Author: Ophelia Benson

So Bush wasn’t all that pleased and flattered by the attentions of Stephen Colbert. Huh. I thought he was supposed to have such a great sense of humour – I thought he was supposed to be such a kidder. (He was awfully funny about Tanya Faye Tucker pleading for clemency, and there was that great joke about Trent Lott’s front porch. He’s a funny guy. Gets it from his mother, apparently – those jokes about the good life at the Houston astrodome were real thigh-slappers.) But apparently he looked more as if he had a mouthful of bleach.

Mr. President and first lady, my name is Stephen Colbert and it’s my privilege tonight to celebrate this president. He’s not so different, he and I. We both get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right, sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say, “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.

Well, I think that’s funny. I’ve heard more than enough drivel like that to find mockery of it pretty funny. Bush needs some vitamins or something.

I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers, and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message that, no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world…But I just have one beef, ma’am. I’m sorry, but this reading initiative. I’ve never been a fan of books. I don’t trust them. They’re all fact, no heart. I mean, they’re elitist, telling us what is or isn’t true, what did or didn’t happen.

Yep. Anti-gut, that’s what they are.

The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man’s beliefs never will.

That one’s more like straightforward reportage than a joke.

Another one of those too-easy marks, but I can’t let it go. I never can. I’m bad that way. [voice rising to a shriek] I just can’t let anything go! It’s Giles Fraser daydreaming again.

What is fascinating about the ill-fated combination of the BNP and Christian Voice is that it demonstrates how deeply resistant Christianity is to all forms of racism. It has not always been apparent that this was the case. After all, Christianity had a hand in slavery and apartheid.

Sorry, people of Putney, but I find that hilarious. It has not always been apparent that Christianity is deeply resistant to all forms of racism. Why? Because it had a hand in slavery – meaning, for not just a few minutes or a week or two or fifty years but centuries, official Christianity and most of its practitioners slept soundly every night and ate a good dinner every noon despite the presence of slavery in their midst, sometimes so in their midst that it raised and cooked the good dinner and generated the wealth that paid for the fluffy pillows and the houses that sheltered them. But nevertheless it was (because it is) the case that Christianity is deeply resistant to all forms of racism. This tranquil ability to live happily and prosperously right alongside it and often right off it, with whippings and overwork and broken-up families all complete, was a mere appearance, you see; the resistance was the reality. A deeply buried, hidden, undetectable reality, to be sure, kind of like the structure of the atom, but a reality all the same. Only for a long, long, long time, while generations of slaves were born and lived crappy lives and died, this hidden fact was not apparent. These things take time, you know. The apparent does not always become apparent just right away – sometimes it takes thousands of years. But finally the mills of god deliver the goods, and they do it right around the time that modern compassionate vicars who think slavery is a bad idea are on hand to look at the view. Then lo! the vicar looks at the view, and he sees the Christianity of his own day, and he sees a religion that is deeply resistant to all forms of racism – not just at the moment, contingently, but of its essence, and for all time – only not in a way that is apparent.

But Christianity also played a decisive role in the dismantling of both. For every bigot wanting to exploit Christianity in the service of racist ideology, there is a Wilberforce or a Tutu reminding Christians of what’s in the Bible.

Oh well that’s fine then. Christianity propped slavery up for a few centuries, and then finally when it got its wits together, it inspired a tiny minority of Christians to think slavery was a bad idea. And as for the second sentence – bullshit! Are there in fact as many Tutus as there are racist bigots? Of course not. Racist bigots are a dime a dozen, and Tutus are not. So what does he mean by saying their numbers are exactly equivalent? Nothing, he just wasn’t thinking, that’s all; he wanted to say what sounded good and he didn’t think about his own meaning.

Don’t get me wrong; that’s not to say it’s not admirable and moving when religion does stiffen people’s resistance to racism and other injustice. It’s just to say that ‘apparent’ lack of resistance to racism is something more than mere appearance. It’s the genuine article.

This is very funny. At least I think so. Apparently what it is, is a blog set up by an English teacher at a small US college (or perhaps university), where students are supposed to post as part of their coursework. Actually that’s not funny; given the level of difficulty of what they’re doing and the fact that this is a college or even a university, it’s bottomlessly depressing; given the fact that some of them are seniors and juniors, it’s – oh never mind. Anyway, their first assignment was to post urls of five misleading websites and explain why they are misleading. Well (you’ll have realized where I’m going with this) – guess who made the cut! I’m so proud. The others are just obvious choices like weight-loss sites and diploma mills and sites that give you free money, but with the last item we hit pay dirt – we hit a really, genuinely, bafflingly misleading site. Misleading not because it pretends it can make you lose 200 pounds in a week or because it’s going to tell you how to make millions of dollars with just a spoon and a Jack Russell terrier – no, that’s kid stuff, this site is misleading because for one thing what the hell is the name supposed to mean?! What butterflies? Where? I don’t see any fokkin butterflies! And what’s with the wheels bit? And what is all this stuff, and what are they trying to do, and where am I?

This site is misleading because its title is butterflies but it talks about issues other than butterflies. The information doesn’t seem legitimate. Topics aren’t clear to me. It seems that this website is based on opinions and not real facts. Not sure what this website is trying to accomplish. The look of the website isn’t appealing and not very clear as to where I should go. It has links to other sites but I don’t know if I would trust the information given.

Very true. Why do people do that? Have titles with words in them but talk about issues other than those words? And information that doesn’t seem legitimate? It’s puzzling.

Mind you, it’s also puzzling that a bit of writing that brief and with such short, clause-free sentences (and such minimal research and sub-minimal thought) should constitute an acceptable assignment in a college English class, but so it is.