soupsoup:

mbrosen:

Jon Stewart on Dennis Miller Live, March 1, 2002.

The topic of the day was religion.

But first:

Dennis Miller: What kind of chicks you get to fuck with that Peabody Award?

Jon Stewart: Just Terry Gross from NPR.

DM: [Laughter]

JS: Smell it and tell me I’m lying.

And, on to today’s topic:

DM: Do you think some people are more prone to becoming zealous?

JS: The weak…not just in religion, it’s in everything else. It’s extremism. It’s not religion, it’s extremism…

DM: I used to think people were weak, Jon, but in an increasingly petrifying world, isn’t the bracketing for “weak” moving out to include a lot of us? I mean, I wonder why people cling to their saviors, or cling to their heroine, or cling to their politicians, and I think the world’s just turned into such a madhouse. Aren’t you ever tempted to look for something?

JS: You just know about it. Now you know about it. You never knew. You know, the Middle East was always the Middle East. It’s not like fifty years ago they were just sitting around playing UNO. It’s fuckin’, we have the internet, we look on there now. I think the idea that somehow these extremists and these violent acts are the product of a policy that initiated in this country…that’s like saying, “Jeez, why can’t Black people just sit down and understand where the Klan’s coming from?” You know what I mean? How is it that we did something, and then they went and blow it up, and then we have to really do some soul searching? “Yeah, why did we build those towers so high? That was fuckin’ ridiculous. We put it right in the way of those planes they were hijacking.”

DM: Don’t you think the country’s gotten so reflexively afraid to express natural feelings when crazy people do something like that…?

JS: I’m just saying, the blame for that —- it’s a way for people to blind themselves, to not have to deal with responsibility for their own actions. And to have them sit there and say, “Jeez, look at the conditions you put us in…that’s why this is happening.” It’s ridiculous.