Okay, now we have Roseanne to ogle. Staring into the 70 inch TV helps
us avoid the 20 inch mirror over the bathroom sink.
Roseanne was funny in a fresh sort of working class way. But that was
then and this is not Roseanne revisited, it's Roseanne Remade. For
me, Roseanne had lost her funniness at least one season before her
demise. Maybe two seasons. I'm not sure since I drifted on to other
stuff.
But now we'll see just how many Americans feel "safe" siding with
Roseanne. Then we'll have Trump's Troopers and Roseanne's renegades.
And God help anyone who is even a little bit different.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/30/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is Roseanne Barr What America Has Become?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
30 May 18
The cancellation of Roseanne Barr's situation comedy reboot at ABC/Disney
is not, as some of my more serious acquaintances on social media are
saying,
unimportant.
Barr's attack via Twitter on former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett (who, Barr
said, looked like the offspring of a union of the Muslim Brotherhood and
planet of the apes), is an important moment in American cultural history.
It
signals the significance today of internet conspiracy theories (why focus
on
Ms. Jarrett now, years after she was out of office?) and of a new racist
fascism that belittles attempts to reign it in. Ms. Jarrett is
African-American, and ape comparisons are an ugly staple of anti-Black
discourse. Even the right wing comic Wanda Sykes (a former National
Security
Agency employee) resigned from the show as production consultant.
The internet has been thick with falsehoods for years about Ms. Jarrett
having wanted to promote Islam in the US. Apparently these lies derive from
her having been born in Shiraz, Iran, while her father, an American
physician, was helping out at a hospital there. The family is not Muslim.
The connection from there to the Muslim Brotherhood is ignorance, since the
Brotherhood is Sunni but Iran is largely Shiite.
It probably does not need to be said that it was the 'planet of the apes'
crack rather than the weird invocation of the Muslim Brotherhood that got
Barr fired. Racist language against Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians is
virtually the only uncontroversial hate speech in today's America. Barr
even
did a segment about Muslim neighbors with strong Islamophobic overtones.
Senator Ted Cruz even wants to legislate the designation of the peaceable
Muslim Brotherhood (which in Egypt made a commitment to peaceful activism
in
the early 1970s) as a terrorist group, as a wedge for delegitimizing all
Muslim non-governmental organizations.
Those on the Right who are complaining of left Stalinism or interference
with free speech are surely jesting. No individual has a right to have a
television show on ABC (if they do, I've been short-changed). ABC/ Disney
is
a private company and can hire and fire at will for cause, and this
behavior
was clearly cause. A consumer boycott of ABC advertisers would cost a lot
more than what the network will lose from Roseanne's ratings.
Unlike a lot of academics, I actually watch a good deal of television and
have done so my entire life. I spend my days reading heavy tomes, so in the
evening I'm just not ready for Hegel. I used to watch Roseanne during its
first incarnation in the Clinton years, and remember remarking that it was
the only place on television where actual working people were regularly
depicted. I remember hearing an NPR interview with a 1960s television
writer
who said that the studios strictly instructed him never to bring up the
words "union" or "strike."
Situation comedies can be game changers. Joe Biden is convinced that Will
and Grace paved the way for greater acceptance of gays and gay marriage.
Right wing politicians recognized this reality. George H. W. Bush's
long-forgotten vice president, Dan Quayle, railed against a "cultural
elite," by which he meant those in Hollywood purveying what he saw as
liberal values. Quayle was raised in a John Bircher family and almost
certainly meant Jews like Barr when he used the term. But this Roseanne
show
clearly had the potential to push the other way.
Barr herself, what with being an outlandish comedian, was always a bit of a
hot mess, clearly prickly and strident. Amy Zimmerman at The Daily Beast
surveys Barr's history of sharp and sometimes baffling exclamations. In her
liberal days she castigated Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians.
She ran as candidate for leader of the Green Party in the 2012 election.
Then, more recently, Barr flipped. Steve Bannon and Breitbart got into her
head and so did Alex Jones and Infowars. She started calling
Muslim-Americans "savages" and embracing the wild conspiracy theories that
flourish in the fact-free, White-resentment-fueled hothouse of fascist New
Media (usually backed by fascist New Billionaires). She retweeted Milo
Yiannopolis and spoke darkly of Kamala Harris's sex secrets. She attacked
#MeToo victims. She had long had business dealings with Trump, and made the
same shift he did. I am not a psychiatrist and never met either one, nor
wish to, but purely as a lay observer of people, I do not believe either
one
is a well person.
Barr's odyssey (or odd-yssey) from a liberal champion of the underpaid
working class to a vitriolic Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist with
an
attraction to racist language is in many ways symptomatic of the United
States itself. And it is worth noting that Donald J. Trump appears to have
followed the same path, though perhaps there were always some racist
conspiracy theory issues that were privately important to him. In public,
he
sounded like liberal Democrat until the last years of the past decade,
after
Barack Obama was elected.
It may have seemed natural to ABC/ Disney to do a reboot of Roseanne's show
after Trump's election. The US business elites bought the myth of major
white working class support for Trump. (Defections by about 14% of the
white
working class who had voted Obama to the GOP could have been the margin of
victory in some states, but that is one in six, not a majority). It is
always reassuring to corporate managers to think that the people you pay
badly and deny basic benefits and overwork don't actually hate you or your
party. Not to mention that the working class in the US is not majority
white
to begin with.
But ABC/ Disney either knew about Barr's bizarre statements and
endorsements
on social media in recent years and ignored all that (so blinded by dreams
of a sure ratings hit that they disregarded the unpalatable behavior) or
they did not do due diligence. In the former case, they were exploiting,
let
us say, a clearly fragile personality-which is a risky thing to do with
tens
of millions of dollars.
After a moment of contrition, when she blamed her remarks on Ambien, Barr
recovered her balance or rather imbalance:
The whole tale is a sorry commentary not on Barr but on where American
culture and politics now stands. We went from a corporate elite nervously
allowing some working class characters on mass media in the 1990s (just as
long, you understand, as it gave no support to actual striking laborers) to
transmogrifying it into an Islamophobic hatefest in the teens of the 21st
century.
Some of my Twitter acquaintances are complaining that the news of a Harvard
study showing thousands of deaths in Puerto Rico from last fall's hurricane
has been overshadowed by the Barr firing, implying that the latter is
fluff.
But both pieces of news point at the same reality, of a downward spiral in
American politics. George W. Bush was pilloried for his inaction over
Katrina. Trump has gotten away with criminally neglecting the US citizens
of
Puerto Rico.
At least we have not retrogressed to the point where Barr's attack on a
prominent African-American was allowed to pass by her employers, though it
should be noted that Trump has said many things as offensive as Barr and
remains at 40% in the polls.
In a better America, there would be as much discomfort with Barr
Islamophobia as with her disdain for African-Americans.
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