COMMENTARY: Democrats Win Two Nights

ROGERS — It was kind of its own little anti-Fox News bunker, this gathering of a few hundred of what must have been the entire left-leaning constituency of Northwest Arkansas.

For a couple of hours on two nearly ideal early autumnal evenings in the Ozarks, longsuffering Democrats in Northwest Arkansas were cloaked against the ruling and raging Republicanism.

They might lose all the elections, but they won these nights.

This was the annual “Gridiron” satirical and musical revue, staged Friday and Saturday nights at the quaint Rogers Little Theater by Northwest Arkansas journalists in joint sponsorship with the local chapter of the American Association of University Women. The purposes were fun-poking and college scholarships. I was delighted to be invited to function as master of ceremonies.

Conservatives and Republicans will say “aha” and see a leftwing conspiracy in a journalists’ satirical production that seemed to be attended inordinately by the relatively few liberal Democrats in the region.

But the show pummeled Democrats and liberals, too.

Even the Dalai Lama, whose meditations are probably more leftward than rightward considering those themes of religious tolerance and peace, sustained a sideswipe or two, if only to set up that song, “Hello, Dalai.”

Still, it apparently is true, and just so happens, that a few of the more talented “Gridiron” writers, none of whom takes personal responsibility for any individual sketch, tend to lurch a tad left when confronted with a need forsatirical creativity. In turn, people predisposed that direction have become, over the years, the show’s more regularly recurring patrons.

A character’s asking President Barack Obama what happened to the “change” he promised as the character turns his pants pockets inside out to reveal no change at all - that was tough and poignant. But it was not nearly as materially rich, let’s face it, as the skit in which Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin played “GOP Jeopardy” and gave answers that were hilarious and had the secondary advantage of being verbatim or near-verbatim accounts of what Bachmann and Palin actually said.

That is to say that, Anthony Weiner excepted, Republicans these days are naturally funnier than Democrats. In fact, the “Gridiron” did an entire sketch on how Gov. Mike Beebe had deprived the show of any spoofworthy material. Mattie Ross was hiring Rooster Cogburn to help her go find that outlaw governor who had stolen all the jokes.

Alas, there was a touch of leftto-right intolerance here and there.

A character portraying Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorialist Paul Greenbergheld forth grandiloquently in a commentary about something’s being “wholly a pleasure” and evocative of Eudora Welty and about how some issue or other had been mischaracterized by “National Propaganda Radio.” He got cut off by another character in the middle of an overwritten sentence.

I then landed one of my biggest emcee’s cheers of the evening when I said - in jest, of course, and in what was wholly a pleasure - that pulling the plug on Greenberg made the evening complete.

Then, acknowledging VIPs in the audience, I mentioned former state Rep. Jan Judy, environmentalist Democrat of Fayetteville, to great applause.

Then I mentioned freshman state Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville and guns-on-campus fame, an ever-affable Tea Party Republican and fine sport who had braved the alien den. There was a smattering of boos and hisses. I felt obliged to do a little tsk-tsk.

Now, now, progressive ones, let us not allow differences of opinion, the beer and wine being sold in the lobby and exultation over that remarkable Hog comeback against Texas A&M to take full charge of our behavior.

We need some civility out there in the audience, please, while we are abandoning it wholesale up here on stage.

P.S. - Good ol’ Charlie Collins later tweeted that he thoroughly enjoyed the show and wouldn’t have believed that I had any talent for emceeing. Man, I get no respect, I tell you. No respect.

JOHN BRUMMETT IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE ARKANSAS NEWS BUREAU IN LITTLE ROCK.