And we are not powerless ...

Last night I learned that late night comic Jimmy Kimmel had been fired by Disney/ABC when I saw a friend's social media post: "we are canceling our subscription to Disney tonight!" WTF???

Apparently Kimmel had committed "wrong speech" about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Trump wanted the critical comedian gone and his hatchet man at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, put the screws to the cooperative media conglomerate.

Our household doesn't have a Disney subscription, so we can't cancel that. 

But tireless Jay Kuo, lawyer and human rights activist, pointed to Christopher Armitage's useful prescription for letting the corporate big boys know that people are outraged.

Here's Kuo's abbreviated summary:

... corporations only understand when their money is at risk.

That means we aren’t powerless. We can do at least four things to hurt them where it matters:

1. Cancel Disney+ and tell them why.
2. Call/email/mail those companies to complain.
3. Screenshot and tag advertisers asking why they support censorship.
4. Share this playbook with others.

There often comes a point where those in power become cocky and badly overreach, misreading the room and handing the opposition an opportunity. When voices from all sides of the political spectrum come together in condemnation, we know we have hit such a point.

Wading into the culture wars with full-on censorship and cancellations will backfire. Comedians like Kimmel and Colbert are beloved figures who speak hard truths in entertaining, accessible ways to millions. The fascist right has nothing like their star power, and it has no sense of irony or comedy, which is why it is so threatened by such figures. 

... The right has managed to take a national conversation about Kirk’s murder and turn it into one about authoritarian censorship. That’s a huge unforced error, and we should exploit it. 

If we care about free speech and blunting fascism, we must keep speaking. 

Darkly absurd

Tis the season of coping mechanisms for those of us made miserable by Donald Trump's resurgence and his traveling circus of grievance monkeys and aspiring alpha wolves. 

Lulu Garcia-Navarro  (gift article) offered a nice distraction with this interview with the HBO comedian and wise observer of human foibles, John Oliver. Interviewer's questions in this brief excerpt are in bold.

... nihilism is completely useless. The coward’s way out. So you work through that. And I have found, generally, that the light at the end of the tunnel — albeit that light might be smaller than you would like it to be ideally — is that there are activists making small, incremental progress on the ground, and that progress is really, really important....

Are you trying to make the world a better place? Because some people would say, “I just want to make people laugh and entertain them.” You seem to have a much bigger aim here. The most important thing to me — and to lots of people at the show — is to do this in service of writing really funny, weird jokes about interesting things. So that is our outcome. It’s not necessarily to make the world a better place. I’m not sure that comedy can do that. To a certain extent, sometimes it’s fiddling while Rome burns.

It seems to have made you uncomfortable that I’ve accused you of trying to make the world a better place. [Laughs.] This might be a hangup of being British. British people took a real stab at, if not making the world a better place, making it a more British place, and it didn’t go too well. So, yeah, you don’t want me involved in that.

... I guess comedy is the way I handle the world. So in the darkest moments of my life, I still find myself compelled to try and make jokes either to take the weight off some of what’s happening or sometimes to feel what’s happening a bit more. I find people employing comedy at moments of tragedy incredibly meaningful. I know some might find it glib or offensive. To me, it is the absolute opposite of that when done well. ...

Explain that to me. I love comedy so much. So, I do not see a distinction between how could you joke about this? For me, it’s more how could you not? How could you not tell jokes about a situation that is absolutely absurd? Darkly absurd, but absurd. And that would apply to the West Bank, too....

... Do you think it also gives people access to uncomfortable emotions? Probably. Look, I’m British, right? So my ability to deal with my emotions has been limited at best. The very fact that I’m telling you, Yeah, I find it better to laugh at things rather than, you know, feel them sincerely as a human being says something. ...

It seems to be so many of us come through this holiday season more than a little numb to the prospect of what's ahead. The numbness will pass when action seems possible ... meanwhile, the spectacle of MAGATs blowing apart is pretty funny.