Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [103]
On November 1st, 2007, less than two and half weeks into Colbert’s historic bid for the U.S. Presidency, the South Carolina Democratic Party Executive Council voted thirteen to three to prevent Mr. Colbert from appearing on the ballot. “The general sense of the council was that he wasn’t a serious candidate and that was why he wasn’t selected to be on the ballot,” said John Werner, the director of the council. The sheep had spoken. The super-man had been held down, just as Nietzsche had predicted.
Well, “perhaps the Council was right,” a godless liberal might object. What a silly objection. Obviously, if Mr. Colbert was not serious, he would not have paid the $2,500 required to run in the first place! “He was only trying to draw attention to himself,” they might whine. But if he did not actually want to be President, he would not have sought election … think, Nation! But, we cannot expect logic like that from sheep, now can we?
Or, how about this: Did the council members bother to run themselves? No, of course not. Like all sheep, they sought only to prevent others from gaining power because they know they cannot attain it themselves. The Council feared Mr. Colbert’s success because they knew they couldn’t match it. In short, that council in South Carolina stopped Mr. Colbert from being on the ballot not because they truly believed that he didn’t want or deserve to be on the ballot, but because they knew how much better than them he really is!
What Mr. Colbert Got Right and Nietzsche Got Wrong
We have established that Nietzsche was pretty right about one thing. It does seem that when a super-man appears, the weaker resent him and try to make it bad to be a super-man. What’s happened to our super-man is a prime example.
But Nietzsche also makes at least one big mistake. He argues that Christianity epitomizes this slave morality. First off, he claims that, “God is Dead.” Then he says that God is an idea that we created to popularize the slave morality. This is clearly wrong. God can’t be dead. How else could Moses have spoken to him? And surely it’s wrong to say that Christianity is a religion for the weak, because we know God isn’t weak. If you read the Bible—and obviously Nietzsche didn’t—you know that God goes around being strong all the time! How weak can you be when you turn people into salt, burn cities to the ground, and open the Earth to swallow people whole? Those of you philosophical-types probably have some issues with this argument, but you had your time already.
Clearly if Nietzsche had really thought about it, he would have realized what the slave morality is actually epitomized by—the Liberal Media. As Mr. Colbert points out often on his show, the liberals in the media spend much of their time trying to corrupt our young people with their ideas of weakness. They talk about “openmindedness” and “dialogue,” but what is really happening is that they are trying to make weenies of us all. For example, since they are not strong enough to become super-men themselves, they try to make us feel bad about the war on terror. Stephen Colbert tells us that we should bring the war to them! But the Liberal Media is too weak for that. So weak, in fact, that they try to make us think that war is a bad thing. To quote Mr. Colbert, “The greatest threat facing America today—next to voter fraud, the Western Pinebark Beetle, and the memory foam mattress—is the national news media” (I Am America, p. 152).
Now, Nietzsche may have failed to realize that it wouldn’t be Christianity, but Liberal Media, that would be responsible for the proliferation of the values of the weak when the man of the future—the super-man—finally arose. But Nietzsche was formidable enough