Shifting Baselines Blog

8/26 - The Brilliance of Lewis Black on The Daily Show

With our Nettracker software we are able to see every day where people visiting our site were referred from. And when people find their way to our site through a search, it lists what they searched. Since posting an item on August 16 about Lewis Black's rant on The Daily Show about "Keep False Hope Alive," we've had about 20 visitors come to our site from searching, "Lewis Black False Hope." Which is rather extraordinary (though we get 500 to 1000 visitors a day, only a few come from searches).

Clearly he touched a nerve with that rant. So I found the full text of it, which is truly brilliant and extremely relevant to our times since so much of our perceptions of nature today as being "a wild and unknownable place" are based on this same sort of false hope. People don't want to accept it. David Helvarg's landmark book, "The Blue Frontier," urged everyone to make peace with the fact that there is no more blue frontier -- its time to shift gears and figure out how to make life work on a tiny planet. But people just don't want to let go
of "their dreams."

Anyhow, here it is. Nice job Lewis Black, you madman.

"But let's be honest, there is nothing more American than false hope. False hope of making 200k is why people who should know better vote Republican. False hope is why the stock market broke 10,000. False hope is why our natural resources will never run out. False hope is why Iraq will become the democratic linchpin of the Middle east. Keep false hope alive!"

"And another thing that makes me mad ..." Lewis Black at work.

Posted by Randy Olson at August 26, 2004 12:34 PM