jon stewart "likes" rachel maddow - who cares?

If you're a fellow media junkie, it's likely you've seen the conversation between Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow in which Stewart reiterated his "Rally for Sanity" stance that MSNBC is the liberal equivalent of Fox News and Rachel gave a lot of factual reasons why he's wrong.  I'd take Stewart down myself but I'd be hard pressed to do it better than Bill Maher, so watch his spot-on analysis here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqjh6JyxOlk

At the end of the interview Stewart announces he "likes" Maddow.  Based on his regularly interrupting her, dismissing her notion that her bosses were "courageous" in employing liberal talent, and generally refusing to acknowledge that what she does is on another level than Bill O'Reilly he doesn't appear to respect her much but apparently he'd be willing to join her for a beer.  Rachel is extremely gracious but I think I'd have had to say - "Thanks Jon, I'm glad you like me.  But I have no idea what bearing it has on our conversation here".

I like a lot of people who I wouldn't want reporting the news or running the government.  I'm sure I've enjoyed  books and movies and paintings produced by people I wouldn't have over for Sunday supper.  When I was running restaurants I would frequently shock staff by asking them to do things like bus tables, or answer the phone, or pick up the napkin they dropped on the floor.  They would be stunned at being corrected.  After protesting this great injustice (bring bread to my table - that's the busser's job - oh, the indignity) they would inevitably follow it with "It's not that I don't like you", to which I would reply "You don't need to like me, you just need to do the job". Oddly, this simple statement of fact tended to make them like me. Whatever.

It's never occurred to me that my boss might worry whether I liked them or not.  He/she was my boss.  We weren't going for lunch.  That didn't mean I didn't have an opinion about them, but I knew it would have no impact on how they expected me to do my job.  I had an odd pre-election conversation with a member of the opposing party.  This person's contention was that no one should be able to critique an electoral candidate unless they have something nice to say about them first, to encourage more civil discourse.  Okay.  Carly Fiorina has super taste in blazers.  Too bad she paid for them by costing 30,000 Californians their jobs.  I could say nice things about Carly Fiorina all day long (oh, okay, I couldn't) but it wouldn't change my oppostion to her stances on the issues or make her qualified to be a senator.  It wouldn't alter the meat of the debate.

"Liking" and  "being nice" are not what's needed to restore discourse and start getting things done. Civility.  Respect.  Listening.  Hard work.  A little humility.  Old fashioned, maybe, but I think it's a good start.

embarrassing moment in "you like me" history

Maybe at the end of it we'll end up finding out we like each other better than we thought we did. But that's an end point, not a beginning.  Because as Jon Stewart helped  remind us last week, being liked isn't the same as being heard.