Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [125]
Thanks, Mr. Colbert! As for Stephen’s urging of supply-side epistemology, the privatizing of higher education, the making of profit over service to the public good—that is, Stephen’s vision of unceasing happy endings of those Reaganite free-market invisible hand-jobs … thanks, but no thanks. But if you must persist, Stephen, might I suggest Senator Larry Craig or former House member Mark Foley. No doubt, they would be in the market for such a promising vision.
16
Freedom Isn’t Free, but Freem Is
MICHAEL F. PATTON, JR. and SAMANTHA WEBB
It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
—Dick Cheney
You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
—Robert Frost
The Colbert Report’s opening sequence of scrolling words intended to define the host’s outstanding qualities has been a distinctive feature of the show since it premiered. On January 9th, 2007,202 the opening sequence flashed a made-up word that subsequently came to define the post-9/11 American moment: freem.
As Colbert reportedly explained it to an audience member, freem means “freedom without the do.”203 What makes this definition so rich is the way it turns on its head the traditional American rhetoric of freedom—that it’s something Americans must vigilantly guard, continually fight for and, more recently, actively spread around the world. Accordingly, the logic of freem suggests that no one needs to do anything to preserve freedom. It celebrates inactivity, particularly as it defines television viewers who (in the ironic imaginary of the show) cheered on the Bush Administration as they took the country to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, as they chipped away at civil liberties, and as they eroded U.S. standing in the world.
But there’s more to freem than this self-reflexive commentary on armchair generals and pundits, of whom the Colbert Nation is the parodic embodiment. In rejecting doing as essential to the preservation of freedom, freem encapsulates President Bush’s call to action after 9/11: “go shopping.” That call, obviously designed to protect segments of the economy and echoed by other world leaders, reflected a conception of the consumer as patriotic actor. The Colbert Report’s freem discloses the near total appropriation of the American rhetoric of freedom by American consumerism, in which consuming everything from goods and services to a television program is identical to acting.
But Colbert goes further than perhaps even George W. Bush would have dared. Although freem didn’t debut until 2007, the first episode of The Colbert Report laid the groundwork for the word’s logic. Colbert dedicated the show to his viewers, “the heroes,” clearly invoking all of the post-9/11 resonance of the term. He declared that “the heroes” can make a difference in the world by watching his show. In doing so, Colbert turned that most passive of activities, watching TV, into an act of patriotism akin to the work performed by firefighters, policemen, Ground Zero crews, and U.S. military personnel. And he did so simply by calling it one. Truthiness indeed!
In what follows, we’ll unpack the logic of freem in terms of its implications for American consumer practices of all kinds in the post-9/11 cultural moment. We’ll also raise questions about whether The Colbert Report implicitly offers a sustained critique of the kind of mindless yet rampant consumerism that menaces our planet, or whether, as a television show owned by a giant media