Daily Show’s Camel Gaffe Isn’t Just About Animals

After the camel it brought to the rallies in Madison got its foot stuck in temporary fencing meant to contain the animal, The Daily Show is getting flack from all sides.

Andrew Breitbart cried torture. PETA said the skit idea “bombed big-time” and encouraged the show to “and to respect animals enough to leave them out of future skits.”

But the truly unfunny thing about the gaff was the joke The Daily Show was using the camel to make: that the movements in Wisconsin, the Middle East, and North Africa have nothing to do with each other.

On last Monday's show, Stewart scoffed at the idea that the two could be related. After showing a (spliced together) clip of Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) saying, "there is an unbelievable parallel [between] the people in the streets of Cairo and the people in Madison Wisconsin."

Stewart said, "Uh, they are not the same in any f***ing way, shape or form. At all. At all. Not at all." [Applause.] "This is the same as people in the Middle East overthrowing years of dictatorship? Or is that just the last thing you saw on the news?"

In the same segment during Monday’s show, Stewart addressed protestors in Wisconsin, saying:

"As for protestors charge that Walker is a tyrant, I will remind you that he was elected with 52 percent of the vote."

Stewart is right in a narrow sense that Walker did not “seize power without legal right,” as the American English Dictionary says (although the dictionary also defines tyrant more broadly as “a cruel and oppressive ruler”).

But he is wrong to dismiss the relation between the rallies in the United States and Egypt. In his rebuke of the protestors, Stewart falls into the trap of thinking of democracy as an on/off switch, when, reality, democracy appears in gradations. I doubt Stewart himself would disagree that the Citizens United decision left the United States a significantly less democratic country or that Stewart would say the growing economic inequality is a good trend for maintaining a democratic society. (I imagine few would say the United States was as democratic as it is today, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —even though Governors routinely were elected by popular votes.)

And, if the similarly important democratic rights to organize and collectively bargain of workers were curtailed in Wisconsin, the state would be less democratic. Reports that websites used by protestors were blocked in the Capitol Building in Madison and Governor Walker’s suggestion that he had thought of planting troublemakers in the crowd during the prank “Koch” call only further questions Walker’s commitment to democracy in Wisconsin.

It is not just that Walker is challenging democracy with his bill and actions during the protests in Madison, but also that the protesters defending democracy in Wisconsin are part of a long legacy of democratic movements —a legacy that the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolution, and movements in Yemen, Bahrain and Libya are all now a part of.

By dismissing the relation between the democratic movements in Wisconsin and Egypt and the rest of North Africa and the Middle East, Stewart and the Daily Show are also dismissing the powerful role labor and young people have played in the movements in Wisconsin and in North Africa and the Middle East. As Eric Lee and Benjamin Wienthal said in The Guardian,  “Perhaps the most overlooked factor in the demise of the authoritarian Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, and the weakening of Hosni Mubarak's grip on state power in Egypt, has been the trade unions in both countries,”And, as Micah Uetricht wrote here at Campus Progress, young people have been central to the Wisconsin protests, as they have been in the Middle East and North Africa.

So, no matter which way you parse out John Stewart’s humor, it’s not funny, just bad reporting.

George Warner is a staff writer with Campus Progress.

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