The Daily Show and DaVinci Code Phenomena

"....there's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear..." So begins Buffalo Springfield's counter-culture song 'For What it's Worth' - one of the most poignant protest songs to come out of the Vietnam era. Of course, this was a political anthem during a baby boomer period of rebellion against authority. Those lines, however, also have merit in other facets of the pop culture arena.

Mainstream media (and academia) is under fire for many good reasons. To a liberal, it's under the control of 'right-wing' media moguls. To conservatives, the 'left wing' bias is blatantly clear for anyone who cares to see or admit.

Regardless of who is getting the perceived shaft, what we have on the air is pagan socialism. What I mean by pagan is that journalists don't have a preference or a clue on what side of the political spectrum they lie. This can be a good thing as it implies a certain level of objectivity. Their jobs are to report the facts, but they have allowed their perceptions to cloud their craft.

Then again, some claim too much objectivity is not good either - please see Gonzo journalism.

It has also been charged that within the walls of academia true intellectual discourse has been watered down to politically correct norms. On both fronts, they are, in sum, anti-intellectual. A strong case can be made that liberalism remains on top within both academic circles and the media.

There are some people; however, who are not interested in what is going on in the mainstream (however you choose to define 'mainstream'). They are seeking other sources of information. Not sure of who and what to believe, they navigate through the network of blogs and alternative (the term alternative is also confusing now) sources in search of something, anything. If they can't get it on the local news then they'll get it somewhere. The fight between the ideological philosophies is so fierce and ferocious people have simply tuned out to both sides and looked for another alternative.

Enter Jon Stewart -The modern Roman political satirist. It comes to no surprise that many young adults now use The Daily Show as a source. The Daily Show is witty and comedic in its orientation and is a reflection, like all solid satire, of human nature in general. The existence of satire proves that a society is free to examine itself without fear of persecution. This is healthy.

The Da Vinci Code, for its part, by Dan Brown is a best selling book that is basically an off-shoot of other books about unlocking the truth about Jesus and the existence of secret societies. One of, if not the first, book of this genre was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. To their credit, these men did not try and pass their book as historical fact. Instead, they positioned it as investigative journalism. To be read at a leisurely distance but not to be taken as an academic work of art. This is not what's happening with The Da Vinci Code.

There is, however, an underlying dark lining to all this. It comes as no coincidence that these two genres are colliding and intertwining when it comes to people discussing contemporary issues. Both fill a void for people searching for answers to what seems to be fantastic issues. They are many things to many people who look for something they want to believe.

People are mistakenly taking these works for serious history. It's not uncommon for people to take The DaVinci Code as absolute fact. The Daily Show, for its part, is not real journalism. To accept it as such is dangerous and reveals how distorted we have become in prioritizing who we trust to filter information to us. Jon Stewart is no more a journalist than anybody who keeps a blog is. He is. Like all comedians before him, a social commentator. He chooses comedy to interpret what he sees. As long as we do not cross this line it will not harm us intellectually.

It's the same scenario, to cite another example, with the editing witchcraft of Michael Moore. Remarkably, Moore has managed to invent a 'I have the truth' market in such a way that it easily fits into various genres- documentary, satire, comedy etc. In the end, this is the genius of his work. Of course, he's none of these. It's just fiction. He takes some truths and reinvents them for contemporary consumption for a contemporary mindset - what I call irresponsible revisionism.

He reveals nothing of supreme value (once one truly ponders upon it) except to have us deal with issues that have been placed on steroids by his trompe d'oeil. To be clear, I do not classify Jon Stewart in with Michael Moore. There's a world of subtle differences between the two. But this is not the topic of discussion here.

Historian Martin Kemp wrote in 'Leonardo' a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, in commenting Brown's 'Code'; (my italics) '....in the service of fiction, such unfounded 'facts' are fine, as history they perpetuate nonsense. The problem with Brown's 'Code' is not its invention of 'truth' (much like Moore); but that it has been taken seriously by those who cannot recognize fiction as fiction.'

I'll close with Francis Bacon from Novum Organum. In his work, he identified four perceived obstacles to scientific progress. One of them was Idols of the Market Place. It can also be called Idols of the Media, according to author Martin Seymour-Smith: Bacon declares "People are led, through "daily intercourse and association," into "numberless empty controversies and idle fancies." This, as I have personally stressed time and again, includes the abnormal fascination we hold for celebrities and their lives and opinions. Not to mention the interest in 'how-to' books. Very few people know how to distinguish between a great film as art and a good film as a product. With all the sensationalism, it's no wonder we hardly see any great scripts or writing anymore. By extension, we can also include the phenomena known as 'Oprah' and 'Dr.Phil'.

All this serves to distract us from the realities of our lives and remove from us the ability to exercise our minds properly. Shows like Oprah simply exist to tell us of what we already know but refuse to submit to. We have become so removed from the 'good stuff' in life that we need Dr. Phil and Oprah or other pop culture 'saviours' to set us back 'straight'. In this light, all are part of a vicious cycle.

As a true satirist, Karl Kraus once said "To know nothing and be able to express it!" Imagine, Bacon wrote his dictum in the 17th century and still found relevance in Kraus' words.