Vanity’s loath to commend a contemporary communicator. Having snatched your precious attention – communicators are pickpockets of awareness – why surrender a minute of it. I’ll steer you to Shakespeare or Pinturicchio no worries, they addressed different dreads, they’re dead, their eminence has been achieved. But Jon Stewart is a fellow Trump thumper – and better at it – and my junior, damn his eyes.

We wield weapons of different calibers, granted – TV versus literate prose. Once mighty in influence, prose is nowadays a pipsqueak, printed syllables popguns compared to TV’s cruise missiles. Who reads anymore? A few of us, you and I, but it’s arduous, unfashionable, and we’re out of practice. Media wax and wane: the signal fire and war cry once conveyed crucial bulletins. Nowadays it’s videos, emojis, or maybe that weird-looking Apple helmet. Even TV’s grip on our consciousness is slipping, as portable screens supplant bulky sets inveigling our attention. Jane and I unplugged our TV four years ago and haven’t missed it except for the Kentucky Derby (Jane’s into horse-racing, for some reason). Most TV gives me hives. The sterility, banality, falsity, tedium! When I die and descend to my deserts a TV will be blabbing 24/7 as in an airport. My heaven is silence – now – our we hour.

I wouldn’t mention Jon Stewart, only his infuriatingly masterful return to the Daily Show is on my mind. Funny, fierce, observant, his twenty-minute monologue snatched my attention as a hawk a wriggling mouse. I caught it on my laptop – rather, it caught me – and made me think.

Jon Stewart is a comedian-turned-pulpit-pounder. Preachers in my span morphed into politicians. Artists and scholars shrieked their despair. A polite, dreamy, poet-type, I never expected to turn ranter from the ramparts. My vitriolic invective startles me, so unlike the me I had in mind. Moment, not preference, summons us to arms. We act and speak, willy-nilly, as our epoch dictates. My placid childhood, in the post-War fifties, gave way to a new sort of war – invisible, invidious – for a satisfying reason to be. We had all we needed pretty much, but what we needed, it turned out, wasn’t what we needed. We the people slid into moral putrescence – cynicism, indifference, selfishness – distrust and neglect of our institutions – in which cesspool we seemed likely to drown. Gradually, our jeopardy dawned on me: our nation, freedom, the fantastic notion of self-government, civilization itself were at risk. Yikes. Many of us took to howling because that’s what you do when you’re scared. Each howled in their native dialect –  Jon Stewart comically, I Latinately, for it was the only way I knew.

Watch Stewart’s rant, to which I’ve linked below. He’s saying what I’m saying, only more vividly. Laughter sneaks into our complacencies like smoke under the door. Stewart earns his concluding peroration when he drops his humorous mask and chides us point-blank. That’s hard to do. We resent being chided. We stiffen in self-defense. This mess isn’t our fault, we huff, knowing it is. This bad American moment I helped create. My fingerprints are all over the crime scene. Maybe by caterwauling I can help repair our broken state. Each of us must do the little we can.

I never went to war. I would have, if my draft number were lower, but I got lucky. I hated the war in Vietnam, it made no sense, but I lacked a draft dodger’s hardihood. My public service was supposed to compensate for my military abstention: so I claimed (though I wasn’t convinced).

We’re at war now. See me shambling in the parade, proud to serve in General Stewart’s brigade.