On Thursday night, as the first event of the new Strictly Speaking series at Cal Performances, Al Franken spoke to what seemed to be a full house at Zellerbach Hall. Much of it was enjoyable -- and a lot of people were laughing jovially as he took apart George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and especially Bill O'Reilly. Nonetheless, I didn't find a lot of it that funny after a while. It felt a bit too much like preaching to the choir. Most of my friends and I spend enough time making fun of George Bush or lamenting his self-serving policies that do little to fend for the poor (I'm hardpressed to see how the President, a born-again Christian, is doing much to help the "least among us" with tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the upper crust. That's been my gut reaction, one I'd like to explore more deeply with some study.).

And Bill O'Reilly -- is really that important a target to lavish such sustained satire? Maybe he is because so many people listen to him and therefore his lies need to be dismantled. But at the end of the day, will enough hearts and minds throughout the country and not just the cultural island that is the Bay Area, be won over to defeat the current administration? How can get out of our social-political ghetto?

Having said that, I must admit that (The article about the reading in today's SF Chronicle helped put things in perspective, making me somewhat more understanding and sympathetic to the audience:

For the longest time, as right-wing pundits mercilessly mocked lefties and Ann Coulter demonized liberals as "traitors," it seemed that a cowed left had lost its voice and its spirit. Michael Moore ranted, Gore Vidal issued a pair of scathing anti-Bush pamphlets, but it wasn't until Al Franken came along that the left regained some of the breath that got knocked out of it by the Florida election of 2000.

Al Franken, political lightning rod? The dude from "Saturday Night Live" with the funny voice and the goofy grin? Seems odd at first, until one considers the healing balm of laughter. Who wants to listen to a whining lament, after all, when the same points can be made, in Franken's case, with raucous humor?

I'm also pleased that the article caught what Franken said during what I considered the most moving moment of the evening, an invocation of the heart and labor of Paul Wellstone:

Paul Wellstone always said, "It's not enough just to believe in something: You have to work, and the future belongs to the people who are passionate and do the work."