Book description
“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”— The New York Times In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. “Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”— Publishers Weekly
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Jon Stewart Looks Back With Sanity and/or Fear
In 2010, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a satirical rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., called the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. This was amid the Tea Party movement. Political emotions were running high. And Stewart ended the rally with a speech slamming the media for stoking the country’s divisions.
“But we live now in hard times, not end times,” he said. “And we can have animus and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.”
That rally has a Rosetta Stone quality to it now. Because what Stewart was describing has only gotten worse. Our divisions feel deeper and more dangerous.
So as we enter election week, I wanted to have a conversation with Stewart about some of the arcs he has traced in American politics since he first hosted “The Daily Show” in 1999. We discuss how the media has become increasingly segmented and polarized in the past 25 years, how that has affected politics, how he understands Tucker Carlson’s political transformation and whether his own politics have changed.
Note: The Washington Post is one of several news organizations mentioned in this conversation. We taped this interview before the recent controversy at the Washington Post over ending its practice of presidential endorsements -- a decision made by the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos.
This episode contains strong language.
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