain for the media. At a New York Times lunch, when Stewart was asked how his show did such a good job digging up clips catching the president and other officials contradicting themselves, the comedian shot back, "A clerk and a video machine." A recent Indiana University study found that The Daily Show was just as substantive as network television news during the 2004 election. I'm not surprised that young people who watch it are well- informed. I read about ten newspapers a day and three newsmagazines a week, and I have my TV tuned to cable news all day, and I still find myself taking notes from The Daily Show.
Colbert, 42, is a meticulous sprite, a grown-up altar boy who still spouts Latin. "He's new to being the Man,'' Karlin says. "He's in that first blush of fame that's thrilling. Jon is over it.'' Colbert somehow grew up an optimist, even though, as the youngest of eleven children in an Irish-Catholic family from Charleston, South Carolina, he lost his father (a doctor) and his two oldest brothers in a plane crash on September 11th, 1974, when he was ten, and his hearing in his right ear from a childhood tumor. "His humor is an accumulation of the eccentricities, mannerisms and jokes of his ten older brothers and sisters, a medley that trickled down,'' says one Colbert staffer. He trained in serious acting and Second City improv and says his politics are a mix of liberal and conservative.
"Stephen is a happy man,'' Karlin says. "He goes home to a lovely wife in New Jersey with a new dog and three beautiful children. He teaches Sunday school and knows his way around the kitchen. And then he has this deviously brilliant comedic mind."
Stewart, 43, is an intense Manhattan smarty-pants who has the style and air of a man perpetually slouching toward adulthood. He's contentedly married with two small kids, but he still casts himself as repressed and anti-social. Stewart, whose parents went through a difficult divorce when he was ten, grew up in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, where he said he was bullied as a rare Jewish kid in his neighborhood. "Jon is driven by the forces of guilt and shame and fear of being on the outside that gives Jews their comic angst,'' Karlin says. "He's self-trained in stand-up. He learned in the wretched comedy clubs of New York.''
The two satirists, interviewed together and separately, are so in sync they sometimes say the same word at the same time, play off each other's pauses or slip in a deft punch line for the other. Stewart cracks up at every riff Colbert does. Colbert, his writers say, still has a bit of hero worship for Stewart, and, as a longtime little brother in his own big family, naturally falls into that role with Stewart.
Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the Odd Couple do not socialize outside the office. "In theory, I think Jon would be excellent company,'' Colbert says. "I just have nothing to back it up."
A fake news show, "The Daily Show," spawned a fake commentator, Colbert, who makes his own fake reality defending the fake reality of a real president, and has government officials on who know the joke but are still willing to be mocked by someone fake. Your shows are like mirrors within mirrors, using a cycle of fakery to get to the truth. You've tapped into a sense in society that nothing, from reality shows to Bushworld, is real anymore. Do you guys ever get confused by your hall of mirrors?
STEWART: I didn't know we were going to have to be high to do this interview.
COLBERT: I think we see it less as a hall of mirrors and more as one of those slenderizing mirrors you can buy that you see in catalogs that make you feel good about yourself before you go out the door.
Jon, you're from stand-up. And Stephen, your background is improv. How does that affect how you approach your work?
STEWART: On our show, the last thing I think about is performing. It's all about the managing, editing and moving toward showtime. Stephen is rendering a character in real time. Typically, he's improvising with people who don't know they're in an improv scene.
COLBERT: While my character's history may not be always perfectly consistent, if you, like, are Web-crazy, and there are a few of them out there, you go to Wikipedia. There's my bio and there's my character's bio, and then there's my character's history, which is slightly different than my character's bio.
It's got a lot of levels. My head hurts sometimes watching "The Colbert Report."
COLBERT: Then we've succeeded. We want people to be in pain and confused. I make up facts left and right. Liberals will come on the show and say, "Well, conservatives want this to be a theocracy." And I'll say, "Well, why not, the Founding Fathers were all fundamentalist Christians." And they'll say, "No, they weren't." I say, "Yes, they were. And, ladies and gentlemen, if I'm wrong I will eat your encyclopedias." And the person folds, 'cause they don't realize I have no problem making things up, because I have no credibility to lose.
I heard, Stephen, that you were concerned at the beginning that it would be hard to stay in character.
COLBERT: We had many conversations about this. I said, "I don't want to be an asshole." And Jon said . . .
STEWART: That you're not an asshole. It's one thing for an asshole to play an asshole. But your basic decency can't be hidden.
Actually, that's what [Fox News chairman] Roger Ailes says, that the camera picks up who you are.
STEWART: Oh, then I would think he would hire more inherently decent people. He doesn't have the ability to recognize that in people.
Stephen, do people come up to you in the supermarket and address you as though you are your character?
COLBERT: People generally don't. I come from a fairly conservative place, Charleston, South Carolina, and people have come up to me there and said, "Well, now I like what you do." They had a little trouble with our liberal, lefty bent over at The Daily Show. But now they're [in Southern accent] "Good fucking A, man, good for you!" And I'm like, "Well, I'm not sure. . . ."
Your show has thrived during the Bush administration. Will you miss it?
STEWART: I remember people used to say, "What are you gonna do when Clinton leaves?" And I'd say, "I'm really OK not having to make another intern blow-job joke in my life." And it'll be the same with these guys. I'd much prefer these guys to leave than to have to continue to make Lord Vader jokes about Cheney. I have great faith in institutional absurdity.
But wouldn't, say, a President Obama be harder to make fun of than these guys?
STEWART: Are you kidding?
COLBERT and STEWART in unison: His dad was a goat-herder!
STEWART: I'd rather make fun of somebody who is wearing their humble beginnings on their sleeve than somebody who has created a situation where casualties are involved. So the idea that somehow it's easier now -- it's not. Because right now it is a comic box lined with sadness.
Is there anything that's considered going too far now? The other night you were joking that Bush could woo CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux with a down-home combination of "wild flowers and date rape.'' And within seconds you did an imitation of W. calling himself "a dick."
COLBERT: Jon has Tourette's. It mostly gets edited out.
STEWART: Here's the way I look at it. President Bush has uranium-tipped bunker busters and I have puns. I think he'll be OK.
COLBERT: I don't know. The pen is mightier than the bunker buster.
STEWART: We rarely do ad hominem attacks. There's the occasional one -- Cheney, I guess we do a little bit. But in general it's based in frustration over reality. We almost never do the, you know, Bush is dumb.
COLBERT: Ashcroft is a douche bag.
STEWART: I think Novak is a douche bag.
COLBERT: I'm sorry. I apologize. It's Robert Novak who's a douche bag. That's just fact. I think it's his confirmation name.
STEWART: When he joined Opus Dei . . .
COLBERT: "You shall be Saint Douche Bag."
So it's impossible to go too far?
STEWART: No, too far is different for every person. I would hope that my sense of humanity prevents me from saying things that are exploitative or so denigrating and derogatory as to be offensive. But I don't understand how anyone can consider jokes about this stuff worse than the reality of it. We're not out to provoke. We're not out to shock. There is no joy in stepping over a line. I don't think there's any way to possibly offend in a comedic sense when reality has such a desperate foundation to it.
Do you think the country would be better off if the Republicans or the Democrats were running it?
STEWART: I have no idea.
COLBERT: I wouldn't mind finding out what the options are.
STEWART: Yeah. It's sad that there are only those two choices. I think we'd be better off if you had a sense that people were making decisions based less on their future political considerations and more on what they believed were in the best interests of the country and the world.
Do you think anybody does that on the political scene?
STEWART: If they are, they're disguising it pretty well.
Your producer, Ben Karlin, said that doing fake news has given him a new appreciation for the Bush administration's skills in faking reality. Do you feel that way?
STEWART: Yeah. No matter what happens, rain, sleet or snow, they see whatever they want to see. People criticize our show for breeding cynicism, but there's nothing at all disingenuous about what we're doing. If anything is cynical, it's suggesting that your policy has never been "stay the course" when we have thousands of hours of tape showing you using "stay the course" as a talking point. I don't worry about this generation of young people. They seem to be far more sophisticated and interesting than I remember myself being at that age. I'm more worrying about my generation. We're digging such a hole for these cats, they will have to be exceptional just to get out of it.
Stephen, have you met Bill O'Reilly? He says you owe him a royalty check.
COLBERT: I met him at the Time 100 Dinner. I turned around and he was right behind my chair, and he said, "Oh, it had to happen sometime." He was very nice. He said, "I like you. You know why? You're not mean-spirited like most of 'em." And I said, "That's nice, I'm glad you like it." He said, "Can I give you some advice?" And I said, "I would love it.'' He said, "Watch your guests. You have an Olbermann on, you have a Franken on, that's a pattern. Your audience may not think about it, but they have a sense of it." And I said, "But you saw how I played with Olbermann. I didn't take him seriously." And he said, "Not everybody watches your show as closely as I do." And I thought, "Take me now, Jesus." I was so thrilled.
You know, actually, I have a genuine admiration for O'Reilly's ability to do his show. I'd love to be able to put a chain of words together the way he does [snaps his fingers] without much thought as to what it might mean, compared to what you said about the same subject the night before.
STEWART: The other night -- this I loved -- O'Reilly said, "Here's why Kim Jong Il did the nuke test: He's trying to influence the American elections, the same reason Iran is ratcheting up." And I just imagine Kim Jong Il, in all his craziness, going, "Claire McCaskill's down by three points to Jim Talent. Launch the nukes! " O'Reilly's problem is not his ability to form rational arguments, because he's a very smart guy. It's his ego.
COLBERT: When he had Geraldo on, talking about Mel Gibson, they talked about Gibson for maybe thirty seconds. And then they go, "If you're rich and you're famous, everybody guns for you." And Geraldo's like, "Guys like us." And O'Reilly's like, "Exactly.'' And the next five minutes was just about them. I saw O'Reilly do an interview with President Bush, and he said, "Guys like us," and I said, "Shit, the most powerful man in the world and a guy with 2 million people a night watching his show." I keep that equation in the forefront of my character.
STEWART: The cornerstone of politics these days is grievance. It's really hard to keep that going when you're in power. I've admired their ability to hold on to that idea of being aggrieved while maintaining almost absolute control of all functions of government. I love it. And what are they most angry about? People who play the victim card.
COLBERT: Like Dennis Hastert saying, "I take full responsibility," and then, "I have done nothing wrong."
Stephen, you recently told "New York" magazine how much you liked Richard Nixon. Were you being sincere?
COLBERT: I have tender feelings for Nixon, because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted The Munsters.
STEWART: And Dark Shadows.
COLBERT [pointing to a Nixon poster above his desk]: Nixon was the last liberal president. He supported women's rights, the environment, ending the draft, youth involvement, and now he's the boogeyman? Kerry couldn't even run on that today.
Jon, you say you don't think Bush is stupid, but you think he talks down to people?
STEWART: The most emblematic characteristic that I think he possesses is competitiveness. If you read Karen Hughes' book, she talks about a note he wrote about the governor's race: "Fight fiercely. Yours in victory." That's what those guys are about: The operative principle is winning. But I don't think he is in any way remotely unintelligent.
COLBERT: I think the way you said it the other day on your show was "Bush is not dumb. He speaks to us like we're dumb."
But just before he ran for president, he was still trying to figure out why North Korea and other hot spots were important.
STEWART: That's being uncurious about the world, and self-involved. But that has nothing to do with intelligence. It just would surprise you that someone who wants to lead the free world would not necessarily know what that free world consisted of. And had only been to Epcot Center. It was sort of like his trip to Baghdad. He went for four hours into the Green Zone and comes back and says Iraq is making great progress. It would be like if we went to the Olive Garden and started going, "I understand Italy."
Stephen, I talked to you right after you did the famous White House Correspondents Dinner speech, and you seemed like you were in a state of shock. A friend of mine complimented you for being subversive, and you said, "I didn't want to be subversive. I just wanted to be funny."
COLBERT: I did not have a sense, as one critic said, that I was throwing a Molotov cocktail. One of my writers, Tom Purcell, said this very funny thing: "You threw a bottle of grape soda that happened to have a lit rag in the neck, and the room was soaked with gasoline."
For the first five minutes or so of the speech, President Bush looked like he thought you were defending him, but then he started to look irritated. Do you think he understood the irony?
COLBERT: We had a very nice conversation beforehand about that subject, actually. I said how nice it is that I, who am satirical and whose comedy can be critical of the administration, get to do this.
Did he talk to you after?
COLBERT: He said, "Well done."
STEWART: As in, how he would like to cook Stephen's hide on the barbecue.
When you came to lunch at the "Times," Jon, you said the lesson of the Oscars and the White House Correspondents Dinner was that you guys should not be talking to "the Establishment."
STEWART: It's not that we shouldn't be talking. It's that we shouldn't care.
COLBERT: We can't care.
STEWART: What people in Washington don't understand is that we're not running for re-election. We don't have to parse every word for fear that it appears in our opponent's commercial and suddenly renders us impotent.
COLBERT: We claim no respectability. There's no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don't have to defend anything.
STEWART: They believe everything has consequence in real-world terms. And what we as comedians understand is, you bomb one night, you go on the next night and you do a little better.
I don't understand why you always say, "I'm just a comedian," because from Shakespeare to Jonathan Swift, humor is the best way to get through to people.
COLBERT: Peter Cook was once asked if he thought that satire had a political effect. He said, "Absolutely. The greatest satire of the twentieth century was the Weimar cabaret, and they stopped Hitler in his tracks." It doesn't mean that what we do is worthless. It's hard to do, and people like it, and it's great. But it doesn't mean that it has an effect politically.
STEWART: Or that it has an agenda of social change. We are not warriors in anyone's army. And that is not trying to be self-deprecating. I'm proud of what we do. I really like these two shows. I like making 'em. I like watching them. I'm really proud of them. But I understand their place. I don't view us as people who lead social movements.
Is there any way to bring young people, or all people, back to news?
STEWART: Yes. Reinstitute the draft. Say it's your job to reinvent the nightly news. How do you make it relevant again?
STEWART: Whatever happened to editorial expertise? Remember 20/20 Downtown? It was 20/20, but John Qui?ones wore a black leather jacket? It was the same fucking show, but he wore a black leather jacket, as though kids would go, "Wait, hey, hold on, who's that guy wearing the black leather jacket? I'm interested in that. The guy dresses just like I do." It is that kind of absolutely transparent contrivance that makes this so much fun to do.
You both had really sad things happen to you when you were ten.
STEWART: I would not put mine in the same category. Is this one of those are-you-crying-on-the-inside questions?
Is it obvious why you would become comedians after that? Do you start it to try to make your mom laugh, or do you think life is so absurd?
COLBERT: I'm one of eleven brothers and sisters, and they didn't become comedians, though they are funnier than I am. It was valuable at some point to be funny for me. I don't think I know myself well enough to give you a succinct answer. I could talk for three hours about that and at the end of it go, "That's probably bullshit."
STEWART: People always seem to view comedy as an affliction as opposed to an ability. I think it is a wiring issue. I remember the first time I got up onstage to do comedy, I sucked. There was something about it where I went, "Oh, right, this rhythm feels like how my brain works, and I think I will get good at this if I work hard." But I don't view it as an affliction.
COLBERT: I had a similar feeling. I started as a straight actor. I'd go onstage and I'd think, "Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene, I don't care, I'll do it again." I took that as evidence that I would be a fool not to follow what was clearly the wise thing for me to do. But what the specificity was that led to that, I couldn't tell you.
Jon, you've been called a sex god by female fans.
STEWART: Let me put it this way. I know how women felt about me before television. And I know that I'm on television. And I know that I married up. When I was a bachelor, I did fine, but usually it had to do with the fact that I was bartending or had a show.
You gave up drinking and pot and smoking?
STEWART: Not all at once. They came in waves.
COLBERT: At noon, it was smoking, then at 3 o'clock . . .
STEWART: I'd say drinking and drugs went first. But drinking and drugs for comics -- people don't realize how fucking boring it is to go to a town outside Detroit from Tuesday to Sunday and stay in a Ramada Inn until 7 o'clock at night. I remember when I first went on the road. I'd go to, like, Lubbock, Texas, and I'd be like, "What do you guys have, a Prairie Dog Museum? I'm there." You explore every inch of that town, and by three years into it, you could be doing a gig in the Vatican and be like, "Nah, I'm not going out. I'm fucking staying in my room and drinking."
When you proposed to your wife, you got Will Shortz, the "Times" crossword-puzzle editor, to help you.
STEWART: He got me a guy who did a puzzle for me.
What were some of the clues?
STEWART: One of them was "1969 Miracle Met baseball player Art." We had a dog named Shamsky. We had a cat named Stanley, so "tool company." There were little things in there that related to her. She got the puzzle wrong. We never got married.
Stephen, how did you propose?
COLBERT: I asked my wife to marry me by having it spelled out in nuclear bombs.
You have a very broad range of interests -- you like "A Man for All Seasons" and "Jackass," hip-hop and T.S. Eliot.
COLBERT: Yeah, I'm an omnivore. I like everything. I was pretty much left to myself as a kid, with a lot of books.
How could you be left to yourself with all those kids in your family?
COLBERT: Because Peter and Paul died. And Dad died. And all the others went to college. And it was just me and Mom.
Was your name always pronounced Col-bear?
COLBERT: No. My father always wanted to be Col-bear. He lived in the same town as his father, and his father didn't like the idea of the name with the French pronunciation. So my father said to us, "Do what you want. You're not going to offend anybody." And he was dead long before I made my decision. I was flying up to theater school at Northwestern, and I sat next to an astronaut, actually. And I told him I was going off to a new school. I was transferring to Northwestern and I didn't know anyone in Chicago. He said, "Oh, wow, you could really reinvent yourself out there." When the plane took off I was Col-bert, and when the plane landed I was Col-bear.
Jon, I have to ask you about changing your name from Leibowitz to a variation on your middle name, Stuart. You've said it was because New York comedy-club hosts didn't know how to pronounce it, but wouldn't they know how to pronounce a Jewish name?
STEWART: It just felt like a mouthful. I'm sure there's some sort of Oedipal, psychosomatic something in there I could find, if I wanted to delve into my psyche, which I don't, because repression suits me. I'm sure it's familial, but I just used my middle name that night and that was it.
What were your political influences?
COLBERT: I was from this big Irish- Catholic family, and my dad was president of Physicians for Kennedy. So we had a picture of the president and my dad. I was sure my parents were Democrats but then later realized they only voted for one Democrat. The Kennedy pictures were more like religious icons.
STEWART: There was no "I remember hearing Hubert Humphrey speak at the Citadel while I was dating a Radcliffe girl." No moment of shaking hands with Kennedy at Boys Nation. I still don't consider myself political. People confuse political interest with interest in current events. The political industry is devoted to the electing and un-electing of officials, and that can be corrosive. If the Republicans don't lose either house, people will talk about Karl Rove's genius. There's no genius. It will be the triumph of machine and money and strategy over reality. I don't think that's anything to honor or enjoy.
OK: Seat of Heat. Jon, if you had to get an erotic instant message?
STEWART: Erotic or neurotic? Or autoerotic?
Well, let's start with erotic. Would you rather get one from Mark Foley, Ann Coulter or Sharon Stone, who you said alarmed you by going topless in your green room?
[Colbert leans over and whispers in Stewart's ear.]
STEWART: I'd go with Coulter.
COLBERT: Hey, you know what? Why don't you have Ann and Sharon fight? Then you stand up and stroke yourself gently.
STEWART: I'll rub my nipples while they go into Thunderdome, and whoever comes out gets to message me. Here's the problem. Coulter, I think, would destroy Sharon in a one-on-one. But Sharon Stone is one of those who won't forget. Like, Ann would be sleeping that night and the limbless Sharon Stone would crawl up the side of her building with a rock and beat her to death in her sleep. I have a feeling she's relentless. It's like The Terminator. Unless every circuit is out, she will regenerate and she will get a rock and she will haunt your fucking dreams.
Stephen, now it's your turn: dungeons or dragons?
COLBERT: Definitely dragons. Because there's nothing worse than an empty dungeon.
Monday, June 18, 2007
我讨厌 Paris Hilton
(刊登于联合早报2007年6月17日)
我讨厌的不是 Paris Hilton 本人，而是所谓Paris Hilton 的现象。
或者较早前的许纯美现象、仿佛永无止境的偶像歌唱比赛、在本地的李名顺酒驾事件等等。或者是更早前的黄娜事件、吾槽邻居争吵事件和近期的独眼龙杀人事件等等。尽管前者可归类成娱乐 “新闻”，而后者可归类成社会 “新闻”，不过我却认为以上两种不同的 “新闻” 在某种层面发挥着异曲同工的效应。对我而言，此类讯息在主流新闻版面占有一席的现象间接地反映了现今主流媒体的种种问题和缺点。当然，我所指的主流媒体不包括所谓的狗仔队和有线电视所播放的纯娱乐新闻节目，因为这些东西原本就等同某种思想的垃圾食品 (junk food)。
我并非完全排斥所谓的娱乐。相反地，本人在闲暇之时也会观看综艺节目和聆听流行音乐。然而，我觉得除了广告时段以外，艺人所曝光的媒体空间就只应该限于以上所提到的管道。至于社会事件，我认为它们很多时候可以牵系着整个社会的情绪。然而，过分的深度报导很多时候就会成为一种变相的街坊闲话。
以上所提的讯息不应该出现在新闻版面上，因为我认为主流新闻媒体在某种层面负起了提供大众有关重要的讯息和主导公共谈话的责任。本人认为所谓的重要讯息包括了任何直接影响民生的政策，或者间接影响本地政策的国际趋势，以及对于这些讯息的讨论和分析。如果新闻媒体因为类似Paris Hilton 或者独眼龙事件的关系而无法全面地报导重要的新闻，不仅在提供重要讯息的责任上失责，恐怕还会降低公共谈话的层次。
或许各位会对本人对于重要新闻的定义会显得有些高傲和呈现出某种类似精英主义的优越感。然而，这只不过是本人身为一位民主国家的公民在考虑到其中的利害关系后所持有的自私想法。因为人民的选票决定咱们的政府，而我们选入国会里的政府将会决定新加坡的政策和未来方向，所以本人希望选民在投票时能够对政党之间所辩论的议题感到熟悉。
如果大家关注的只是哪位选手可以获得偶像歌唱比赛的冠军而不是有关当局的政策会怎么影响我们，或者是什么艺人又跟什么艺人闹绯闻而不是全球化到底对我国会有什么影响的话，那么恐怕就会无法独立分辨出有关当局所提出的各种方案的利弊。如果未来的选民对于选择领导班子不是因为充分了解他们所提出的政策，那么所谓大选会不会沦为一种类似新加坡偶像般的过程呢？
说回新闻媒体，为什么要去报导类似Paris Hilton的讯息呢？或许比较愤世嫉俗和相信 “阴谋论” 的人会认为这是官方勾结媒体，好让人民转移注意力以不留意到官方的弊病。然而，本人认为事情并不那么复杂，而这只是简单市场力量的恶性循环在作祟罢了。在各新闻媒体趋向于增加公司利润的目标下，最容易增加销售量或者收视率的就是迎合大众的口味。媒体的大肆报道会使到某件事件受到大众的瞩目，而大众的好奇会驱使媒体跟进报导此事件，从中形成恶性循环。然而，不是每个迎合大众口味的讯息就一定是对社会有益的，而如果新闻媒体只注重利润，那么在某种程度就会失去它们所谓的基本功能和应该肩负的社会责任。
很多时候，咱们都以各新闻媒体所报道的内容来评断其水准。不过，本人觉得我们也可以从新闻媒体不报道的讯息来评断其水准。如果没有新闻媒体愿意报导有关
Friday, June 15, 2007
Lewis Black on Homeland Security
Lewis Black raging and ranting on the Homeland Security Department of the United States of America (This is pre Hurricane Katrina...). You've got to love the part on the nuclear weapons safety instructional videos....
Bible Drawn Into Controversy
Whenever I am approached by evangelicals who wants to convert me, I politely refuse and said that I have no interest in any sort of religion. When they press me for a reason (and hence annoying me), I always would reply sarcastically that the reason why I do not wish to convert is because I have read the bible and the incest, murder, rape, and general lack of moral guidelines did not appeal to me... Needless to say, most of the evangelicals were quite offended and tried to argue with me that I was wrong... My reply will always be: read the bible... look it up.
Now, from this news article about the a recent publication controversy in Hong Kong, it seems that I am not the only person to feel this way..... (And by the way, Reverend Wu, it is not common sense... where do you think crazy people who blow shit up get their justification from???)
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Bible drawn into sex publication controversy
HONG KONG (Reuters) - More than 800 Hong Kong residents have called on authorities to reclassify the Bible as "indecent" due to its sexual and violent content, following an uproar over a sex column in a university student journal.
A spokesperson for Hong Kong's Television and Entertainment Licensing authority (TELA) said it had received 838 complaints about the Bible by noon Wednesday.
The complaints follow the launch of an anonymous Web site -- www.truthbible.net -- which said the holy book "made one tremble" given its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest.
The Web site said the Bible's sexual content "far exceeds" that of a recent sex column published in the Chinese University's "Student Press" magazine, which had asked readers whether they'd ever fantasized about incest or bestiality.
That column was later deemed "indecent" by the Obscene Articles Tribunal, sparking a storm of debate about social morality and freedom of speech. Student editors of the journal defended it, saying open sexual debate was a basic right.
If the Bible is similarly classified as "indecent" by authorities, only those over 18 could buy the holy book and it would need to be sealed in a wrapper with a statutory warning notice.
TELA said it was still undecided on whether the Bible had violated Hong Kong's obscene and indecent articles laws.
But a local protestant minister shrugged off this possibility.
"If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn't mean it encourages those activities," said Reverend Wu Chi-wai. "It's just common sense ... I don't think that criticism will have strong support from the public," he added.
Now, from this news article about the a recent publication controversy in Hong Kong, it seems that I am not the only person to feel this way..... (And by the way, Reverend Wu, it is not common sense... where do you think crazy people who blow shit up get their justification from???)
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Bible drawn into sex publication controversy
HONG KONG (Reuters) - More than 800 Hong Kong residents have called on authorities to reclassify the Bible as "indecent" due to its sexual and violent content, following an uproar over a sex column in a university student journal.
A spokesperson for Hong Kong's Television and Entertainment Licensing authority (TELA) said it had received 838 complaints about the Bible by noon Wednesday.
The complaints follow the launch of an anonymous Web site -- www.truthbible.net -- which said the holy book "made one tremble" given its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest.
The Web site said the Bible's sexual content "far exceeds" that of a recent sex column published in the Chinese University's "Student Press" magazine, which had asked readers whether they'd ever fantasized about incest or bestiality.
That column was later deemed "indecent" by the Obscene Articles Tribunal, sparking a storm of debate about social morality and freedom of speech. Student editors of the journal defended it, saying open sexual debate was a basic right.
If the Bible is similarly classified as "indecent" by authorities, only those over 18 could buy the holy book and it would need to be sealed in a wrapper with a statutory warning notice.
TELA said it was still undecided on whether the Bible had violated Hong Kong's obscene and indecent articles laws.
But a local protestant minister shrugged off this possibility.
"If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn't mean it encourages those activities," said Reverend Wu Chi-wai. "It's just common sense ... I don't think that criticism will have strong support from the public," he added.
Nice Rebuttal
This is a clip from the series "The West Wing"... Nice rebuttal for anyone who uses the bible as a justification against homosexuality (or anything else)...
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Bill Moyers Interviews Jon Stewart
This is an interview of Jon Stewart by Bill Moyers... I'm used to seeing Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, playing the fool and the fake news anchor where he makes jokes and throw spitballs at the absurdity of the world we live in...... This is another side of him where he stops and becomes serious and talk about things that are bothering him......
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Jon Stewart Mocks The Paris Hilton Phenomenon
I have told my friends that Paris Hilton (the phenomenon, not the person) epitomizes everything that is wrong about the media nowadays... I mean, can you imagine my disgust when I flipped open the Straits Times and saw that they devoted half a page to discussing this issue???
I think Jon Stewart's critique on CNN summarizes my feelings (and contempt) for the mainstream media....
I think Jon Stewart's critique on CNN summarizes my feelings (and contempt) for the mainstream media....
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Evolution, Religion and Free Will
This is an interesting article that appeared in the latest issue of American Scientist, which is the results of a survey polling evolutionary scientists on their beliefs in evolution, religion and free will....
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Evolution, Religion and Free Will
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Evolution, Religion and Free Will
The most eminent evolutionary scientists have surprising views on how religion relates to evolution
During the 20th century, three polls questioned outstanding scientists about their attitudes toward science and religion. James H. Leuba, a sociologist at Bryn Mawr College, conducted the first in 1914. He polled 400 scientists starred as "greater" in the 1910 American Men of Science on the existence of a "personal God" and immortality, or life after death. Leuba defined a personal God as a "God to whom one may pray in the expectation of receiving an answer." He found that 32 percent of these scientists believed in a personal God, and 37 percent believed in immortality. Leuba repeated basically the same questionnaire in 1933. Belief in a personal God among greater scientists had dropped to 13 percent and belief in immortality to 15 percent. In both polls, beliefs in God and immortality were less common among biologists than among physical scientists. Belief in immortality had dropped to 2 percent among greater psychologists in the 1933 poll. Leuba predicted in 1916 that belief in a personal God and in immortality would continue to drop in greater scientists, a forecast clearly borne out by his second poll in 1933, and he further predicted that the figures would fall even more in the future.
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Edward J. Larson, professor of law and the history of science at the University of Georgia, and science journalist Larry Witham, both theists, polled National Academy of Sciences members in 1998 and provided further confirmation of Leuba's conjecture. Using Leuba's definitions of God and immortality for direct comparison, they found lower percentages of believers. Only 10 percent of NAS scientists believed in God or immortality, with those figures dropping to 5 percent among biologists.
2003 Cornell Evolution Project
Our study was the first poll to focus solely on eminent evolutionists and their views of religion. As a dissertation project, one of us (Graffin) prepared and sent a detailed questionnaire on evolution and religion to 271 professional evolutionary scientists elected to membership in 28 honorific national academies around the world, and 149 (55 percent) answered the questionnaire. All of them listed evolution (specifically organismic), phylogenetics, population biology/genetics, paleontology/paleoecology/paleobiology, systematics, organismal adaptation or fitness as at least one of their research interests. Graffin also interviewed 12 prestigious evolutionists from the sample group on the relation between modern evolutionary biology and religion.
A primary complaint of scientists who answered the earlier polls was that the concept of God was limited to a "personal God." Leuba considered an impersonal God as equivalent to pure naturalism and classified advocates of deism as nonbelievers. We designed the current study to distinguish theism from deism—that is to day a "personal God" (theism) versus an "impersonal God" who created the universe, all forces and matter, but does not intervene in daily events (deism). An evolutionist can be considered religious, in our poll, if he calls himself a deist.
Comprised of 17 questions and space for optional comments, this questionnaire addressed many more issues than the earlier polls. Religious evolutionists were asked to describe their religion, and unbelievers were asked to choose their closest description among atheist, agnostic, naturalist or "other" (with space to describe). Other questions asked if the evolutionary scientist were a monist or dualist—that is, believed in a singular controlling force in natural science or also allowed for the supernatural—whether a conflict between evolution and religion is inevitable, whether humans have free will, whether purpose or progress plays a role in evolution, and whether naturalism is a sufficient way to understand evolution, its products and human origins.
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Perhaps the most revealing question in the poll asked the respondent to choose the letter that most closely represented where her views belonged on a ternary diagram. The great majority of the evolutionists polled (78 percent) chose A, billing themselves as pure naturalists. Only two out of 149 described themselves as full theists (F), two as more theist than naturalist (D) and three as theistic naturalists (B). Taken together, the advocacy of any degree of theism is the lowest percentage measured in any poll of biologists' beliefs so far (4.7 percent).
No evolutionary scientists in this study chose pure deism (I), but the deistic side of the diagram is heavy compared to the theistic side. Eleven respondents chose C, and 10 chose other regions on the right side of the diagram (E, H or J). Most evolutionary scientists who billed themselves as believers in God were deists (21) rather than theists (7).
The responses to other questions in the poll parallel those in the ternary diagram and are summarized in graphs below. Furthermore, most (79 percent) of the respondents billed themselves as metaphysical naturalists. They were strongly materialists and monists: 73 percent said organisms have only material properties, whereas 23 percent said organisms have both material and spiritual properties. These answers are hardly surprising given previous polls. But the answers to two questions were surprising to us.
How Evolution and Religion Relate
Evolutionists were presented with four choices on the relation between evolution and religion: A, they are non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) whose tenets are not in conflict; B, religion is a social phenomenon that has developed with the biological evolution of Homo sapiens—therefore religion should be considered as a part of our biological heritage, and its tenets should be seen as a labile social adaptation, subject to change and reinterpretation; C, they are mutually exclusive magisteria whose tenets indicate mutually exclusive conclusions; or D, they are totally harmonious—evolution is one of many ways to elucidate the evidences of God's designs.
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Only 8 percent of the respondents chose answer A, the NOMA principle advocated by Stephen Jay Gould, rejecting the harmonious view of evolution and religion as separate magisteria. Even fewer (3 percent) believe that evolution and religion are "totally harmonious," answer D. A weak response to both of these options is unsurprising since the participants are so strongly nonreligious, shown by their answers to other questions in the poll. But we did expect a strong showing for choice C, which suggests that evolution and religion are mutually exclusive and separated by a gulf that cannot be bridged. This was the answer chosen by Richard Dawkins, who has a strong reputation for declaring that science has much better answers for human society than does religion.
Instead, the wide majority, 72 percent, of the respondents chose option B. These eminent evolutionists view religion as a sociobiological feature of human culture, a part of human evolution, not as a contradiction to evolution. Viewing religion as an evolved sociobiological feature removes all competition between evolution and religion for most respondents.
Evolutionary scientists are strongly motivated to ameliorate conflict between evolution and religion. Sociobiology offers them an apparent conciliatory path to the compatibility of religion and evolution, avoiding all language of inescapable conflict. Sociobiological evolution is the means to understanding religion, whereas religion as a "way of knowing" has nothing to teach us about evolution. This view allows a place for religion and sounds superficially comforting to compatibilists.
Charles Darwin was also loath to talk about evolution and religion in On the Origin of Species. He sought ways to lessen the conflict between his idea of natural selection and Christianity in the period just after 1859. Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who was so taken by the Origin, wrote two reviews arguing for the compatibility of the intelligent design of God and Darwin's idea of natural selection. God, according to Gray, guided the available variation and thus controlled the evolutionary process. Darwin sought Gray's permission to reprint parts of both reviews as a pamphlet that Darwin, at his own expense, distributed widely to those who raised religious objections to his views in the Origin. At this time, Darwin privately believed that Christianity was incompatible with his idea of natural selection but used Asa Gray's reviews to help mute public and academic uproar from religious objections to his book.
Nine years later, On the Origin of Species had become a huge international success, and Darwin published The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. No longer needing a compatibilist slant on natural selection and religion, he clearly distanced himself from Gray's views. In the last paragraph of Volume II, Darwin rejects the possibility that God was guiding evolution and writes about Asa Gray:
… no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided. However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief that "variation has been led along certain beneficial lines," like a stream "along definite and useful lines of irrigation."
If Gray were right, then natural selection was superfluous; an omniscient Creator determines the goals of evolution. "Thus," Darwin concludes in the last sentence of the book, "we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination." Darwin, however, had solved the problem of free will more than 30 years earlier; he believed it was nonexistent. He also believed that he had solved the problem of intelligent design in adaptations—that also was nonexistent for him, a view shared by the vast majority of the world's most eminent evolutionists alive today, according to our study.
If Asa Gray represented the commonly held view of scientists who studied evolution in the 1860s, evolution could be subsumed under religion as a manifestation of God's design. Today, as our results show, the commonly held view among evolutionists is that religion is subsumed under sociobiological evolution. There has been a complete inversion of the naturalist worldview in the last 150 years.
Eminent evolutionists are now caught in a bind that reminds us of Darwin in 1859. They worry that the public association of evolution with atheism or at least nonreligion will hurt evolutionary biology, perhaps impeding its funding or acceptance. Asa Gray's gloss and that of the evolutionists in this poll, however, differ fundamentally. Gray offered a theological synthesis with natural selection that Darwin carefully used for a few years before extracting himself from it. Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths. A recent informal poll of our religious acquaintances suggests that they are not pleased by the thought that their religions originated in sociobiology.
Human Free Will
Charles Darwin recognized the importance of free will to evolutionary biology. He first wrote about human free will in his M & N notebooks as he became a materialist in 1838, soon after the voyage of the Beagle:
The general delusion about free will is obvious because man has power of action, & he can seldom analyses his motives (originally mostly INSTINCTIVE, & therefore now great effort of reason to discover them.…)
Darwin saw punishing criminals for any reason other than deterring others as morally wrong: Criminals should be pitied and rehabilitated rather than hated. Revenge he abhorred. Further, "this view should teach one humility, one deserves no credit for anything (yet one takes it for beauty and good temper)." And finally, he said, a "believer in these views will pay great attention to Education."
Our questionnaire offered evolutionary scientists only two choices on the question about human free will: A, all organisms are locally determined by heredity and environment, but humans still possess free will; B, all organisms are locally determined by heredity and environment, and humans have no free will. To our surprise, 79 percent of the respondents chose option A for this question, indicating their belief that people have free will despite being determined by heredity and environment. Only 14 percent chose no free will, and 7 percent did not answer the question.
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Some philosophers have come to the view that human beings are entirely determined but still possess free will—see, for example, the views of Daniel Dennett or Ted Honderich—but we doubt the evolutionists polled have read carefully this genre of modern philosophy. This view was not mentioned in the interviews nor in the many comments generated by the free-will question. Instead, we think there is a conflation of free will with choice.
We anticipated a much higher percentage for option B and a low percentage for A, but got just the opposite result. One of us (Provine) has been thinking about human free will for almost 40 years, has read most of the philosophical literature on the subject and polls his undergraduate evolution class (200-plus students) each year on belief in free will. Year after year, 90 percent or more favor the idea of human free will for a very specific reason: They think that if people make choices, they have free will. The professional debate about free will has moved far from this position, because what counts is whether the choice is free or determined, not whether human beings make choices. People and animals both certainly choose constantly. Comments from the evolutionists suggest that they were equating human choice and human free will. In other words, although eminent, our respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes. Evolutionary biology is increasingly applied to psychology. Belief in free will adds nothing to the science of human behavior.
Conclusion
Only 10 percent of the eminent evolutionary scientists who answered the poll saw an inevitable conflict between religion and evolution. The great majority see no conflict between religion and evolution, not because they occupy different, noncompeting magisteria, but because they see religion as a natural product of human evolution. Sociologists and cultural anthropologists, in contrast, tend toward the hypothesis that cultural change alone produced religions, minus evolutionary change in humans. The eminent evolutionists who participated in this poll reject the basic tenets of religion, such as gods, life after death, incorporeal spirits or the supernatural. Yet they still hold a compatible view of religion and evolution.
Bibliography
- Barrett, P. H, P. J. Gautrey, S. Herbert, D. Kohn and S. Smith, eds. 1987. Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Dennett, D. C. 1984.Elbow Room. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Dennett, D. C. 2003. Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking.
- Dupree, A. H. 1959. Asa Gray. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Gould, S. J. 1999. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine.
- Graffin, G. W. 2003. Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist World View: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology, dissertation. Ithaca: Cornell University. http://www.polypterus.org
- Honderich, T. 1993. How Free are You? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Kane, R., ed. 2002. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Larson, E. J., and L. Witham. 1998. Leading scientists still reject God. Nature 394:313.
- Larson, E. J., and L. Witham. 1999. Scientists and religion in America. Scientific American, September, pp. 88-93.
- Leuba, J. H. 1916. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study. Boston: Sherman, French and Co.
- Leuba, J. H. 1934. Religious beliefs of American scientists. Harper's Magazine, August, pp. 291-300.
- Smith, H. W. 1952. Man and His Gods. New York: Little Brown.
- Stack, G. J. 2000. Materialism. In Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Bill Maher New Rules (Season Finale)
This is the season finale of Bill Maher's New Rules (May 27th 2007)... I like the one about Walmart....
Michael Moore Interviewed By Bill Maher on His New Film Sicko
I like Michael Moore's documentaries... can't wait for this new film to open......
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