My tenure at 'The Daily Show' started during the decade after September 11, and fear of Muslims was at an all-time high. Politicians and the media seemed to dial the fright, mistrust, and animosity up to a fever pitch to gain votes and ratings.
There are men and women still on the streets, and that's all they are saying Can you spare a quarter? I come from a crowd of people who were current on the outlook on life, who were social and knew where they were and had some input into how things seemed to be.
Playing different characters in different films helps keep you excited about what you do. It always seems like a whole new adventure.
We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.
Education for all seems to be the product of a type of distributive justice that is in no way related to the individual.
Movies can provide tear-inducing or comically-entertaining representations of love, but many agree that its deeper conflicting complexities often seem unfathomable.
One problem with globalisation is that bad ideas seem to travel faster than good ones; first there was smearing tomato ketchup on everything; then drinking sugar-soaked cocktails ('Cosmo'-politanism) instead of our traditional whisky soda, and now this idea that we should abandon the poor to their fate in order to protect their dignity.
Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.
Whenever we try something new, mistakes will happen. Seemingly good ideas will fail and need to be re-thought.
We will remember UPA 2, if at all, it seems, as that period when things went mysteriously wrong - for the bribe-taking, buck-passing, foot-dragging, and general sense of paralysis.
