Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [98]
For Colbert, this was tantamount to Helmke’s “coming for our guns” and “infringement.” In fact, during a significant stretch of the ensuing examination, the man-child Colbert constantly resorted to “infringe, infringe, infringe” as his mantra of defense in response to Helmke’s patient attempts to explain the debate about the meaning of the constitutional right to bear arms. Later, after Colbert failed to goad Helmke into conceding that he’d use a gun to defend himself if Colbert came at him with a knife, Colbert himself admitted that a gun wouldn’t help him anyway “because I’m hopped up on screamers.”
Seemingly feeling that he was losing ground in the debate to the unflappable Helmke, Colbert eventually trotted out the ultimate weapon: Jesus. You see, we may insanely want to keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable persons. But, as Colbert noted, the problem with this stance is that many people thought Jesus was crazy. Colbert had finally found his trump card: “Now imagine how much more hopeful the story of the gospels would be if Jesus had a gun. You agree that the idea of Jesus with a gun is a good image? … I’m picturing it… . I had a great picture of Jesus with a pistol.”
Helmke couldn’t quite agree. For some reason, the image seemed discordant to him. So he whipped out his own trump card: James Brady, the person in whose honor the Brady Bill was named. Brady was an aide to Reagan. In 1981, John Hinckley, Jr. shot Brady in the head as he tried to assassinate Reagan. Although Brady survived, he was seriously and permanently injured.
Now usually Stephen Colbert the comedian wields his ironic wit not as a blunt instrument of cruelty but one of entertainment, therapy and indirect instruction. But there are moments when he reaches, and sometimes even crosses, a borderline of cruelty. It was at this point in his exchange with Helmke that he arrived at one:
How long is he (Brady) going to hold that up like ‘I know more about being shot than you do because I got shot’? Wouldn’t it take more courage to be shot and go, ‘no, I’m not going to infringe other people’s rights just because something bad happened to me.’ That would be bold… . (Brady’s being a hero is) just a card you’re playing to win an argument as opposed to listening to the issue here, which is people want guns.
Yes, if you’re juiced up on crank and fantasizing about Jesus holding a pistol, you might think that the fact that “people want guns” means that there shouldn’t be sane restrictions of any kind on our being able to have them. You also might be likely to say something you shouldn’t.
Comedians with less talent and heart might have rushed to conclude the interview at such a moment. To his credit, Colbert was as quick to perceive the overreach and pull back from it as he is to see an opening for comedy. Indeed, he turned it into one. The segment concluded with the hard-core but ultimately humane inquisitor ironically improvising a compelling case for gun control:
And if you say, hey, guns kill a lot of people: look at what happened at Virginia Tech; look at what happened at Columbine; look at our leaders who have been assassinated; look at how many children are killed every year by playing with guns that were not locked properly; look at how many couples kill each other; look at how many people in individual families are murdered by members of their own family; look at how more likely you are to be killed by a gun that you are keeping in your house than to be able to defend yourself; look at how hard it is even for policemen to defend themselves when they are attacked by someone with a weapon—I mean, I think people are tired of the ‘a lot of people have been killed by guns’ card.174
Checkmate.
ThreatDown: Taming the Bear Within
As Freud has taught us, it isn’t easy to find a healthy equilibrium where our animalistic desires are adequately met while we tend to the moral and social obligations that make possible the civilized community that we share. We