By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Even before the stars took the stage September 21, an almost electric sense of excitement flowed through the sell-out crowd at the new McCaw Hall, in the shadow of the Space Needle. The set was simple: a pair of wicker-back chairs flanking a small round table placed in front of a formless black backdrop. It was as if the Charlie Rose show had been relocated to Starbucks.
Even the introduction by Foolproof Performing Arts director Marilyn Raichle drew raucous applause, forcing her to repeat
some of the obligatory plugs and acknowledgements. When the duo did make their entrance, they were greeted with a standing ovation — a rarity for any performer at the start of his or her act, let alone a couple of stout middle-aged writers coming to have a conversation in public.
But this was no ordinary couple — Molly Ivins has been covering politics in her native Texas for more than a generation, with a combination of outrageous wit and common sense. Her insights into the strange world of the Austin statehouse has taken on a special relevance since the younger George Bush (whom she nicknamed “Shrub” when he was still governor) ascended to the highest office in the land.
Her counterpart for the evening was Al Franken. A founding writer-performer for “Saturday Night Live” and the alter-ego of Stuart Smalley — the phenomenally annoying persona who authored I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough and Doggone It, People Like Me — Franken remade himself as a crusader against “fair and balanced” ideologues half a dozen years ago with the publication of Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat Idiot — and Other Observations.
After settling the question of who would interview whom — Ivins won out, based on her 35 years experience as a journalist — Franken answered the only religious question of the night: “When God speaks to you, does She really sound like Barbara Jordan?”
“I don’t know,” the Jewish satirist responded. He explained that he was called from on high to write his latest best-seller, LIES and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – A Fair and Balanced View of the Right, because “God was pissed because George W. Bush had told a lot of people that he was called by God to be President.
“God,” he continued, “thought that He/She/It had arranged for Al Gore to be President — not only by winning the popular vote but the electoral vote, too.”
Finally he addressed the question directly: “When God talks to you, God sounds like yourself.”
The remainder of the evening, which included an extensive audience question period, mostly followed the same lines. On the subject of the lawsuit by Fox News for allegedly expropriating their trademark — “Fair and Balanced,” Franken regaled the receptive crowd with a long tale of meeting up with Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, whose picture on the cover of Franken’s book figured prominently in the anecdote.
“He’s a bully and my dad always said you stand up to bullies,” Franken explained. “When you stand up to a bully on the playground, he goes running to the teacher and asks her to sue you, which is what they [Fox] did.”
He said his first response to the news that Fox was considering a lawsuit was “Oh, please, please, please sue me” and that once he explained the First Amendment’s protections of satire to his publisher, and they’d consulted with a renowned First Amendment expert, they calmed down as well.
Sliding briefly into a more serious tone, Franken said he had taken on the role of a modern day Don Quixote battling right-wing media windmills.
“You can’t have a discussion in this country where one side lies and lies and lies, and the other side doesn’t take them on,” he said.
Franken peppered his talk with specific examples of what he described as the right-wing commentators’ and newscasters’ lies, complete with quotes and citations of sources to back up his contentions.
“What you have is an artificially created echo chamber at the right wing of the American political spectrum,” Franken said, in response to an audience member’s question about why the Right attracts so much media attention. “This is no right-wing conspiracy. This has all been done out in the open” over 30 years’ time, he said.
Breaking free of her interviewer’s role, Ivins described the experience of appearing on a 24-hour news channel, where the interviews are limited to four-minute segments, and a producer allowing an extra two minutes is seen as a precious gift. She described the “round-table discussions” on shows like Fox News Sunday as pairing two journalists with two right-wing ideologues, without enough time to get into the substance of any of the issues that are raised.
“It’s like having two people on one side of a see-saw and two people in the middle,” she said.
“— And it’s about as interesting to watch,” Franken interjected.
“The losers are the people who tune in who are concerned about public affairs,” Ivins added, “even if they only tuned in to see a political food-fight.”
Ivins said political satire has served “for thousands of years” as a weapon of the poor and powerless, but that “people like Rush Limbaugh turn that weapon around and use it against the poor and powerless.”
Recognizing the audience as having a large number of political activists, Ivins urged attendees to be creative and have fun while protesting. She recounted the community’s response to a Ku Klux Klan march in Austin a few years back.
Thousands of anti-Klan protesters lined the parade route and, in a sports stadium like wave, dropped their pants and mooned the marchers.