The Parodic-Travesty of Campaign Financing or Farce in Following the Money

Money has long been not only an accessory but an accomplice to politics in America--and vice versa. Furthermore, with the Supreme Court's decision to protect corporate speech as (individual) free speech in the political arena, we saw a powerful move to strengthen the collusion between corporations and campaign finance. As Andrew Cohen notes, such undertakings "no doubt [mark] the beginning of a new struggle between right and left, corporate and individual, government and the governed, which strikes at the core of our modern-day capitalistic democracy."

That struggle was played out, first in both Bill O'Reilly's and Glenn Beck's recent apologies for the Fox Newscorp decision to give $1 million to the Republican party and subsequent contentions of conspiracy between covert contributors to the Democratic party, and then on the satirical stage of "The Daily Show." Jon Stewart recently performed an already classic parody of Glenn Beck and his twisted logic. On August 18, Stewart qua Beck returned in another first-rate parodic, albeit terse, performance.



The topic: the parodic travesty of campaign financing.The target: Glenn Beck (and Bill O'Reilly, and the circuitous money trail of campaign financing, and Fox News, and the Republican Party, and...).

Campaign financing has long been a relatively clandestine enterprise. That's a $1 million (controversial) contribution has been so easily exposed is telling in itself, but Stewart parody tells more. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, "the process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of [a discourse] that are not otherwise included in...a given style. Parodic-travestying...introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique of the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and most importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fitted into a high and straightforward [language]." As Stewart demonstrates, the straightforwardness of what he parodies is actually quite laughable--perhaps even more so than than the outlandish connections O'Reilly and Beck attempt to make in implicating democrats in illegitimate political financing.

Still, a travesty is, understood simply, a burlesque (or grotesque or hyperbolic) imitation of a work or discourse. To say that travesty aligns with parody, itself an imitative and "doubled" rhetorical tactic, requires no sleight of hand, which is why Stewart's contention that "[The $1 million donation] is travesty" is all the more a propos. As Hari Sevugan, secretary of the DNC, notes, "Any pretense that may have existed about the ties between Fox News and the Republican Party has been violently ripped away." Adds Stewart, "I really think, if anything, the Republicans should be paying Fox News millions and millions of dollars, not the other way around." This after crude mockeries of Beck's demeanor and hilariously on point depictions of his near-salacious intrigue with his own faulty reasoning.

Campaign financing has long been "corrupt." What is more, it is axiomatic, indeed proverbial at this point, that to discern the nature of power one need only follow the money. But there is another parody, I think, that says something about a pot calling a kettle...you get the idea. Such is why what is revealed, what is concealed: travesty troubles, parody procures.

Photo credits: Indecisionforever.com.