When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Hot Take of the Day:

You're gonna love this one....

20 years before everybody else decided that 'problematic' is a synonym for 'blasphemous', I was consistently getting yelled at for pointing out to friends and acquaintance irritants that Disney, comics, Sci-fi, fantasy, TV, action movies, comedy, popular musical genres, and just about every form of popular culture, had some of the deepest conceivable incapacity for self-reflection about how they used racism, misogyny and general appeals to limbic system prejudices to create convenient plot melodramas because they were not seriously dealing with human issues. And that's part of what turned me off at an early age from large swathes of popular culture.

And now, in 2020, everybody who didn't want to hear it in 2000 now seems to believe it's of paramount importance to never introduce their children to the very cultural products which gave them their fondest childhood memories without making them feel guilt for everything that was once fun about them. The whole point of most of this stuff is escapism, so once you can no longer escape the messiness of the human condition, most of the stuff you loved as children then becomes worthless, both aesthetically and socially, and all that's left is agitprop that imitates the escapism of our childhood cultural consumption, but is in fact so overloaded with propagandistic messages that there is no way that it can provoke the same lifelong enjoyment in its watchers that Disney and Marvel comics used to provide for you.

Once social media took over our neural pathways, we were rewired in no more than a year or two to think that everything we once thought could do no wrong is so wrong that virtually every form of pleasure and consolation we once had has always been a form of oppression.

The problem was never that light entertainment preached the wrong values, the whole point of consuming entertainment is that it has no values except for the most convenient ones that let you think as little as possible and assures you that everything about the world is OK. The hero always wins, good is good and evil is evil, the hero is the white guy and everybody else is at best just supporting characters existing only to attend to the needs of *his* narrative with no independent story of their own. Whomever's on top in a society, light entertainment that works as light entertainment will always flatter the existing superstructure.

The problem has always been that our culture wanted entertainment that allowed us to shut our brains off, so now we're beginning to create a new generation of entertainment that preaches progressive values, and therefore isn't really entertainment at all, it's propaganda with tropes of entertainment - designed not to shut your brain off but make you yet again righteously indignant at how badly society needs to be reordered. In another generation or two, your children or grandchildren will rebel against this diet just as you did against the previous one, and decide that all the racist and sexist tropes really weren't all that harmful: but of course, they were, they always were, and they always will be. Our generation is absolutely right about that. But long as we're headed down the road of turning entertainment into propaganda, perhaps the next way which entertainment gets refashioned will be so archetypal in how it's plotted that it will be propaganda that preaches not equality but nothing less than the outright superiority of some groups over others. It's happened before, it's happened very consciously, and it's happened in society's where the majority previously believed in equality's inviolate sacrality.

So the only solution is the one everybody still doesn't want to hear: you have to condition kids from the earliest age to consume products associated with that dreaded A-word, Art. There's all sorts of art that seems deeply racist and sexist, and if it is, there's a 90% chance it's not as good as its reputation, and it never was. But a lot of it does still hold up, and rather than providing answers about how the world should be ordered, it has the humility to merely ask questions: this is the way the world is, does it need to be this way? Can it be different?

In Othello and the Merchant of Venice and Richard III, Shakespeare did not provide answers for the plight of Africans and Jews and the disabled in white and Christian and ableist societies where their inconvenient presences were unwelcome, he merely posited that *perhaps* the way we view minorities is because our social conditions forced them into acting the way they do, which therefore fulfills and reinforces our stereotypes of what these people in fact are. That is what Jane Austen and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Tolstoy showed in their portrayals of women: that the options of women were so limited that they were basically coerced into seeming like flighty creatures because the expectations and limitations on them at the time were such that they couldn't help reinforcing society's image of how women act. It was Aeschylus who posited that perhaps it is rule of law and trial by jury to determine truth that will stop cycles of violence and revenge. And yes, one could make the same argument for the humanizing paradoxes inherent in works of popular mediums like The Wire or The Simpsons or The Sopranos or Mad Men or The Godfather or Vertigo or The Searchers or Raging Bull - people all throughout societies are coerced into acting like the most unattractive stereotypical versions of themselves which society has of them. And showing that process humanizes these ostensibly unattractive people whom we're predisposed to cross the street to avoid. And THAT is what builds a better, more compassionate, more tolerant society of good faith.

That's what America misses by demanding entertainment that either lets them forget about their cultural values and expectations, or demanding entertainment that reflects their values perfectly. And it creates the society whose current problems we live with every day. Every society has its problems, but the solution to THIS particular problem is right in front of us, and it always was.