It’s Not About Trump
Comedienne’s online kookery says nothing of Middle America
VALERIE Jarrett says that the Roseanne Barr train wreck should be a “teaching moment,” and so it should — about the poisonous kookery of Roseanne Barr.
Given the political freight piled atop the hit revival of her TV program, it was inevitable that Barr’s spectacular Twitter flameout would be interpreted as a portentous statement on President Trump’s America.
Chris Hayes of MSNBC says that Barr’s “problem turned out to be that she far too authentically represented the actual worldview of a significant chunk of the Trump base.” Roxane Gay in The New York Times wrote a piece headlined, “‘Roseanne’ Is Gone, but the Culture That Gave Her a Show Isn’t.”
Activist Michaela Angela Davis said on CNN that Trump had enabled Barr — a common theme on the left — and then went all the way: Asked point blank if all Trump voters are racist, she said, “Yes.”
Nothing more perfectly encapsulates the dynamic of the Trump era than a TV show that was supposed to be a sympathetic portrayal of Trump supporters by liberal America leading — once again — to the ritualistic denunciation of Trump supporters by liberal America.
Barr is not a typical Trump voter just because she played one on TV. She shares much more in common with a celebrity culture that never lacks for its share of nuts and toxic personalities, especially among comedians, than with, say, Youngstown, Ohio.
Her wild ramblings don’t tell us anything about what Trump voters think, about the state of race relations in America, or working-class culture. Her crackpot views are all her own.
She was a kook long before Trump ran for president. She maintained that 9/11 was “an inside Bush job,” perpetrated to destroy the records of George W. Bush’s Enron and Arthur Andersen friends, prior to destroying the entire economy.
She’s not a conservative. She supported Occupy Wall Street and competed with Jill Stein for the 2012 Green Party nomination. When she lost, she ran instead on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was her running mate, prior to their — surprise — falling out.
Her worldview, such as it is, is prone to wild swings. She used to call Israel a “Nazi state” and denounce “warmongering American rabbis,” before turning around and calling Hillary Clinton “anti-Semitic” and Huma Abedin “a filthy Nazi whore.”
Her subsequent explanations for her heinous Valerie Jarrett tweet should make it clear — she thought Jarrett was a Saudi, or a maybe a Jewish Persian — that this is fundamentally a story about an unhinged person advertising that fact on social media.
Of course, Trump gave his critics reason to associate him with Barr by calling her and eagerly trumpeting the success of her show. Trump’s boosterism was characteristic of him — it’s all about the ratings — but also partook of a longstanding weakness of the right.
Conservatives disdain celebrities, but dangle a C-list celebrity in front of us with a few rightward leanings and he’s immediately awarded a speaking slot at the next Republican convention.
We have low regard for pop culture, but crave its validation. If it must come via a program that is a 1990s-throwback reliant on a ticking time bomb of a star, so be it.
The genesis of the “Roseanne” revival was innocent and laudable enough. The president of DisneyABC Television Group explained the show’s inception after the 2016 election: “We looked at each other and said, ‘There’s a lot about the country we need to learn a lot more about, here on the coasts.”
He was right. The appetite for the show, which reflected none of the toxicity of Roseanne’s reallife personality, speaks of the hunger for more programming about red America. Surely, there must be other vehicles for it — assuming Hollywood doesn’t internalize the critique of Roseanne Barr as an all-too-typical Trump voter.