Sunday, April 1 – John opened on Ronny
Jackson as the new VA secretary (featuring pictures demonstrating how far
off-base Jackson was on Trump’s physical,) then moved onto Egypt’s sham
election and Sinclair Broadcast Group forcing local anchors to air a must-run
piece on “fake news.” The main story, on
immigration courts, was devastating. As
one clip stated, the broken system conducts “death penalty cases in a traffic
court setting.” The discrepancy between
deportation rates in various cities was awful, and I was horrified by the fact
that detained immigrants have no guaranteed right to an attorney, including
unaccompanied minors as young as two years old – anyone who thinks that isn’t a
repulsive miscarriage of justice deserves none of my respect. And of course, John pointed to cases where
deportation is a literal death sentence, showing such high-stakes cases handled
in such a distracted, slipshod manner.
The last
couple of months, I’ve liked The Daily
Show’s pieces looking at Black history and women’s history. Roy’s “CP Time” pieces and Desi and Dulcé’s
“Shafted” series were both great ways to observe the history for each
month. I like how Roy’s stories each
centered around a theme, such as Black inventors, Black people in politics, and
Black women in history; it was a neat way to pick up a lot of interesting bits
of information. In contrast, each of
Dulcé and Desi’s stories focused on just one woman, and they all had the same
theme of a woman who didn’t get credit for her innovation (Sarah Howe got to
enjoy the fruits of her labors the longest, but history caught up with her
eventually – it’s called a “Ponzi scheme,” not a “Howe scheme.”)
What I
particularly like about both of these series is that neither spent much time on
the big-name figures: MLK, George
Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Emily Dickinson, and so
on. Instead, we looked at people we
might not have heard of before – I know I hadn’t heard of many of them. So often, we use Black History Month or
Women’s History Month to rehash the same few stories we retell every year, and
while those stories are certainly important and need to be told, repetition and
ritualization of them can create a false sense that those are the only pieces
of Black and/or women’s history worth telling.
When in truth, there’s so much. There are a ton of fascinating people from
history who did wild or amazing things, people we don’t find as
well-represented in our history books, and the more opportunities we take to
discover them, the better.
It’d be
cool to see the show repeat these series every year, each time with even more
stories that have gone largely untold.
What’s more, I’d love for them to do the same with other
history/heritage months, although I recognize that some might be tougher than
others – mainly due to the availability of representatives from those
groups. For instance, Ronny and/or Hasan
could cover Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May,) but what about Gay
Lesbian Pride Month (June), or National Hispanic-Latino Heritage Month
(mid-September through mid-October?) I
could see more reluctance to set up a recurring segment like that if they don’t
have any correspondents who fit those identities, but I still think those
stories would be worth telling. Maybe,
if they didn’t have correspondent to fill in, they could bring in guests to do
it? Tell me Laverne Cox wouldn’t love
presenting short pieces on LGBTQ history.
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