Jon Stewart changed everything: How “The Daily Show” revolutionized TV & revitalized the Democratic Party
In 2006, Tom Stoppard (our greatest living playwright if you haven’t heard) gave us "Rock ‘n’ Roll," a tale of personal conflict set amidst a political revolution. The play opens in late-'60s London as a piper (Pink Floyd’s Syd Barret) serenades a young girl from atop a garden wall. It ends in 1990 with the Stones playing Prague. Along the way, "Rock 'n' Roll" traces Czechoslovakia’s long road from Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring to Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution. As Stoppard tells it, musicians -- Dylan, the Stones, the Plastic People, the Velvet Underground --led the way; that rock-and-roll is apt to foster freedom because it is rebellious even when it isn’t political. He says it often works this way: artists leading politicians to democracy.
On Thursday, Jon Stewart, perhaps our greatest political satirist, bids us farewell, for now at least. No matter when he chose to go, it was bound to feel like the worst possible time. Stewart has spent 16 years pleading for a rebirth of democracy in America. Our national circumstances are, in a way not disimilar from those of the Czechs a generation ago: our culture more democratic than our democracy; our politicians silenced not by a communist dictatorship but by their own corruption. So we too look to our artists for political leadership.
