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shirking responsibilities, when it comes to race relations, by accident. This general pattern runs through much of Colbert’s comedy in the form of Stephen’s commitment to truthiness. Asserting that there is no truth beyond truthiness, no matter of fact beyond what feels like fact, is the ultimate expression of claiming rights while shirking responsibilities. Why? Because truthiness justifies running roughshod over the complexities of the real world. (Go ahead and ignore that which doesn’t agree with you. It’s all just truthiness anyway!) Yet at the same time, it muddies our understanding of rights. It seems arbitrary that we should confer rights on those that take the time to try and understand complex situations like when and why someone else is liable to be offended by something that we say. (Again: it’s all just truthiness anyway.)

In the closing pages of his book, Randall Kennedy says that though racial relations are complex, we should not allow individuals to use the “rhetoric of complexity” to cover the misconduct of racists (Nigger, p. 138). Just because it’s not clear whether or not David Howard’s use of the term “niggardly” is really racist does not mean there aren’t other uses that clearly are. If the way I’ve characterized truthiness in the last paragraph is correct, truthiness is a crystallization of the rhetoric of complexity.

So here’s the lesson. Politicians, pundits, and powerbrokers don’t go around talking about truthiness. They don’t go around referring to their guts. But they’re well-versed in the rhetoric of complexity and in how to use it to deny responsibility. “Global climate change, affordable health care, social justice for all peoples, these are important issues,” they’ll say. “But they are complex. That’s why we see so little progress being made on them!” And yet, somehow, the status quo on these issues always seems to favor the rich and powerful. Those who have figured out how to game the system are always telling the rest of us how complicated and ungameable the system is.

But as I think our discussion of Stephen Colbert’s attitudes toward race show, even if the issues are complex—perhaps even irresolvable—certain attitudes and actions are clearly better than others to the extent that they reflect an honest effort to understand the complexities. If truthiness is the grasping at simplicity in the face of complexity, then we should reject it as incompatible with our responsibilities as rational human beings. This is true not only in our public officials but in ourselves as well. Only if we keep our eyes open to the complexity of the issues facing us can we begin to hope to deal with them. Such, anyway, is the philosophy of Stephen Colbert.190

15

The Wealth of Colbert Nations

KURT SMITH

Stephen Colbert has become America’s favorite right-wing enthusiast and egomaniacal talk-show host. Fanatical follower of the capitalist prophet Milton Freidman, Stephen holds the free market to be sacrosanct. “The market is a dangerous and destructive God,” he says.

On a slightly different rendering, Stephen conceives participation in the free market as being akin to something like a soul’s participation in the Beatific Vision, depicted by Dante in his Paradisio. Looked at this way, since privatization is what makes one a participant in the holy marketplace, those who do not participate in the “private sector” are not in communion with the one true God. The aim of the free market zealot, then, is to convert all comers by fire if need be, and to transform them into participants of the sacred private sector.

Healthcare was the zealot’s most recent convert, almost burned beyond recognition by the priests of the free market who before setting it aflame accused it of being an instrument of socialism. Education has more than once been scrutinized by the inquisition of the far right and now finds itself tied to the stake. In what follows, I want to challenge the view that tells us that not only must higher education answer to the priests of the free market, but must be converted (privatized)