How we live now

Taste and Taboo, the Id and the Ick
Some thoughts on the celebrity of Sarah Silverman.

It is a cultural fact of life that such culturally pre-approved taboo-breakers as Miss Silverman must have impeccably liberal credentials, and she has been as slavish a devotee of the Democratic cause generally and the cause of Barack Obama in particular as one is likely to find outside the pages of the New York Times. She organized something called The Great Schlep, aimed at recruiting young Jews to persuade their Florida-dwelling elders to help deliver that key electoral state to him in his presidential contest. She makes get-out-the-vote videos that are in practice get-out-the-vote-for-Obama videos, and has a habit of saying dumb and uninformed things about subjects such as population growth. (Malthus deserves better representatives.) Given that liberals have taken to deriving their political views from comedians as a general practice (Ahoy, Jon Stewart! Greetings, Bill Maher!), Sarah Silverman, whose politics are as crass as her sense of humor, is a perfect cultural fit for the Age of Obama.