Comedy is an excellent vehicle for communicating ideas and Dave Chappelle is a master at it. Dave Smith summed it up best in a recent Unregistered podcast when he stated that “what is best about comedy is when it is intermixed with the truth.” I love Chappelle’s comedy and I put him up there with the masters of truth in comedy in the vein of Rock, Pryor, and Carlin who are not afraid say anything and expose hypocrisy wherever it exists. That being said, there was something missing in this recent special. When comedy is used to gloss over the misdeeds of our imperialist government it only serves to cement in the collective mind that, if not for the trivialities of mean tweets and political gaffes, everything is running smoothly, nothing could ever blow back in our faces and it reiterates the concept that the government will take care of everything, if only the “right people” get put in office.
Admittedly, I laughed my ass off when I watched Chappelle’s latest special and in it, he got a lot right. To wit: everyone being too easily offended and falling prey to identity politics, indeed this is the case. People falling for the “savior” politician who will fix any and all problems? Yes, spot on. Many have also rightly focused on the economics portion of the special. A recent FEE.org article summarized and captured the essence of the sound economic principle that Chapelle encapsulated in one passage, as follows:
Chappelle summarized President Trump’s position vis-à-vis China: “I’m gonna go to China, and I’m gonna get these jobs from China and bring ‘em back to America.” Chappelle then interrupted his Trump soliloquy, asking: “For what, so iPhones can be $9,000? Leave that job in China where it belongs… I wanna wear Nikes, I don’t wanna make those things. Stop trying to give us Chinese jobs.
Getting that basic economic message out to the masses in such a simplified manner is exceptional. Most aren’t seeking out economic books and blogs to gain an understanding of this concept, but sneak it into a comedy bit and it might start to stick with people. That being said, there is room for improvement in two key areas: foreign policy and presidential worship. What we got in this special was the standard routine of glossing over several major foreign policy obscenities with Obama and Clinton under the guise of “anything would have been better than Trump,” and a reinforcing of the concept that voting for the lesser of two evils is something everyone should feel good about.
Many voted for Obama on account of the lofty change ideals that candidate Obama espoused. Right out of the gate, with the election in hand, Obama turned around and stacked his cabinet with former Clintonites. How’s that for change? On the other hand, dropping over 26,000 bombs in a single year is actually quite a change, one routinely ignored by progressives. Did the masses who came out and voted for Obama think they were voting for a foreign policy of funding a group of rebels in an attempt to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad? It’s okay, Obama and the oh-so-eager-to-comply media called them the Free Syrian Army, which sounded a lot nicer. This was a calculated move to dupe the nightly news watchers, who are too busy with soccer practice to realise that this was a coalition of about 1500 different militia groups, essentially Sunni rebels, who ended up forming ISIS with the money and weapons courtesy of Obama’s foreign policy (they then marched right into Iraq and took over the leftover military equipment that the U.S. had abandoned, but I digress). Fast forward to today, Assad is still there, but there are now well over 500,000 dead bodies, hooray for attempted regime change! How about targeted assassination of US citizens, indiscriminate drone bombing and wars in eight countries? Yes we can! Finally, there is this little gem: Obama signed into law legislation granting government the ability to arrest anyone without charges and detain them indefinitely. That is quite a dangerous precedent. Dave, you couldn’t slip in a litte jab about any one of these? Not one little throw away line to maybe, just maybe, get one or two folks thinking differently? Nah, preserving the “Obama/Hillary image” always takes precedence.
But wait, there’s more fodder out there, ripe for comedic gold, as Jim Bovard summarized in a recent HIll.com article:
The 2016 election was also a referendum on the Obama administration, which routinely refused to release key evidence on its most controversial efforts, including the IRS targeting of conservative non-profits, the Fast and Furious gun-running to Mexico, the schizophrenic intervention in Syria, and the machinations behind the Affordable Care Act. The Society of Professional Journalists and 37 other press organizations condemned the Obama White House in 2014 for “politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies.”
I would venture that anyone reading this has long ago left their naïveté about government being a benevolent, clean, and always-striving-for-the-public-good entity. A majority of others just blindly go along with the standard narrative or they just don’t care, especially when it comes to Hillary Clinton and Chappelle seems more than happy to go along with it too. The standard line was that Clinton was the one who everyone was supposed to go out and “do the right thing and vote for,” so that mean guy Trump doesn’t win. Many believed it and went out and did just that, so easily forgetting, or maybe never understanding, the reality of Clinton’s foreign policy, as summarized in this FEE.org article article by Joey Clark from 2016:
Just think of all the “humanitarian” foreign policy adventures to Hillary’s name…she pushed [for] the bombing of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, advocated strongly for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, supported the 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan (which led to the majority of American deaths in the Afghan war), orchestrated the 2009 coup in Honduras, supported the revolutionary overthrow of Hosni Mubarak 2011, led the policy to violently overthrow Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi in the same year only to smugly giggle at his death [“we came, we saw, he died”], and persists in her defense of the use of drone warfare that kills innocents across the globe from Yemen to Pakistan while continuing to advocate the arming of Syrian rebels as part of her on-going support for the overthrow of ISIS’s enemy, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.“
Many are uncomfortable disagreeing with both sides of the political spectrum and of being an outsider. But remember, it’s all just a game for politicians. One need not look any further than the Republicans in office during the Obama presidency, so called fiscally responsible Republicans who railed against spending during Obama’s tenure, claiming that if they “only had one more seat” in the House or Senate, that if they only had the presidency, THEN they could get this mess all straightened out. Fast forward to 2017-18, the Republicans have it all, and what comes of it? Massive spending measures and a token tax cut bill to give the campaigning republicans up for mid-term elections something to run on. Chappelle emphasized in his special that the eight years under Obama, economically speaking, were pretty decent for most, which on the surface, could be true only if you ignore the fact that this was only possible by fostering a propped up economy based on printing money and piling on debt. No change there either, the US has been doing that for years; out of sight, out of mind.
Candidate Obama sold himself to be a relative outsider who would change the way everything was done, would be the most transparent administration and the complete opposite of that evil guy Bush. It turns out he deported more people than Bush did, continued and expanded wars, became one of the least transparent administrations and prosecuted whistleblowers with vigor. The masses are in the process of being hoodwinked yet again with the remaking of the presidential image after-the-fact for Obama, Bush and Clinton. Believe me, I get it, Trump is no better and yes, he is a braggadocious buffoon and I can’t wait for the next guffaw, but there’s not that much difference, he’s just meaner when he tweets it out. Fear not, by the time Trump leaves office, we will be able to compile a sordid list just like the ones earlier in the article for Obama, Clinton, and no doubt countless others, for this is not specific to just one political party. The evidence is already piling up for Trump, think “take the guns first, due process second,” or the continued participation in the blockade and starvation of Yemen. The repetition of the standard lines of presidential worship once our heroic leaders leave office sets us up to repeat past mistakes. One way to combat this undue glorification and worship is to analyze the realities of the U.S. imperialist state acta non verba, in little tidbits, here and there, in everyday conversation, via comedy and any other means possible. Dave, I need your help: make the people address the uncomfortable realities of our imperialist misadventures, don’t let Obama off so easily and help the good people let Hillary go….and keep it up with the Trump jokes.
