Sorry folks ... "racism" isn't *technically* what cost Roseanne her TV show.
@JimboX
More than one reader has sent me an email asking me for my hot take on the big Roseanne reboot brouhaha, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t have a whole lot say about the matter.
But first things first, lemme get something off my chest. I never thought the original Roseanne TV show was *that* good, and that includes all of the much-ballyhooed Halloween episodes (boy, I wonder how Matt from Dino Drac is taking this one? Five bucks says he winds up scrubbing all references to the show from his site by the time July rolls around.)
Anyhoo, going back and watching any episode of Roseanne from 1992 or 1993 just feels painfully outdated, and not even in the hopeless 1990s nostalgic way, either. It’s a boring, uneventful and painfully unfunny program that never had an iota of the pseudo-blue collar charm and humor of Married ... with Children and golden-era The Simpsons, and I’m actually kinda' happy that channels like Logo are probably going to obliterate the show from their film vaults the same way TV Land responded to the Charleston massacre by taking Dukes of Hazzard of the air — a decision that no doubt prevented many a race-related shooting and in no way, shape or form could be construed as desperate, knee-jerk corporate slacktivism.
I wish I had more pneuma underlying this whole Roseanne becoming persona non grata thing, but frankly, I just don’t give a hoot. Yeah, on one hand the First Amendment absolutist in me feels philosophically peeved, but then again, ABC cancelling her show isn’t a form of state censorship, but privately held corporate censorship. It’s the exact same deal as the whole NFL national anthem flap — it’s not the gubbernment telling somebody what to do and think, it’s a private sector employer telling an employee what he or she can and can’t do if they want to keep getting a paycheck from them. Simply put, if you’re outraged about “but muh freedoms!” over one of these topics but not the other, you sir, madame or transperson, are indeed a hypocrite of the highest caliber.
But it does seem interesting that ABC — a subsidiary of Disney(*), the most powerful pop cultural conglomerate in history — would yank the plug on the show after spending an entire half year patting themselves on the back over its ratings and, sigh, topical significance. I recall watching segments on Good Morning America in which the spokes-prostitutes praised their own network for “raising important questions” about Islamophobia and trans rights through the reboot, thus hitting the TV line-drive double of championing their owners social engineering agenda while simultaneously stealth advertising their own prime time lineup.
And by that same token, we saw the same network try to sow a little sociocultural discord by asking itself if the show went too far by making jokes about Black-ish and Fresh Off The Boat pandering their intrinsic ethnoracial thematics to white audiences even though the shows themselves were contextually and conceptually identical to any number of similar sitcoms about Caucasian family dynamics.
Well, if Walt Disney wanted some faux controversy to drive more pupils to the program, they certainly got more than they wished for when Roseanne — apparently bored of accusing Chelsea Clinton of secretly marrying a Soros and copypastaing PizzaGate rumors — took to Twitter to call Valerie Jarrett (an Iranian woman who apparently is 1/4th black or something like that) the hypothetical cross-pollination of “The Muslim Brotherhood” and Planet of the Apes.(*)
Naturally, the only “right” way to interpret that tweet, as our illustrious media has shown us time and time again, is to immediately equate such as an act of racist linguistic terrorism, despite the fact a quick Google search does indeed reveal that Mrs. Jarrett does bare an astonishing resemblance to Dr. Zaius, a blonde, peach-skinned human-orangutan hybrid, from the original Planet of the Apes movies.
Of course, even noting an innocuous, nonjudgmental visual similarity between the two is considered a veritable hate crime in this day and age, because as we all know, nothing is more offensive than dare trudging up the hideous, bigoted, xenophobic notion that some darker-hued individuals may share aesthetic commonalities with lower primates — itself a gleefully discredited and discarded reminder of (pseudo)scientific racism so erroneous in theory and application that even Google’s most advanced artificial intelligence programs have NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER distinguishing our more melanated brethren from gorillas.
Was Roseanne’s comments truly anchored in steeped ethnoracial rage? Is that one tweet alone proof positive that she’s no better than racial purity proponents and ethnostate supporters a’la Don Black or David Duke (or Muhammad Ali, for that matter?)
It doesn’t matter. In today’s cultural milieu, there are no degrees of “racism.” The academic/entertainment/media/Silicon Valley complex makes no moral distinctions between low-key, politically-incorrect verbalisms online and vandalizing a historically black church, or spray-painting slurs on the walls of a college dorm, or calling in threatening messages to synagogues … which, nowadays, actually seems to be more of a “black” thing than a “white” activity, but such facts are useless against the reality-resistant masses, who have long embraced their own unfounded, unthinking, subjective feelings as unquestionable, unvarnished objective truth, regardless of the logical evidence to the contrary.
Roseanne herself is a bit of a contradiction. In the 1990s she miffed the conservatives by making fun of the national anthem and making out with that one chick with bushy eyebrows back when gayness on network TV was a novelty, and now she’s rankling the modern pop cultural puritans, the post-Hillary left, a consortium of fervid feminists and dogged dope smokers and aggrieved ethno-nationalists of all varieties united by their utter abhorrence of all things Caucasoid, masculine and heterosexual, by going after their one utmost sacred pillar, that one unifying ideal that makes their indignation dignified instead of less savory adjectives, like “childish,” “rash,” and my personal favorite, “ironically prejudicial.”
And it cost her dearly. Even the perception of being a ray-ray-ray-cist is enough to end one’s career in post-Hillary America, and it’s probably only a matter of time until Roseanne is thrust into the pit where micro-aggressors like Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter and Jimmy the Greek fester. She’s been branded with the Scarlet “R,” forever forced to carry with her a social stigma every bit as career-crushing as being deemed a communist during the height of McCarthyism or a Wiccan during the Salem Witch Trials. “The Racist” is our society’s agreed upon “One Great Evil,” the collective, cultural boogeyman we’ve convinced ourselves is lurking in the shadows, anxiously awaiting to derail all of our majestic “progress” and force the gays into gulags, women into subservient second class citizenship and the black folk into bona fide bondage … which, of course, are things you could never, ever accuse the Muslims or Red Chinese or any Sub-Saharan totalitarian societies of actively practicing. Hey — we can’t speak poorly of our allies in the struggle against the man, can we?
I dunno. Maybe Roseanne actually wanted to get fired for the LULZ. I mean, if she really wanted to be subversive, I guess costing 200 SJWs on staff their livelihood and screwing the company out of millions in advertising dollars would be a pretty dandy way of doing so. But so much about the woman makes so little sense — this is a self-avowed socialist who voted for Trump, after all — that I’m not sure what she even stands for culturally or politically.
All we know for sure is that we won’t be seeing her on TV for the foreseeable future.
Not that it matters, I suppose, since we can see her on the Internet, for free, anytime we want.
You know — until they kick her off that media platform for “wrongthink,” too.
More than one reader has sent me an email asking me for my hot take on the big Roseanne reboot brouhaha, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t have a whole lot say about the matter.
But first things first, lemme get something off my chest. I never thought the original Roseanne TV show was *that* good, and that includes all of the much-ballyhooed Halloween episodes (boy, I wonder how Matt from Dino Drac is taking this one? Five bucks says he winds up scrubbing all references to the show from his site by the time July rolls around.)
Anyhoo, going back and watching any episode of Roseanne from 1992 or 1993 just feels painfully outdated, and not even in the hopeless 1990s nostalgic way, either. It’s a boring, uneventful and painfully unfunny program that never had an iota of the pseudo-blue collar charm and humor of Married ... with Children and golden-era The Simpsons, and I’m actually kinda' happy that channels like Logo are probably going to obliterate the show from their film vaults the same way TV Land responded to the Charleston massacre by taking Dukes of Hazzard of the air — a decision that no doubt prevented many a race-related shooting and in no way, shape or form could be construed as desperate, knee-jerk corporate slacktivism.
I wish I had more pneuma underlying this whole Roseanne becoming persona non grata thing, but frankly, I just don’t give a hoot. Yeah, on one hand the First Amendment absolutist in me feels philosophically peeved, but then again, ABC cancelling her show isn’t a form of state censorship, but privately held corporate censorship. It’s the exact same deal as the whole NFL national anthem flap — it’s not the gubbernment telling somebody what to do and think, it’s a private sector employer telling an employee what he or she can and can’t do if they want to keep getting a paycheck from them. Simply put, if you’re outraged about “but muh freedoms!” over one of these topics but not the other, you sir, madame or transperson, are indeed a hypocrite of the highest caliber.
But it does seem interesting that ABC — a subsidiary of Disney(*), the most powerful pop cultural conglomerate in history — would yank the plug on the show after spending an entire half year patting themselves on the back over its ratings and, sigh, topical significance. I recall watching segments on Good Morning America in which the spokes-prostitutes praised their own network for “raising important questions” about Islamophobia and trans rights through the reboot, thus hitting the TV line-drive double of championing their owners social engineering agenda while simultaneously stealth advertising their own prime time lineup.
(*) As an aside, it’s nice to see Bob Iger and Channing Dungey publicly congratulating themselves for taking the moral high ground on something — especially while Disney continues to use teenage slave labor in Bangladesh to sew together Olaf dolls.
And by that same token, we saw the same network try to sow a little sociocultural discord by asking itself if the show went too far by making jokes about Black-ish and Fresh Off The Boat pandering their intrinsic ethnoracial thematics to white audiences even though the shows themselves were contextually and conceptually identical to any number of similar sitcoms about Caucasian family dynamics.
Well, if Walt Disney wanted some faux controversy to drive more pupils to the program, they certainly got more than they wished for when Roseanne — apparently bored of accusing Chelsea Clinton of secretly marrying a Soros and copypastaing PizzaGate rumors — took to Twitter to call Valerie Jarrett (an Iranian woman who apparently is 1/4th black or something like that) the hypothetical cross-pollination of “The Muslim Brotherhood” and Planet of the Apes.(*)
(*) By the way, Valerie Jarrett is the person more responsible than any other White House adviser for ensuring Obamacare’s failure — and thus, expediting and intensifying the health care woes of low-income Americans of all colors of the rainbow. Surely, there’s a good reason why the MSM hasn’t brought that up in all of their narratives, right?
Naturally, the only “right” way to interpret that tweet, as our illustrious media has shown us time and time again, is to immediately equate such as an act of racist linguistic terrorism, despite the fact a quick Google search does indeed reveal that Mrs. Jarrett does bare an astonishing resemblance to Dr. Zaius, a blonde, peach-skinned human-orangutan hybrid, from the original Planet of the Apes movies.
Of course, even noting an innocuous, nonjudgmental visual similarity between the two is considered a veritable hate crime in this day and age, because as we all know, nothing is more offensive than dare trudging up the hideous, bigoted, xenophobic notion that some darker-hued individuals may share aesthetic commonalities with lower primates — itself a gleefully discredited and discarded reminder of (pseudo)scientific racism so erroneous in theory and application that even Google’s most advanced artificial intelligence programs have NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER distinguishing our more melanated brethren from gorillas.
Was Roseanne’s comments truly anchored in steeped ethnoracial rage? Is that one tweet alone proof positive that she’s no better than racial purity proponents and ethnostate supporters a’la Don Black or David Duke (or Muhammad Ali, for that matter?)
It doesn’t matter. In today’s cultural milieu, there are no degrees of “racism.” The academic/entertainment/media/Silicon Valley complex makes no moral distinctions between low-key, politically-incorrect verbalisms online and vandalizing a historically black church, or spray-painting slurs on the walls of a college dorm, or calling in threatening messages to synagogues … which, nowadays, actually seems to be more of a “black” thing than a “white” activity, but such facts are useless against the reality-resistant masses, who have long embraced their own unfounded, unthinking, subjective feelings as unquestionable, unvarnished objective truth, regardless of the logical evidence to the contrary.
Roseanne herself is a bit of a contradiction. In the 1990s she miffed the conservatives by making fun of the national anthem and making out with that one chick with bushy eyebrows back when gayness on network TV was a novelty, and now she’s rankling the modern pop cultural puritans, the post-Hillary left, a consortium of fervid feminists and dogged dope smokers and aggrieved ethno-nationalists of all varieties united by their utter abhorrence of all things Caucasoid, masculine and heterosexual, by going after their one utmost sacred pillar, that one unifying ideal that makes their indignation dignified instead of less savory adjectives, like “childish,” “rash,” and my personal favorite, “ironically prejudicial.”
And it cost her dearly. Even the perception of being a ray-ray-ray-cist is enough to end one’s career in post-Hillary America, and it’s probably only a matter of time until Roseanne is thrust into the pit where micro-aggressors like Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter and Jimmy the Greek fester. She’s been branded with the Scarlet “R,” forever forced to carry with her a social stigma every bit as career-crushing as being deemed a communist during the height of McCarthyism or a Wiccan during the Salem Witch Trials. “The Racist” is our society’s agreed upon “One Great Evil,” the collective, cultural boogeyman we’ve convinced ourselves is lurking in the shadows, anxiously awaiting to derail all of our majestic “progress” and force the gays into gulags, women into subservient second class citizenship and the black folk into bona fide bondage … which, of course, are things you could never, ever accuse the Muslims or Red Chinese or any Sub-Saharan totalitarian societies of actively practicing. Hey — we can’t speak poorly of our allies in the struggle against the man, can we?
I dunno. Maybe Roseanne actually wanted to get fired for the LULZ. I mean, if she really wanted to be subversive, I guess costing 200 SJWs on staff their livelihood and screwing the company out of millions in advertising dollars would be a pretty dandy way of doing so. But so much about the woman makes so little sense — this is a self-avowed socialist who voted for Trump, after all — that I’m not sure what she even stands for culturally or politically.
All we know for sure is that we won’t be seeing her on TV for the foreseeable future.
Not that it matters, I suppose, since we can see her on the Internet, for free, anytime we want.
You know — until they kick her off that media platform for “wrongthink,” too.
