Why I'm not happy about Stephen Colbert taking over the Late Show or I'm a little preachy and I apologize.

Twenty years ago, The Colbert Report would have been cancelled half-way through the pilot. The style and the satire would have been too sharp. It would have been unbelievable. But 2005 was a special time. Fox News spent most of the year as the ratings giant and George W. Bush began his second term as president. The magically sharp buffoonery of Colbert met a world weary of war (Afghanistan then in its fourth year and Iraq in its second) and a little too cynical to believe those in power were telling the truth. The character Stephen Colbert held up a mirror (granted it was a distorted mirror but not so distorted we couldn’t see ourselves) that was too close for comfort. It was in the same spirit as Swift’s Modest Proposal. Swift unmasked the underlying sentiment of how little society cared about Irish children. Colbert unmasked how little we as Americans care about anyone else.

Colbert came at everything sideways. Instead of reporting on Super PACs, the audience, over several months, was walked through the process of just how PACs operate and how potentially corrupt they can become by Colbert himself starting a Super PAC.  He even had his own billionaire – Mark Cuban- funding him.

Colbert told us the truth in uncomfortable ways. During the 2012 primaries, when it seemed sure that Mitt Romney would receive the republican nomination, Colbert had a “countdown to loving Mitt” which was exactly the atmosphere of the Republican Party. There was a desperation to the search for anyone else (Chris Christie please get in the race! Please PLEASE) that was inversely proportionate to the despondency over Romney as candidate. Colbert got it just right.

With symbolic action and a knack for highlighting hypocrisy, Colbert did what any good comedian does – he made his audience laugh. But there is another vocation called to do the same job although it involves less laughs and more stones – prophet.

What we as human beings and as a society need will always be someone brave enough to stand up and tell us the hard truths about ourselves. Seeing the poverty of our morality and the hypocrisy of our love are just as apt to get laughs as they are to induce anger. But hopefully more than that too, hopefully it will help us to change. Because if we fill our life with “yes men” in our news and culture we damn ourselves to drift from reality.