Moral high ground is lost as Democrats and Republicans squabble in the gutter
IT WAS the tweet, as they say, that was heard around the world. When Roseanne Barr found herself back in the limelight and at the top of the ratings, it looked as if she had just secured one of the biggest revivals in recent entertainment history.
The woman who was once the undisputed queen of the TV sitcom had gone through the doldrums in the years since ‘Roseanne’ was cancelled in 1997 – a decision which nobody lamented at the time.
That show, which was loosely autobiographical at the best of times, seemed to veer off into the ether when, in an effort to recognise her new-found wealth off-screen, her on-screen persona won the lottery, was suddenly in possession of a vast amount of money and as she drifted further away from the roots of her blue collar, suburban appeal, the viewers left in droves.
The reason was simple – Roseanne Barr used to represent the everyman and everywoman.
Roseanne and her on-screen husband John Goodman were the hard-working, long-suffering, stoic backbone of America and people felt they could relate to the kind of working-class life she led – and not just in America, either. In fact, for a period in the early-to-mid-1990s, ‘Roseanne’ was the most successful sit-com in the world.
So having fallen into a long period of creatively fallow obscurity, only broken occasionally by some demented outburst, such as deliberately screeching and caterwauling her way through the national anthem at a televised ball game, the recent renaissance of her show, and the fact that it was a massive ratings winner, seemed to be her latest chapter in the American dream of succeeding, failing, and then succeeding again.
Of course, that dream has now turned into a nightmare for her and, more importantly, the several hundred crew members who also stand to lose their livelihood.
That astonishingly stupid tweet, which compared former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett to the love child of the Muslim Brotherhood and ‘Planet of The Apes’, was always going to derail her latest resurgence, and you don’t have to be a student of psychology to guess that there was a subconscious part of her brain which was determined to destroy her latest success.
To further compound her error, she then produced a series of different excuses, ranging from the only excuse a comedian should ever use (‘it was a joke’), to making the rather improbable claim that she presumed Valerie Jarrett was white, to her now widely mocked assertion that she had taken the sleeping tablet Ambien and wasn’t in control of her faculties when she typed out her career-killing nonsense.
Even the makers of Ambien, who are more used to dealing with negative publicity about the over-prescription of their drug to Americans, were able to grab some positive traction by releasing a statement which joked that “side-effects of Ambien do not include racism”.
But as obnoxious and stupid as the tweet was, and it was an undeniably unpleasant and ridiculous thing to say, the responses have been as predictable and hypocritical as we have come to expect.
That the American market place of ideas is now a more brutal and vicious place is not in doubt. That President Donald Trump is responsible for much of the
coarsening of the tone is, equally, not in doubt.
But he has been pushing a revolving door when it comes to crassness and what is striking, particularly post-‘Roseanne’, is how both sides seem determined to claim the moral high ground while ignoring the fact that they are all too busy squabbling in the gutter to take any sort of superior stance.
Those levels of breathtakingly brazen hypocrisy were expertly showcased by Michelle Wolf, the comedian who was on the receiving end of Trumpian hostility when she went after both the president and his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at the recent White House Correspondents dinner.
One might have assumed that her own experience in the cross-hairs of widespread and hysterical condemnation would have given Wolf a degree of empathy for the predicament Barr now finds herself, but not a bit of it.
In fact, she attacked the ABC network for even giving her a show in the first place, saying: “The bold move was actually putting this lady Hitler chef back on the air in the first place.”
As it happens, the ‘lady Hitler chef’ reference was to a photo shoot Barr (herself Jewish, lest we forget), did for satirical Jewish magazine ‘Heeb’ – hardly a bastion of anti-Semitism.
If comedians like Wolf are willing to deliberately ignore the whole point of satire just to settle a political score, then comedy is in more trouble than we may previously have thought.
Of course, the double standards flew thick and fast – a few days after Barr’s Tweet, TV satirist Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***”, which produced the same equally furious response from conservatives as Barr’s slur on Jarrett had received from liberals (and some conservatives as well, it should be noted).
In Bee’s case, common sense won out, she apologised and, as should be the case, will continue to do her job.
So why the disproportionate response between the two faux-pas?
It’s actually quite simple – the liberal intelligentsia hates Roseanne for the same reasons they hate Trump and for the same reasons they hate the people who voted for Trump.
It’s a form of myopic cultural arrogance which means they can never acknowledge, either publicly or privately, that maybe they are not 100pc right and maybe Trump and his followers have something to offer.
It’s a reflection of how the Democrats turned away from their blue-collar base and pursued identity politics instead, placing each race, tribe and gender in a hierarchy of victims and deciding that the white working class were undeserving of their attention when there were so many other grievances to be addressed.
That’s why they lost in 2016 and it’s why they’re on course to lose again in 2020.
THIS obsession with identity bias was unconsciously echoed by Wolf when she explained why she thought it was fair to sack Barr while liberal performers such as Bee, Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann were allowed to say arguably worse things and still keep their job.
According to her: “How about we enslave all white people for a couple hundred years and even after they’re not slaves anymore, still hold them down in society... and then after that there will be no double standards and everyone will get fired for everything they say?”
That statement might be rich with righteous indignation, but it’s poor when it comes to addressing the startling issue of Hollywood hypocrisy.
It also ignores Bill Clinton’s sage advice that the Democrats would do well to learn from the arrogant mistakes of their last disastrous presidential campaign and not simply repeat them in two years’ time, when they will simply have to endure the exact same result.
In the meantime, it might just be nice if both sides stopped trying to get everyone sacked for saying something stupid.