I braved a few minutes of Cenk Uygur's new and probably temporary show on MSNBC the other night. I swear I almost felt sorry for him, and I unquestionably felt sorry for his guest, liberal Democrat Jan Schakowsky.
I never realized that The Cause, conspiring with pressure to fill network airtime, could impel a host to such utter inanities. To wit, Uygur asked Schakowsky -- and I kid you not, he actually asked this -- how she and her fellow Democrats would now, could now get progressive legislation through the House.
I froze in incredulity for the briefest moment, wondering if I had heard what I thought I just heard. Rep. Schakowsky stood similarly frozen on camera for what was perhaps the funniest, split-second double-take since Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First."
Although rapidly fleeting it was, this chuckling train wreck of a television moment also slowed time for those of us unmercifully involved, permitting seemingly expansive thoughts to intervene between question and answer. I recall thinking before Schakowsky replied that a Sam Rayburn or Rep. Lyndon Johnson would have simply responded: Are you fucking kidding me?
But Rep. Schakowsky is a generational part of that genteel species that knows cable news isn't really cable news; it's "pack" programming in which a smiling or snarling host-leader either shares fresh meat with friends or bows back and bares teeth at ideological intruders -- all in the tribal pack are warmly embraced, strangers are suspect, and hostiles are generally pre-banished.
As such, Schakowsky felt prohibited from saying what LBJ would have said; instead she paused momentarily and politely, a bit dazed, and then stuttered that maybe a few House Republicans would hear the angels and see the transformational light and start voting the progressive way -- or, a trifle more realistic, she added, was that she and her fellow Democrats would not, after all, be passing much progressive legislation through this ... uh ... right-winging, tea-partying, revolutionary Terror-Reigning House.
Now, I feel compelled to venture this much, at least, in defense of Cenk Uygur: He knew that. He had to know that. Please tell me that a grown man who can find his own way to MSNBC's studios already knew that progressive legislation has absolutely no hope of survival in this, the most ideologically violent, "executive"-opposing assemblage since the Rump Parliament.
But here's the thing ... the other thing: Cenk is a True Believer, for whom belief in the celestial Cause must always trump recognition of secular reality. As such, Cenk has acquired a following of abundantly likeminded, reality-denying True Believers who, being in characteristic possession of a frighteningly fawning level of "authoritarian-personality" attributes (they ain't only on the right), look up to their Cenk Uygurs as demigod fountains of eternal truths and utopian hopes that must be ruthlessly peddled and evangelically reinforced. No back-sliding revolution should ever be televised.
And that's what leads to comically idiotic questions wrapped in otherworldly stratospheres such as Mr. Uygur's the other day. The exuberant Struggle endures, even if blinkered beyond belief.