K so the Roseanne reboot. 1) Watching the show is, yeah, morally dicey. Roseanne Barr is a pretty bad person. And I’m still not cool with the whole Black-ish thing in comparison.
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2) The show is good. I hope the Murphy Brown reboot is this good. I still haven’t watched the Will and Grace reboot. I generally oppose reboot culture but damn if the shows are better than the new shit... they’re better.
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3) The Conner family is a liberal fantasy of Trump voters, but tbh, the Conner family has ALWAYS been a liberal fantasy of working class white folks. The fact that their “salt of the earth”ness extends to loving their own grandson is perfectly in character.
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4) Aunt Jackie is an affectionate parody of “smart liberals” and it is frankly spot-on. I find myself wincing a little because I’m aware I’m being poked fun at. But it isn’t a bad feeling! The life coach thing is 100% dead on.
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5) I increasingly don’t have a problem with Roseanne Conner the Trump voter. I do have a problem with anybody who is dumb enough to think that liberals don’t know that there are Trump voters who are sweet people who are good to their own.
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The WHOLE POINT is that they chose a fantasy of being good to their own over a reality of being bare minimum decent to everybody else. One needn’t utterly efface the other... but also if you’re gonna stick with your own, we gotta do the same, and that may mean repudiating you.
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6) I DO have a problem with Roseanne Barr the Trump voter, who is not a Trump voter in the way Roseanne Conner is, but is instead a Trump voter in the way Dave Chappelle, in an alternate universe where Trump didn’t target blacks, might be a Trump voter.
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Roseanne Barr is a performative MAGA because she actually IS a deplorable—that is, she is a person who, rather than engage with the ethical claims/demands contemporary times make on her, embraces her (performative, and by inference false) indifference towards those claims/demands
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And because she, like Dave Chappelle, is among the idle rich, I have none of the sympathy for these rich comedians that I have for your average hood nigga that loves Dave Chappelle or the WWC folks who identify with Roseanne (if they exist, idk bc I don’t know them).
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7) Ultimately, the show offers a perfectly palatable compromise: you can be culturally conservative, and even vote for Trump, as long as when the rubber meets the road in your real life, you show up for the people who are “different” within your family.
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And of course, the inference is that you then will vote for, e.g., Bernie Sanders: louder about economic justice, more, um... a softer touch when it comes to social justice (to be almost absurdly generous).
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Frankly, I don’t think that’s a bad compromise to offer Trump voters. AND, as actual conservatives recognize, by casting that as the Acceptable Trump Voter, you further marginalize active, rather than passive, bigotry.
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AND you insist that passive bigots are only OK if, when the rubber meets the road, after they go sit in the garage and drink an angry beer about it, they choose against the bigotry (inference being if they can do this in their lives, they can do it at the ballot box too.)
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Ultimately, therefore, I think the show is likely to do more good than harm. Still, I would feel a lot more comfortable watching it if a) ABC hadn’t censored Black-ish, and b) Roseanne Barr were less, well, deplorable.
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End of conversation
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