Barlow on Colbert Report
John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead songwriter and Sublette County rancher, will appear on “The Colbert Report” tonight on Comedy Central.
Barlow is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group devoted to protecting freedom in cyberspace.
EFF recently joined a lawsuit against Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, over a video parody of “The Colbert Report” posted on YouTube. Viacom had the clip, titled “Stop the Falsiness” and produced by MoveOn.org and Brave New Films, taken down from the site.
Former EFF staffer and Jackson bard/freelancer Dennis Derryberry passed along the following letter from Barlow inviting friends to watch the show. An unlikely (and conflicted) Wyoming Republican, Barlow also shares some sharp political insight.
Here’s a snippet:
For one thing, you ironists ought to enjoy the sight of someone who looks, talks, and behaves like a Republican, but isn’t, interviewing someone who fits none of the contemporary Republican stereotypes,
but is.
For those lacking TV reception, Comedy Central’s Motherload site ought to have a clip of tonight’s show posted in a couple of days.
Here’s Barlow:
TWO WHITE GUYS SITTING AROUND TALKIN’
Since I don’t watch television — not even the “good” stuff — I’d never heard of Steven Colbert until he soared into my consciousness with what I think was the bravest act of humor since Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal.” (In this essay, Swift, a compassionate Englishman, suggested that the Irish might address this famine bother they were experiencing by eating a few of their own children, of which most of them had in rather greater abundance than potatoes.)
I refer to Mr. Colbert’s astonishing address to the White House Press Corps (most of them too scared to laugh) during their annual dinner last April 29. If Congress conferred medals for courage in the service of dark laughter — which, although it’s a good idea, the current Democrat-controlled Congress is even less likely to do — they’d have no choice but to give Steven Colbert the Congressional Medal of Humor with oak leaves and clusters.
I mean this guy eats dinner seated between George and Laura Bush and then gets up to the podium and compares the Bush administration to the Hindenberg! (If you haven’t seen it before, I strongly recommend that you watch this video. If you do, observe the weird displacement of The Decider’s head in relation to his body over the course of the address. I didn’t know cervical vertebrae could do that.)
Anyway, this speech made me a devout Steven Colbert fan. He didn’t convince me to start watching television, but he did convince me that if I were to watch television, it would be mostly so I could watch him and his kind (if he has one).
Turns out my next opportunity to watch him will be at close range. He is interviewing me on his show tonight.
I think it will air at around 11:30 pm in a lot of places, but I really have no idea when it might be on in your area. Those of you who still navigate The Vast Wasteland probably know how to find it. If you don’t watch enough television to have developed such tracking skills, don’t start now on my account. It’s not worth the risk. You can maybe catch it later on YouTube.
With any luck, it will be worth catching. I don’t know what he wants to talk with me about. (Though I kind of doubt that he wants to talk about EFF’s recent legal intervention when The Colbert Report was trying to get a MoveOn parody of the show stricken from YouTube.)
When I asked about the topic, the staffer said, “everything.” Ah, television. An environment where they think you can cover EVERYTHING inside of six minutes. Describe the Universe. Give two examples. Break for a commercial.
We won’t accomplish such a feat as that, but it could be pretty good anyway. For one thing, you ironists ought to enjoy the sight of someone who looks, talks, and behaves like a Republican, but isn’t, interviewing someone who fits none of the contemporary Republican stereotypes,
but is.I tried being a Democrat for a year. Hated it. I traded my sense of humor for sanctimony and gutless indignation. I was nearly overcome with impulses to save people from themselves, using force if necessary. I found myself becoming hysterical, brittle, and cowardly.
I am not a comfortable Republican — and I’m no Republican at all if George W. Bush is to be the measure of the GOP’s beliefs from this point forward, but I do have balls. So I ended up switching back. I may be the last Republican who believes that the party stands for limited government, personal freedom, prudent fiscal policies, genuinely free markets, and a deep wariness of foreign military adventures. Just as I didn’t flee my country when I saw it being taken over by religious zealots, plutocrats, fratboy incompetents and make-believe soldiers, I won’t flee my party on the same grounds either. (Though I’m starting to think that there is a grand new party waiting to be born in the space vacated by these latter-day Republicans.)
I strongly suspect that when Mr. Colbert is just kicking around the house, his ideology and cultural style differs from what his persona projects on-screen. Nevertheless, I have decided to take him at face value and contest him as I would his “mentor” Bill O’Reilly. In fact, I will take him on as the very sort of pious, closeted gay fascist who decided to become active in the GOP when he learned that poor people and weirdos could actually vote and that the Episcopalian church didn’t field political candidates. I have even prepared a defense of wild, marauding bears. So it should be fun.
Anyway, I probably won’t see you tonight, but you stand a good chance of seeing me.
Yippie-ti-yo,
Barlow
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To read Planet Jackson Hole’s 2005 interview with Barlow, click here.
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