The YouTube Moment came at the end, when Jon Stewart devoted about 10 or 15 minutes to a serious speech. He spoke about how, unlike what you see on cable TV news and in Washington politics, Americans are mostly people who work together to solve problems.

On a windblown stage on a sunny afternoon, Stewart tried to make himself the voice of reason in American media. I think he succeeded, but in doing so I’m worried he ignored the role that passion—irrational, rude, confrontational passion—plays in making American work.

During his speech, Stewart played some footage of cars lining up for the Holland Lincoln Tunnel and used it as a symbol for America: People of all different backgrounds lining up and taking their turns to get through the darkness. Stewart noted there is the occasional driver who comes up on the shoulder and cuts people off, but that person is rare and scorned—not hired as an analyst. Stewart identified two problems that cause people to mistrust their fellow “drivers”: Cable television and Washington politics. (Of course, Stewart owes his success to both. His show airs on cable, and a large part of his material comes from ribbing politicians.)

I get Stewart’s point about how we all need to respect one another’s differences. But is the Lincoln Tunnel the America we want? A nation sitting in traffic, waiting patiently in the face of problems? Or do we want a place where people get fired up? This country is not just about solving things. It’s about inventing things. Our greatest writers, architects, engineers and businesspeople did not just set out to make improvements, they set out to create something awesome, to get famous, to make money. Some of the most beloved Americans left behind a trail of hurt feelings and enemies. Thomas Edison did not wait patiently in line for cars at the tunnel. (OK, literally he took the train and the ferry over from Jersey, since the tunnel wasn’t built yet.) He behaved totally unreasonably and irrationally, screwing his investors, taking credit where it wasn’t earned, flattening his competitors, and in doing so managed to bring electric lights to the masses. If he had been a rational man, a large part of the American story would have unfolded more slowly.

Stewart’s call for reason is right on if we’re limiting the conversation to politics. Our political leaders have strayed into dangerous territory lately with statements that slander Muslims and immigrants. Cable news is bad for rational discourse (but probably no worse than the pamphlets, newspapers, rallies and party machines in the last century).

Outside of politics, though, there’s a need for irrational actors. If Stewart himself had followed his own advice—shown restraint, respected everyone—his career probably wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is now, and the millions of people who enjoy his entertainment would have missed out. Sometimes you have to piss people off to get stuff done. And when someone is a jerk to you in America, you sometimes have to be a jerk back.

Not that The Daily Show is any less funny or pointed when Jon Stewart acts righteous. The fact that Stewart can inspire this kind of rally, with this kind of high-quality conversation, is a testament to his skill as a thinker, orator and entertainer.

Update: Here’s a video of the speech:

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

How could a growing number of people get a basic fact so wrong? I don’t believe it’s because 18% of Americans are fools. I think it’s because we are just beginning to see the effects of a radically new way of communicating. The strategy involves a mix of broadcasting and the Internet. Here’s the formula:

1. A mass media person (say, a radio talker or cable TV anchor) tells you something intriguing but also confusing. Then they move on without reaching any conclusion, sometimes with a comment like, “This is obviously a lot to think about!”
2. Left feeling curious and unsatisfied, you spend a few minutes poking around on the Internet. There you find a clear and obvious trail of breadcrumbs reinforcing a dark narrative. You learned what the speaker couldn’t figure out—or was too scared to say on the air!
3. Your hunch is confirmed. Obama is a closet Muslim! Eureka!

It’s immensely satisfying to follow clues and crack a mystery. It’s also a powerful way to learn something. I asked my friend Leslie, a teacher, if there’s a term for this in education theory. There is: Constructivist learning. It’s different from a traditional lecture.

Traditional orators teach facts by talking at you. The best example on TV right now is Keith Olbermann, who makes his case with logic, speaking forcefully into the camera:

On the flip side, the new breed of political commentators uses constructivist learning: Here are the pieces, you assemble the puzzle. The best example right now is Glenn Beck fidgeting with his chalkboard:

You can see why Beck (who leans close to the Obama-is-a-Muslim camp) is so much more effective the Olberman. Olberman is preaching to the choir, while Beck is building a mystery. If you’re in Beck’s audience, it’s up to you to solve the puzzle on your own time. It’s homework—and yes, you’re allowed to use the Internet.

The “broadcaster/mystery + Internet/clues” strategy has powerful advantages.

• You can teach the audience false information, and because they learned it through a process of personal discovery, they will be skeptical of all evidence to the contrary.
• The celebrity host attracts an audience craving hateful secrets, while keeping a safe distance from anything truly radioactive—helping ensure his or her survival on a mass media channel.

A key part of this strategy is dropping obscure, faux-intellectual phrases that audiences can use to find more information on Google. These politically loaded phrases come to life organically online. Once one makes it into wide enough usage on blogs, broadcasters start to use it too. The phrase becomes part of a political brand. To see what I mean, search Google for the word “Obama” with one of these terms: “stealth jihad,” “liberation theology,” “statism,” or “backdoor amnesty.”

Start following links like those and you too might be convinced Obama is part of a secret conspiracy to destroy America. Do this now and you’ll probably conclude it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. However, if you follow those links after listening to Glenn Beck for an hour, you’d be primed to believe conspiracy theories, and you might not snap out of it.

As a political communication strategy, constructivist learning is awesomely effective. You can just plant a seed of a sinister idea, and crowdsource the ugly stuff to a bench of bloggers willing to sacrifice all shame in exchange for the delicious reward of influence. Nobody does this as well as Fox News and the conservative/anti-tax/Tea Party movement. The Democrats don’t appear to have even the slightest clue how this works.

As for the 1990s-era dream that the Internet would produce a more enlightened society by shining light on facts, giving the public access to primary source documents, and opening up a wider marketplace of ideas? Keep dreaming. It’s not about how good your ideas are. It’s about how fun your mystery is.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

One of the best and worst things about the show was its tendency to be self-referential—especially in having the characters criticize the show’s own convoluted plot lines. I began to notice this in the fifth season, when the character Hurley announced his confusion when other characters tried to explain the time-travel aspects of the plot. Knowing we needed it, the writers wrote an ombudsman into the show. Hugo Reyes, audience advocate!

By season 6, we had Miles playing the skeptic. After a really contrived scene in which Sun is said to be suffering from aphasia after getting knocked out, Miles asks, “She hits her head and forgets English? Are we supposed to buy that?”

The writers became the show’s best and most obsessive critics. They identified places where bubbles of cynicism were be growing, and used the characters to pop them. By the time we got the finale, these there was a lot of bubble popping to be done. After a particularly corny bit of exposition in the first few minutes, Hurley, a Star Wars fan like much of the “Lost” audience, chimes in with a well-timed, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Then there’s this one, also from the finale. It primes the audience for the finale’s heavy-handed reliance on Christian imagery, and addresses “Lost”‘s annoying tendency to give characters obvious, symbolic names.

Kate: “Who died?” Desmond: “A man named Christian Shepherd.” Kate: “Christian Shepherd? Seriously?” Desmond: “Seriously.”

History may remember the way the show’s writers tailored the scripts around the fan chatter on the Internet. When fans decided they hated Paolo and Nikki, the show offed them in one of my favorite episodes. First blogs and, later, Twitter (invented two years after “Lost” went on the air) acted as a real-time focus group for the show. And it felt like writers and producers read the blogs and genuinely wanted to be liked—not only to make a commercially viable show, but to make something that the geekiest of the fans would enjoy.

As an added bonus, it’s hard to hate on a show that’s so smartly self-aware and self-deprecating. All these meta references built a wall of criticism-proofing around “Lost.”

And so I often wanted to abandon “Lost” but kept watching it because it was fun. Six seasons is a long time in TV years. Call it a success. If we’re lucky, there will more shows like it. See you in another life, brother.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

There’s lots of buzz this week about 3-D TVs at CES. I don’t buy the hype. Here are 5 reasons 3-D TV is a non-starter.

1. The Internet. Barring any huge leap forward in technology, 3-D video (which requires a steady, high frame rate) is incompatible with Internet streaming (which adjusts frame rates depending on your connection speed). As such, 3-D TV is a naked ploy by the entertainment industry to push viewers back toward buying DVDs and cable subscriptions, rather than enjoying free online video. It won’t work. Trying to steer the freeloaders back to paid video once they’ve figured out Hulu and Netflix and torrents is pushing water uphill.

2. Glasses. Nobody has solved the 3-D glasses problem. Are you and your buddies going to hang around a sports bar watching football, drinking beer, eating wings, while wearing identical sets of flimsy plastic glasses? No. Glasses are for squares.

3. Production costs. It’s waaay more complicated and more expensive to produce TV shows in 3-D than in 2-D. Amateurs can’t do it. But for years, the trend toward digital video has meant cheaper TV shows, often with user-submitted content. This has been both good (CNN’s iReport) and bad (“Jon & Kate Plus 8″) but there’s no sign that really expensive television is due for a rebound.

4. Hardware costs. Except for hard-core home theater enthusiasts, it will be hard to convince people to buy new TV sets for 3-D alone. With the digital switch, it seems like everybody has shopped for, bought, and had installed a new TV in the last couple of years. That’s a lot of Best Buy-induced trauma. But people endured the shopping madness for a reason. Even though research showed that most people couldn’t tell the difference between HD and standard-def digital TV, we preferred HD TVs anyway because they’re wide, bright, flat and can be mounted on the wall. They just look high-tech. 3-D TVs offer no advantages other than being able to accommodate 3-D signals. Would you pay more to see “The Jay Leno Show” in 3-D?

5. Porn. Secretly, all advances in video technology are about making porn better. Face it: You don’t want 3-D porn and neither do I.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

But the Macy’s parade delivers a single, visual quality that towers (literally) over the sloppy choreography and humiliating celebrity appearances. The balloons! Round and colorful, they bob like hallucinations past the flat, stone edifices of the city. Tiny ants at the ends of guylines ease these cartoon behemoths around the corners of Midtown office buildings. The feat has become so routine—this is the parade’s 83rd year—that our eyes miss seeing it for the remarkable spectacle it is.

Some of my earliest, dimmest impressions of New York—before I ever visited the city—are of the Macy’s parade on TV. At no point did I ever imagine being there. As childhood impressions go, New York City was similar to the Land of Oz—vivid, fun and purely fictitious.

Now this is my 8th November in New York. I have never actually been to the parade, since I always travel to Maryland to spend Thanksgiving with my family. But I always catch a few minutes of the parade on TV, or I see the photos later. Don’t let familiarity spoil how cool those images are. Balloons and buildings, speaking to one another: A pairing of color and monochrome, soft and hard, fleeting and permanent. The Macy’s balloons are a perfect artistic response to the canyons of Manhattan.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Geddes and I disagree on this point. As I wrote back in November, I enjoy watching Fox News at the gym because it makes me angry, and anger helps me exercise harder!

Since November, however, I have changed my mind about something I wrote.

Back then, I said “Fox & Friends” has “shockingly sloppy production.” In fact, it has gotten better. The entire show looks and sounds sharper and more professional. On Monday they switched from 4:3 to widescreen. Somebody is putting money into this show.

My theory is that they’re saving money by cutting down on reporters. There are almost no remotes on “Fox & Friends” any more. Some mornings you can watch for a full half hour and never leave 48th Street. “Fox & Friends” has always been an opinion show disguised as a news program, but now it’s essentially not even bothering with the journalistic window dressing.

“Fox & Friends” feels like it’s scripted by an evil genius who is a master of rhetoric and human psychology. In a typical segment, the anchors spout fast bursts of facts, all of which are irrefutable, but which add up to nothing. Then they shrug their shoulders and basically say, “The people in charge don’t get this, because they’re fools.” That means: Apply this raw data to whatever nutty conspiracy theory you’ve got. Or be a fool.

The facts are gibberish, and the conclusions are never even spoken. They’re supposed to be our little secret. Out-of-touch people don’t know them, but you, the Fox News viewer, do. Here’s what you know:

• You aren’t a racist. The black people in your neighborhood are good people. But the blacks in the city are bad and scary. Nobody knows what kind of black person Barack Obama is. That’s why he’s so dangerous!
• Community organizers ruined the economy. Now they’re going to take away your medicine.
• Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran are setting a trap for Obama, and he’s going to fall for it. This could lead to global nuclear war—or worse, socialism!
• White Christians are oppressed by secularists.

Then they spend 10 seconds on a wacky YouTube video. Then graphics. Then cut to a commercial for a diet plan or male enhancement product. Or my favorite, the commercial for the home security system in which a man in a dark hoodie forces his way into a McMansion on a sunny afternoon, while a terrified white mom and daughter cower in fear inside.

These days, “Fox & Friends” seldom dwells on Al Qaeda, 9/11-style terrorism, Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s old news. We don’t talk about the war anymore. Is this because Fox News ended up on the wrong side of popular opinion, and it’s un-American to dwell on your mistakes? I don’t think so. I think it’s just a ratings decision.

And FNC knows ratings. The top 13 programs in cable news are all Fox News shows!

“Fox & Friends” is so fascinating to me that I could easily write another 1,000 words about it. There’s a real threat to democracy here, but I’m not quite ready to articulate it yet. For now, this channel is just helping me stay in shape.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

If you’ve never seen the 1960s TV show “The Prisoner,” now is the time: AMC is streaming all 17 episodes for free here. (A remake of the show is supposed to air on AMC this summer.)

Be seeing you!

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

(If you can’t view the clip above, you can watch it here, at about the 1 minute mark).

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

“Flight of the Conchords” comes to the Slope Wednesday: No parking!

(These signs were up around 5th Ave and 13th.)

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.