What the world surely doesn’t need. 

Patrice Greanville

The New York Times headline made me wince:

Jon Stewart to Direct Serious Film, Will Take Hiatus From ‘Daily Show’ 

The news—when read in more detail— was not reassuring. It would seem like one of the most colossal egos in the entertainment world is about to pull an ARGO on us.  No I’m not referring to Affleck, whose Oscar for that perniciously-timed film is the official certification for Hollywood’s willing concubinage with imperial America. I’m talking about Jon Stewart, by far one of the most insufferable and self-impressed personalities in the modern pantheon of cheap idolatry for which American culture will surely be remembered—should the world survive its runaway ignorance and misdirected violence.

The reason for my disgust is that Stewart is about to take a 12-week hiatus from his duties at the uber-adulated The Daily Show to direct a movie whose plot—oh my— he penned.  The movie —”Rosewater”, is reported to be an adaptation of the 2011 book “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival,” by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. Hmm. Hold that a cotton-pickin’  minute.  Captivity? A guy named Bahari? Knowing as I guess you do, that the US and its usual accomplices are desperately looking for a way to provoke a fight with Iran, what country do you think will be cast as the humorless heavy in this picture? Yes, that country. The same country already exploited by liberaloid Affleck to excellent “artistic” returns.

“One of the reasons we are in this business is to challenge ourselves,” Mr. Stewart said [fatuously], “and I really connected to Maziar’s story. It’s a personal story but one with universal appeal about what it means to be free.”  Mr. Bahari’s ordeal is familiar to “The Daily Show” fans — in fact, the comedy program played a role in it. ⁽¹⁾

The blooming of this execrable notion took place in a rather serendipitous manner. According to the Times,

A Canadian-Iranian journalist and documentarian, Mr. Bahari was jailed in Tehran in 2009 for four months, accused of plotting a revolution against the government. Shortly before his arrest, Mr. Bahari had participated in a “Daily Show” sketch, conducted by one of the show’s correspondents, Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Mr. Bahari’s captors used the footage against him. “You can imagine how upset we were,” Mr. Stewart said, “and I struck up a friendship with him afterward.”

Since ARGO was premised on something like a ruse to fool the Iranians, Stewart’s  premise, also packing identity errors, sounds to me derivative, at best. Not so bloody funny. Let alone that original. How many times are we gonna take credit for rooking the Iranians?

One more requiem for liberalism

With this recklessly ill-timed film, Jon Stewart is now clearly joining not only the lot of imperial apologists (which as Abby Martin suggests—see below—was well prefigured by his fawning over Obama and other Democratic politicos), but also proving for the umpteenth time that liberals are either egotistical assholes with the political acumen of a hedgehog or… thinly-veiled groupies for the imperial status quo. So first Affleck, now Stewart, where will it end, this noxious parade of (shall we say charitably) unwittingly self-indulgent “cinematic art”?

Since Stewart  is a comedian, very much the frat-sort, smart-ass, middlebrow American comedian, the kind that the politically illiterate and almost permanently infantilized Generation X finds so damn amusing, albeit one now afflicted with acute auteur pretensions, we can’t tell at this point where this expensive bauble will end, hopefully in the trash, but we can bet that the Iranians will be once again characterized as fanatical ciphers  or dunces—not exactly the image needed at this point to inject some warmth and respect in the American mind toward that tortured nation.

Well. What else could we expect? This is the rotten Zeitgeist we inhabit, friends. For ill or for ill.

In the final analysis, however, as even a bright 6-year old could tell, war is too dreadful a matter to be left to mere politicians…or  megalomanic buffoons.  Man, where is George Carlin when we need him!

Patrice Greanville is the editor in chief of The Greanville Post. 

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ADDENDUM

Abby Martin of RT calls out court jester Stewart and his accommodation of Obama.  Hard questions are never asked on Stewart’s Daily Show, particularly when Democrat politicians need votes.  I’ve said previously how Stewart parades a constant stream of establishment war criminals and monsters on his program so they can peddle their books.

SOURCE: 

Jon Stewart to Direct Serious Film, Will Take Hiatus From ‘Daily Show’

⁽¹⁾ http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/jon-stewart-to-direct-serious-film-will-take-hiatus-from-daily-show/

•••••

not be celebrated.  And that someone would see the obvious and call Stewart on it, that to pick—of all possible subjects, many much more urgent—this particular plot to sink a pile of greenbacks in it, is simply obscene. Well, about that I suppose I was being way too optimistic.

—PG

THIS clip is from ABC Wold News with Diane Sawyer (3.5.13).
For some reasons this clip shows a bit more balance and the poison is lighter but still powerful enough to distort the impact of the piece. The good part is that somehow they made the decision to allow Hugo Chavez to say a few words uninterrupted and unedited. It should be noted that a “think piece” accompanying the page on the ABC World News site by Russell Goldman applies further antiseptic to Chavez’ message. (See inflammatory terms and unsupported assumptions, including lies, sprinkled throughout in bold in the transcript below.  Annotations in brackets.)—Patrice Greanville

Grade: C-

By RUSSELL GOLDMAN (@GoldmanRussell) ABC World News

March 5, 2013 

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s fiery [“fiery” always suggests “unstable”] and controversial socialist president who came to power on a wave of popular sentiment and befriended some of the world’s most notorious dictators, has died at the age of 58, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro said today. Chavez had been fighting cancer, recently seeking treatment at a clinic in Cuba.  A self-described champion of the poor [Hmm..egotist, he calls himself something. Actually the masses called him “champion of the poor”.] who first tried to overturn Venezuela’s powerful elites in a failed 1992 coup, Chavez was democratically elected in 1999, with huge support from the country’s poor. During his time in office, he became one of Latin America’s most well-known and polarizing figures. A constant thorn in the side of the United States [you mean the ruling cliques, not the people], he commanded headlines in newspapers around the world. A populist who suppressed free speech [a complete and total lie], he remained immensely popular among his country’s poor. From the time he won election in 1999, Chavez held onto power through tightly controlling the media [Again, a laughable lie; anyone could read anything in Venezuela, and the media, controlled by the rich, disseminated constant lies and provocations without official censure. Venezuela always had under Chavez and still has, a much broader spectrum of information and opinion than America, where systemic criticism is completely suppressed.]. and through a series of populist elections and referenda, including one that allowed him to seek a limitless number of terms.  [Suggestions of  seeking dictator for life position] PHOTOS: Hugo Chavez Through the Years Chavez, whose public appearances diminished in recent months, received his first surgery and chemotherapy treatment for cancer in Cuba in 2011. He returned to Cuba, a guest of that country’s ailing socialist leader Fidel Castro, for treatment and surgery in February 2012.

Miguel Gutierrez/AFP/Getty Images

Hugo Chavez Dead at 58 After Battling Cancer

Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan President, Dies at 58

Exclusive Interview With Hugo Chavez 

Chavez announced on Dec. 8 on state television that he would travel back to Cuba to undergo surgery since his pelvic cancer had “returned.” Despite his ailing health, Chavez was reelected last year. Chavez was born in 1954 in the town of Sabenta, Venezuela. Both his parents were schoolteachers. A military academy graduate and a decorated paratrooper, in the 1980s he and a group of officers founded an underground socialist organization named for the 19th century South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar. Full Coverage: Hugo Chavez In 1992 that group, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement, led a failed coup that ended with 18 people killed and Chavez imprisoned. Chavez spent two years in prison before receiving a pardon. After leaving prison, he rebranded his movement into a populist party called the Movement of the Fifth Republic and replaced his military uniform with business attire, or oftentimes a red shirt or red track suit.

Venezuela has one of the longest democratic traditions in Latin America, but by the early 1990s many of the country’s working and middle class people were disenchanted with the country’s two primary political parties, both of which suffered from endemic corruption.

Chavez, an icon from his prison days, promised to rid the country of corruption and pledged to divert revenue from the country’s ample oil sales to projects aimed at helping the poor, including improved education and health care. Unemployment and poverty, however, remain high despite the country’s oil wealth. Always the firebrand, Chavez created a series of bogeymen on which the Venezuelan people could pin their frustrations, firing jabs at traditional spheres of power and influence, including the oil companies, the Catholic Church and the United States.  [The reporter is here defending these powerful political players as if they were totally innocent in the decades-long suppression and exploitation of the poor.  In fact, all three have a long history of support for dictatorships and strongmen of the right, willing to do the bidding for the ultra-rich, hence to fault Chavez for denouncing them, as if they were angels, is rank In a public address he once said of oil executives that they live in “luxury chalets where they perform orgies, drinking whisky.” [Quite true, of course. Especially rankling in a nation where the overwhelming majority lived like animals.]  His greatest ire, however, was [deservedly] saved for the United States, particularly former President George W. Bush. He called Bush a “liar,” “coward,” “murderer” and “donkey.” In a 2006 speech before the UN General Assembly, he called the U.S. president “the devil.” “I think I’m just saying what many people would like to tell him. I said he was a donkey because, I think, he’s very ignorant about what is actually happening in Latin America and the world,” Chavez told ABC’s Barbara Walters in a 2007 interview. [Anyone has a problem with that? Or has Bush now become an intellectual? Apparently, the simple truth bothers the apologists for the US corporatist state.]

Jose Goitia/AP Photo

Cuba’s President Fidel Castro, left, talks… 

Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan President, Dies at 58

Exclusive Interview With Hugo Chavez 

He further needled the United States by closely allying himself with some of America’s enemies, including Castro and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Despite promises that he would clean the country of corruption, his administration was rife with corruption. [A wild exaggeration, and look who’s talking, as if America was a land without corruption.] He and his government were routinely criticized for human rights abuses, particularly restricting freedom of the press. [Both accusations were simply fabrications using suspect sources to pin a wave of media attacks on Venezuela’s president and his Bolivarian project.]