"The mainstream-media 'puppet masters,' he said, want to 'smuggle their dangerous ideas across the open borders of your mind. I want to shut down those borders. I want to close your mind.'"
— Marantz, Andrew
Author
Date
November 20, 2017
Metaphor
"The mainstream-media 'puppet masters,' he said, want to 'smuggle their dangerous ideas across the open borders of your mind. I want to shut down those borders. I want to close your mind.'"
Metaphor in Context
The first episode of "The Colbert Report" included a monologue about "truthiness," a coinage so timely that it became Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. We're now in an even more confusing moment, and Klepper's first-episode manifesto was slightly muddled. The mainstream-media "puppet masters," he said, want to "smuggle their dangerous ideas across the open borders of your mind. I want to shut down those borders. I want to close your mind." It was clever, but a bit off target. Twitter is full of sycophantic pundits who see each of Trump's gaffes as a masterly move in a game of 4-D chess, but Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, and Jones aren't among them. For two decades, Jones's shtick played equally well on the far left and the far right. Then Trump came along, and Jones's brand shifted: less antiauthoritarianism, more Americana; less "Resist the police state," more "Blue lives matter." Jones's problem is not that his mind is closed. If anything, his mind is far too open.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Andrew Marantz, "Jordan Klepper's Comic Conspiracy," The New Yorker (November 20, 2017). <Link to The New Yorker>
Date of Entry
11/17/2017
