You may remember the evening of Sept. 29, 2001. On that evening, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Saturday Night Live. It was 18 days after the September 11 attacks. This appearance of the mayor of New York — who had spent almost three weeks comforting a shaken nation, mourning with families of the murdered, and leading — was widely considered a signal: We could laugh again. We needed to laugh. Heaven knows, Giuliani must have needed it as much as anyone.
Laughter can be a beautiful thing, a great gift in difficult times. A way to reach those who might not otherwise respond to you or your message. Laughter can also be something vicious, coming from a very dark place.
The latter is what enveloped our nation’s capital at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. Jokes about our former president and vice president. Jokes about interrogation. Jokes about gay marriage. Jokes about abstinence. Jokes about terrorism. Jokes about addiction. Jokes about abortion and embryo destruction. And the president of the United States was the headliner, responsible for some but not all of the shamefulness of the night.
The last time I was at the Naval Observatory was in December, at the then vice president’s Christmas party. Toward the back of the room was a screen displaying photos. There was humor in them — Dick Cheney wearing a Darth Vader mask — but they also documented what was overwhelmingly present in the eight years of the Bush presidency: We are at war. We are in a war not of our choosing. And the responsibility to protect and defend America weighed heavily on our elected leaders each day.
Cheney is on the sidelines now, and there is a new party in town. The new president, insulting the administration before him, told us in his inaugural that he was going to put away childish things.
But even the children were not left out of the jokes. President Obama used his daughters to make light of Air Force One’s Lower Manhattan flyover. Before Saturday night, there was no better visual symbol of this administration’s September 10 policy blindness. Air Force One might as well have been flying a banner that read “We Don’t Get It.” Obama’s joke about the incident could be considered the banner.
Following the president, Wanda Sykes said:
Mr. President . . . you’ve had your fair share of critics. . . . Rush Limbaugh, one of your big critics, boy — Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. So you’re saying, “I hope America fails.” You’re like, “I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs, or our soldiers in Iraq.” He just wants our country to fail.
To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything differently than Osama bin Laden is saying. You know you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight.
Too much?
You’re laughing inside, I know you’re laughing.
Rush Limbaugh: “I hope the country fails.” I hope his kidneys fail, how about that?
He needs a waterboarding, that’s what he needs.
And some of the most prominent luminaries in Washington politics, media, and popular culture laughed. You don’t have to be a “dittohead” to know that is shameful (and it would be just as shameful if the rant were about a left-wing host, at a right-wing gala).
But Sykes wasn’t the core problem, as tasteless and awful as her jokes were. I keep going back to Sasha and Malia. The president used his daughters, two days after he let one of his staff take the fall for his administration’s use of everyone in Lower Manhattan and along the Hudson River on a clear morning as a prop in the Obama show. Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered on a day not unlike that one, and his administration needlessly freaked out those who witnessed it. And he’s laughing.
Of course, that was his job Saturday night. To go to the Reagan Hilton and entertain the media and Hollywood audience. Presumably the crowd likes him (he joked about this too) and hates Rush. He knew what the crowd wanted and ran with it. It was unpresidential when Bush did that (remember looking for weapons of mass destruction at the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner?) and it’s unpresidential when Obama does it. And it’s downright shameful when done with the meanspiritedness that was on display Saturday night.
Somehow Dick Cheney, who continues to stand athwart unseriousness yelling “Stop,” is the enemy. Somehow Rush Limbaugh, conservative stalwart, the embodiment of capitalist success, a man who has struggled with adversity with an inspiring humility, is someone we’re to disdain so much as to laugh at the prospect of his kidneys’ failing. Somehow we are supposed to be pining for one of the nastiest men on television to do something that everyone laughing at the joke presumably considers torture to Sean Hannity, who, agree with him or not, is the happiest of warriors compared with Keith Olbermann.
The reviews of the president Saturday night were good, I keep hearing. But what happened Saturday night was not right. The same liberal elite that has brought us hate-crimes laws and speech codes spewed real venom. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is below the president, whoever he is (I thought this when Bush was president and I think it even more today). But that dinner Saturday night –in the jokes the president of the United States of America was willing to make and to laugh at — was beneath America.