Fight The Power: Celebrity That Inspires
How Jon Stewart reminds us that artists can be valuable voices of dissent
(Photo Credit: UPI)
Good morning and thanks for spending a portion of your day with The Kerr Report.
Thirty years ago while an undergrad attending the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo., I went to see a speaker.
I dragged my roommate Todd along one night to listen to a man named Chuck D (real name Carlton Douglas Ridenhour.)
A few years removed from the film “Do The Right Thing,” a movie that made Chuck D and his hip-hop band, Public Enemy, famous for their groundbreaking song “Fight The Power,” I remember Jesse Auditorium being full that night.
(I had a cassette tape of the soundtrack from the film and played it in my dorm room constantly. Any guest walking down the aisle in Holmes Hall on Missouri’s campus that spring likely heard either a song from the Tom Petty album “Full Moon Fever” or were blasted out by “Fight the Power.”)
One late winter’s night in Columbia, Chuck D, that captivating, engrossing voice I’d heard on that song, stood some 20 yards away from me. And when he spoke live behind a podium, instead of on tape through sound speakers, he was as enthralling as when heard through my Sony Walkman headphones. Just not as loud.
What I recall three decades later, speaking in a measured, almost scholarly tone, is Chuck D talking about his life as a young person growing up in Long Island, New York in the 1960’s and 70’s. He was a bright young man looking for guidance, to receive mentorship. Most older black males at that time in his neighborhood were going into the army or got caught up in what he called the “system,” which often meant incarceration. With no role models to pattern behavior, Mr. and Mrs. Ridenhour taught their son to “be one.”
He became an artist. That was the way for the adolescent Carlton to express himself and rebel against what he saw as oppressive forces in his community.
Here’s a lyric and chorus from the song Carlton grew up to write as Chuck D titled “Fight The Power”:
From the heart
It's a start, a work of art
To revolutionize make a change nothing's strange
People, people we are the same
No we're not the same
'Cause we don't know the game
What we need is awareness, we can't get careless
You say what is this?
My beloved lets get down to business
Mental self defensive fitness
Don't rush the show
You gotta go for what you know
Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be
Lemme hear you sayFight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
We've got to fight the powers that be
Artists have used words, music and other forms of media to articulate what was happening in the culture at large well before Public Enemy recorded “Fight The Power”in the late 1980’s and for the three decades since. We, as citizens, have looked to cultural figures to lead the way out in times marked by instability and erosion of ethic.
We are currently in one of those cycles, with woke culture and overreaching public health policies stifling our ability to move forward.
We need leaders. Just this week, an unlikely one emerged—Jon Stewart.
Appearing on the Stephen Colbert show Monday night, the comedian and former host of “The Daily Show,” spoke truth to power in hilarious two-minute rant about COVID-19’s origins.
Here is the clip:
Having complete buy in to what Stewart said is not the point. It’s the fact someone like Stewart said what he said.
Stewart, like all of us, has had 15 months to form an opinion about Covid. He’s read everything he’s going to read and talked to the people he is going to talk to. He knows what he believes and has no allegiance to a corporate ideology or political party, just the truth as he sees it.
His argument: that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. There is mounting evidence that corroborates Stewart’s argument. There is mounting evidence that other theories were concocted to divert the public away from the likelihood the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
Comments from Stewart to Colbert:
Oh my god, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird!
I think we owe a debt of gratitude to science. Science has in many ways eased the suffering of this pandemic which was more than likely caused by science.
Of course, as a result of Stewart freely sharing his viewpoint, he has become a target of left-leaning opinionists, slamming and accusing him of manufacturing his comments as a desperate way out from his purgatorial state of irrelevancy, even questioning if he believes what he said.
The blow back is so predictable, it’s funny. Thought to be a well-groomed, institutionalized leftist commentator, Stewart broke rank and to the chagrin of his thought-to-be back-slapping comrades, gave ammunition to the Trump-supporters anxious to prove the former president right about the lab leak. They simply can’t believe he said what he said.
But he did say it and the party of science is reeling in their exposed hypocrisy—how science comes first except when it fails to protect ideology. Then just default to ideology.
An optimal outcome from Stewart’s comments—that it marks a sea change as it pertains to Covid and its politicization.
Artists are not bound by corporate shields, censored only by the limits of their imagination. They see what is happening, the stifling of creativity, and say, “this is ridiculous. Let’s punch back and get busy living and laughing.”
The more artists like Stewart use mainstream media platforms to question the status quo, the more it gets shared. Big Tech can’t censor it. The viral levers move too rapidly.
Will Stewart’s revolt trickle down to education and schools?
Not directly. Too many fingers in too many pots. And Illinois has the fattest cook and the most kitchens.
But what Stewart and others like him can be are examples of speaking truth to power, of using celebrity to inspire others to do the same.
Just as a rapper named Chuck D instructed to an auditorium of undergraduates three decades ago.
For story ideas, article comments/feedback, media inquiries and more, drop note to jon@jonjkerr.com, or @jonjkerr on Twitter.