In the years just prior to the French Revolution, Paris was awash with satirical pamphlets making great fun of Louis XVI and his ill-fated bride, Marie Antoinette. A number of historians believe that these pamphlets and flyers, which mostly poked fun at the couple’s sex life, were partially responsible for the fall of the regime. It was a classic example of the media leading the mob.

Recently, our own media has depicted George W. Bush as follows:

1. Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Conan O’Brian showed the president as an incompetent, politically tone-deaf buffoon.

2. Stephen Colbert accused the president of being both a rapist and a homosexual.

3. Saturday Night Live opened its program with an actor playing the part of the chief executive behaving like a child with acute attention deficit disorder.

4. South Park, the animated Comedy Central hit, had the president putting a gun into a young man’s mouth and blowing off the top of the kid’s head.

5. And The Daily Show, hosted by Jon Stewart, just showed the president being, well, the president.

All of this took place within the last month, and the amazing thing is, nobody seemed to notice or care. Showing the leader of the free world as an oversexed, asinine, gay murderer doesn’t raise an eyebrow in our country anymore, and this kind of political detachment may well have a profound influence on our children.

At the center of this non-controversy is Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, a four-times-a-week Comedy Central broadcast that has become the go-to program for anyone selling a book or an idea in America. In the last month, Stewart — who performed last week at UCSB’s Thunderdome — has played host to Senator Trent Lott, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, political columnist Frank Rich of the New York Times, Bill Clinton, and a host of other mainstream politicians. Why would such an august body of men schlep to a seedy studio in midtown New York City? Because that’s where the smart kids are hanging.

Jon Stewart, however, is more than just an Oprah bookselling machine; he is also the leader of the loyal opposition to the Bush government. This was made abundantly clear the day after the election when Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, came onto The Daily Show and told Stewart’s audience, “Thank you guys; you’re the ones who did it for us.”

So, what’s going on here? How did a B-list actor/comic become a national figure whose antiestablishment views have led him to becoming part of the culture’s elite? For starters, he’s good at what he does. Stewart has that wonderful ability to be serious but silly at the same time. He can grab a tragic issue such as Abu Ghraib and explain it to us in such a way that the absurdity of the American position is laid out for even a child to understand. Though Stewart does not come across as a smug, know-it-all purveyor of political truths, he is very smart. He’s well read, able to think on his feet, and most importantly, he’s a genuinely nice guy. He makes his guests, be they liberal or conservative, extremely comfortable, and as a result gets the most out them.

Finally, and this is critical to The Daily Show’s success, Stewart and his producers have put together some of the best investigative reporters on television. The show has become the institutional memory of the Bush administration. Each time the administration denies it has changed course, for instance, The Daily Show brings up a clip showing it doing just that. Every time the White House communications office issues talking points to its followers, The Daily Show puts together a montage of Fox News commentators and government functionaries saying the exact same thing. By doing this over and over, Jon Stewart and his reporters show their audience that Fox News and the Bush regime have become one ubiquitous propaganda machine that is often not telling the American people the truth.

Stewart’s remarkable success has led to similar programming. His protégé, Stephen Colbert, now with his own show, The Colbert Report, has, for example, taken The Daily Show’s wonderful sense of irony to its logical conclusion. And then there’s Sacha Baron Cohen and his new film, Borat! Baron Cohen seems to have inherited the “Yippie” ethos of the counterculture. Just as its two most famous practitioners — Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin — shocked and appalled “the man” (i.e., one’s parents) with their antiestablishment antics, Baron Cohen comments brilliantly on how easily we can be manipulated by our current entertainment environment. His relentless attacks on red-state victims, frat boys, evangelical preachers, rodeo attendees, and others leave us doubled over in the aisles with laughter.

So what is there to worry about with this cultural commentary? Last Sunday, The Simpsons, arguably one of the most successful comedic shows in American television history, aired a program in which Homer is recruited to join the United States Army. The basic premise was that anyone who would enlist at this point is an idiot, a far more offensive slap than poor Senator Kerry’s lame joke. I can only imagine what our troops in Iraq who downloaded the episodes on their iPods must have thought.

My point is that, like the French just prior to their revolution, we’re distributing a lot of media about how screwed up our leaders and our way of life have become. This obviously has a positive side: It’s critical to have the hypocrisies and lies of our government leaders pointed out to their citizenry, and we’ve not had such an unstable head of government since Nancy Reagan ran her husband’s administration with horoscope charts.

But at what cost? Are we creating a new generation of Americans who have become nonbelievers in our very system of government? Have Stewart, Baron Cohen, Colbert, and others artfully shown the problems of our society to be so nasty as to turn a generation of young people away from caring about how we are governed?

I don’t mean to sound like an old fogy; I’ve always believed that comedy could be a wonderful mirror to reflect the contradictions in American life. Hell, I wrote the screenplay for Revenge of the Nerds. But I’m beginning to think that things are getting out of hand. I’m afraid the constant hilarious and effective bombardment of our governmental institutions by Stewart and others is going to leave a lasting scar on the body politic. I’m worried that it’s going to leave a residue of cynicism and distrust for political leadership that could become a threat to proper governance of our country.

Why? For the simple reason that if people start by laughing at their leaders, they end up by having no respect for them or the offices they represent. If the people think it doesn’t matter who’s in office because all politicians are horses’ asses, then they stop participating in the electoral process. My great fear is that Jon Stewart and his cohorts, brilliant, clever, and funny as they may be, are creating a disconnect between our government and our youth that will have long-lasting consequences — consequences that are not even a little bit funny.

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