Review of reviews:?Books

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke

by Russell L. Peterson

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Jay Leno is a threat to democracy, says American Studies professor Russell L. Peterson. Every weeknight, the host of TV’s most popular late-night talk show bounds onstage in his Burbank studio and directs a barrage of pillowy jabs at our leading public officials. Boy, is John McCain old. Golly, President Bush sure is inarticulate. And did anyone in the audience forget at any point today that Hillary Clinton’s husband has libido-control issues? Leno isn’t the lone offender, Peterson says. David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and the cast of Saturday Night Live traffic in the same numbing political humor. Their jokes merely repackage things we already know—or think we know—about our leaders. Nothing’s at stake.

Peterson isn’t arguing that comedians should give politicians a free ride, said Troy Patterson in Slate.com. What Peterson would like to see more of is real political satire, an art distinguished by its desire to advance a moral argument and its willingness to take sides. Peterson, a former nightclub comic himself, has written a book “so smart, supple, and frisky that it instantly stands as required reading for every aspiring critic in the country.” Peterson’s worries about the power of softball comedy can’t be easily dismissed, said Dinesh Ramde in the Associated Press. When we think back to George H.W. Bush’s performance as president, many of us flash first to Dana Carvey’s lovable impersonation rather than to any of the senior Bush’s actual policies. Late-night comedians really do affect how we view our leaders, and the message we receive is that none is worthy of respect, or even of opposition.

“Part of the fun of Strange Bedfellows is matching up your own likes and dislikes with the author’s,” said Louis Bayard in Salon.com. His antipathy for Dennis Miller seems merely personal, but it makes sense that he applauds Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as lonely defenders of comedy’s watchdog function. There’s a weakness in Peterson’s argument, though, that he never addresses. Leno, the supposed enemy, is also the audience favorite, while Stewart and Colbert represent only a “small and brainy” white elite. Is he implying that, since the masses choose Leno, non-elites are “just too dumb to be trusted with democracy?”

In 1976, a century-old movement to engineer global population growth nearly achieved its ambitions, says historian Matthew Connelly. That year, the government of India bulldozed urban slums and offered new homes only to the displaced adults who agreed to be sterilized. Millions of Muslims and Hindus in the countryside succumbed under similar coercion. The World Bank and its American president cheered these initiatives, while powerful U.S.-based nonprofits remained tellingly silent. Some of those population-control organizations had been founded only decades earlier by people who believed that the unchecked growth of the “unfit” was the foremost threat to civilization. All believed that the world’s wealthier societies had a right and obligation to suppress birth rates among the poor.

India’s harsh crackdown on fertility wound up being a turning point, said Martin Morse Wooster in The Wall Street Journal. Though Western experts provided technical assistance a few years later, when China began requiring abortions for women who had already had one child, a popular backlash against population-control efforts was taking root. As Connelly points out, the “pashas” of the population-control movement finally lost power when Ronald Reagan’s administration ended funding to all international organizations that subsidized abortions. Still, Connelly’s “disturbing and compelling” history of the movement is “a cautionary tale about the future,” said Lori Valigra in The Christian Science Monitor. He warns that pressures created by global warming and genetic engineering could soon produce a new generation of overzealous population managers.

Connelly focuses too much on exposing the arrogance of “a privileged slice” of the U.S.-based nonprofit sector, said Reihan Salam in The New York Sun. He never discusses some of the grandest follies among 20th-century population-control campaigns, simply because the U.S. had no role. He also fails to mention that today’s population planners have “learned from past mistakes,” said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. Creating educational opportunities for girls is now understood to be “the single most effective means of contraception in poor countries,” and nothing but good can come from that effort. While old-school planners deserve criticism, Fatal Misconception reads like a history of doctors that disparages bloodletting without acknowledging that medical professionals “are pretty handy people to have around today.”