The Drive / WTF, Wyatt Cenac?

The Drive

    I find to my surprise that I’ve never been to Central Washington before. I’ve been to Walla Walla and up to Spokane; I’ve been to Seattle and Olympia and Mt St Helens; but I’ve never been up the spine of the state where the apples are grown and the wine is made. I’m in Ellensburg now, headed up to Roslyn tomorrow for a half-marathon. I’m surprised to find that this part of it, at least, isn’t particularly scenic. Mostly it’s barren hills, some fed by irrigation from the many dams on the Columbia. But the mountains aren’t visible from here, and there are no pine forests like in Central Oregon. I know I’m mostly a pro-Oregon chauvinist — I actually crossed the Columbia and drove on the Washington side because the view of Oregon seemed more beautiful — but as long as we’re talking abou remote, sparsely-populated parts of our states, I’ll take Central Oregon over Central Washington, and by a lot. Cinder cones, canyons, the mountains huge in the west. Much more satisfactory than hill after gray hill of nothing.

    For some reason today I was having a hard time with the drive. Not like with staying awake or being bored — with terror. Sometimes, for no real reason, getting on the road puts me in much closer touch with my mortality than it usually does. Today was one of those days. I stayed off the freeway all the way out to Gresham, and then got off of it as quickly as I could. And I kept having these flashes of thoughts: what a terrible driver I was when I was 17, for example, or the possibility that someone in one of the other cars was suicidally psychotic and might pick me to go out of the world with them. Once this starts all kinds of things will freak me out. I cease trusting my eyes. After a while I was doing 55 in a 70 while guys on motorcycles spit around me like water around an island. Scared the bejesus out of me.

    I think I’m taking back roads to Roslyn tomorrow morning.

WTF, Wyatt Cenac?

    Part of the reason I wasn’t bored on what could have been a deathly dull drive was a riveting interview of Wyatt Cenac on WTF. I went in with low expectations. Cenac was a corrospondent on The Daily Show in the years after I quit watching due to Giving a Shit Fatigue, so I’d seen him only a few times. He seemed reasonably funny, but I hadn’t exactly followed his career with avidity. A lot of the time I just delete those episodes, but I played this one in part because I was curious if Cenac would have anything to say about the inner workings of The Daily Show.

    Boy, did he. Apparently Cenac did not have the best time while there, especially towards the end, when he clashed with Stewart over Stewart’s impression of Herman Cain, which Cenac found racist. (I haven’t seen the impression, but suffice it to say that white dudes doing “black” voices makes me uncomfortable about 99.99% of the time.) Cenac objected, first over email, then in a writer’s meeting, and then, finally, in a shouting match in Stewart’s office that, apparently, the entire staff of the show could hear, all over the office. The incident left Cenac in tears, and eventually led to his quitting what he had described earlier in the interview as his “dream job”.

    There were a lot of fascinating aspects to the thing. Cenac was frank about the fact that being the only black person on staff at TDS made him feel responsible: it was, he said, his job to stand up for the viewpoint of (in his words) “all minorities” as the show was being written and produced. On a show so avowedly liberal and allegedly righteous, it was interesting to hear about how it was still a sea of whiteness, on which it was clear Cenac felt a little bit set adrift. It made me feel sad for the guy. That’s too big a job for any one human: to be The Black Voice on what might be the most important show on television, to feel like the weight of so many people is leaning on you and you alone. The white dudes on staff at TDS only had to be concerned with being funny. Cenac had to be funny and try to speak up about uncomfortable topics, into a room full of white people, including one of the most powerful people in the biz. No wonder he couldn’t take it after a while.

    Another interesting thing is Stewart’s response to being challenged on a matter of race. I don’t know the guy, so I can’t presume to understand the entirety of what was happening in his mind, but I think I get some of it. Cenac described Stewart as a fairly removed boss, and as someone who didn’t lose his temper when challenged, for the most part. But this one issue is so charged, and in so many different ways. For a guy like Stewart, who I imagine tries his best to be racially aware and work on the side of civil rights for all people, to be challenged on this specific issue probably made him feel unbelievably crappy. He didn’t want to be the racially insensitive white guy. So he lost his cool in attempting to assert that he wasn’t. I recognize the feeling. I’ve never blown my top like that, but there have been a few times when it’s been brought to my attention that I’ve done or said something that made someone feel like shit. Like Stewart, I did these things in total ignorance, without thinking that they might be anything other than harmless. And you know what? It was embarrassing. Really, really embarrassing. It made me feel ugly and stupid and small and like shit. Because the people who have pointed them out have been my friends, I’ve never blown my top in response. But I could see how you could, especially if you were an immensely powerful older man who felt like you were being insulted by someone who worked for you.

    But really, the most interesting thing about the story is the way it fit into the story of Cenac’s life. You know, you see people on TV and you tend to think — at least if you’re me, you do — that things must be pretty good for them. A guy like Wyatt Cenac: he’s funny. For a living. He’s on a hugely popular TV show and people laugh. He’s successful! He’s probably and easygoing, fun-loving guy, right? But clearly Cenac’s life hasn’t been that at all. I won’t spoil the interview for you, but Cenac’s conflict with Stewart came in the context of a whole host of shit that primed him for exactly that. Cenac was totally self-aware about that, too. He’d been plucked from unemployment and obscurity by Stewart. In a life haunted by a father who died when he was a toddler, Cenac was prone to seeking out father figures. Cenac’s own analysis is that part of his difficulty with Stewart — and it extended outside that one fight — was that Stewart wasn’t interested in doing that for him. It was a huge bummer. It sounded, though they never talked about it, like Cenac’s life has been plagued by depression, sadness, and disappointment. It turns out that being on TV doesn’t really mean you’re happy.