Sunday, August 07, 2005

The Daily Show: Miracles and Boycotts

I love this show. Just love it. On Stewart's August 4th show, he cleverly and hilariously made a couple of great points. One point had to do with the media's hailing the survival of everyone on on an Air France flight that was struck by lightening a "miracle." As Stewart says,

That is bulls--t. A miracle...defined in my dictionary is 'a marvelous event manifested in a super-natural act of God.' To me the only thing that was a miracle in that situation was the lightening that hit the plane. That was the act of God. If anything, God was trying to kill these people. His plan was foiled by the crew's Satanic competence. Can't someone take some human credit for a job well done? (Watch here).
In the same episode, "correspondent" Stephen Colbert does an interview with Ben Jones the guy who played a character named Cooter on the 1970s-80s TV show "Dukes of Hazard." Jones is trying to lead a boycott of the movie because it doesn't live up to the decency of the original TV show, where a car named General Lee with a Confederate Flag painted on its roof was driven around the county on missions to blow things up. According to Jones, that was good, clean family fun while the movie is filled with "hoochie coochie." Colbert then interviews three frat guys, as members of the youth that Jones is trying to protect from the movie, as Colbert says, who are instead very eager to see the film because of Jessica Simpson.

It turns out, as Colbert finds, Ben Jones has an unlikely ally in the NAACP, whose President in South Carolina, Lonnie Randolph Jr., objects to the film(and the TV show) though for a different reason: its display of the Confederate flag on the General Lee. Ben Jones defends the flag as something that means "different things to different people," and for some it symbolizes "the spirit of the South." Colbert suggests back to Randolph that the flag is fun to some people, and Randolph remarks back that lynching was once considered "fun" in the South. Colbert humorously says he has to disagree with Randolph on that. Randolph (and all of the interviewees on that show) is a good sport. Oh sadly, but not surprisingly, Ben Jones served in the U.S. Congress.

1 comment:

Elaine said...

Well they don't have the clip online, so I was trying my best to describe it. One can choose not to read it, but anyway... Also, as funny and clever as Colbert is, I don't know if he can be called an actual news correspondent, though I suppose a lot of newspeople shouldn't be called such.