The Chris Moeller Archives

Racist tweets

I'm not on Twitter. I will have demonstrated the main reason why I'm not on it after this post has raced past 140 characters in length. The social media site has come to be best defined by United States President Donald Trump, who has a penchant for posting stream-of-consciousness personal attacks upon his critics in the early morning hours of the day. Twitter lacks the capacity for nuanced opinions certainly, but media attacks upon "tweeters" seem to lack nuance as well.

Roseanne, the show, two times around the block as the best on television, has to go away now because its namesake, star, executive producer, and identity center, comedian Roseanne Barr, posted a tweet that referred to former Obama White House aide Valerie Jarrett as a cross between "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes."

I've been a fan of Roseanne Barr for as long as she's been in the national spotlight. I met her in Eldon, Iowa nearly 25 years ago when she was married to a fellow Iowan, comedian Tom Arnold. She and I have both been candidates for public office representing the Green Party, and that list we are on is not a particularly long one. (She left the party in anger after failing to secure its presidential nomination in 2012.) I didn't come to this post specifically to defend her, but the time and place that we live in will dictate to many of you that that's what I'm doing, and also, as I think about it, what's wrong with it if that's what I'm doing? But what I'm attempting to do instead is to address the lack of nuance in the news coverage and the cheapening of the discourse that Barr is, at once, taking part in and that also has taken her and her show off the air.

Roseanne Barr, first of all-- it must be noted-- suffers from mental illness. She is quite open about this since publishing a book about it in 1994. She's given multiple interviews about it. She has a split personality disorder and claims to have seven different personalities living inside of her. To recognize how far she has climbed in the American social stratosphere during her life, know that at age 16, after already growing up in a dysfunctional family, she suffered severe brain trauma in a car accident, and was institutionalized in a Utah state mental hospital for eight months, where she then became pregnant by a fellow patient and gave birth to a child that she gave up for adoption. Barr claims that she tweeted this week under the influence of Ambien, which caused the drug's manufacturer, Sanofi, to issue a statement glibly saying that the drug's known side effects do not include racism, but known side effects I found on WebMD are depression, confusion, aggression, anxiety, memory loss, inability to concentrate, disorientation, and emotional blunting, so, you know, full disclosure.

The point of referencing Barr's mental illness and the fact of her split personality disorder is that she's always been across-the-map in her public pronouncements and her political statements, but her high-profile media position has always stranded her without the capacity to garner much human empathy beyond our gratefulness for her willingness to continue entertaining us and her ability to monetize her talents to the benefit of other people. This is an anthem of American cultural life.

Her tweet deserves closer examination. First of all, it seems to me that she didn't compare Jarrett's appearance to an ape, as every headline reads. She compared her to Malcolm McDowell, the actor made up to look like a fictionalized and humanized ape in a 1968 classic sci-fi film. Barr claims she believed Jarrett, who has an African-American parent, but who actually does not possess many traditional African-American physical traits, to instead be white and Arab, and I'll return to that in a moment. My point is that the unfocused anger seems to have nothing to do with the fact that the offense was insulting her physical appearance at all, which, on one hand is more sexist than it is racist, and on the other hand, no American politician escapes insults upon their public appearance by comedians. We're debating this right now from the angle of the left to the right with Michelle Wolf, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and last month's White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Clinton supporters in 2016 challenged us by saying that Hillary faced an undue challenge in her campaign as a woman because of the media focus upon her appearance and her manner of speaking, but among her predominate opponents, Trump took just as many free shots about his weight, his hair, and his speech. The difference is that his campaign never presented a roll call of grievances about them at any point. Bernie Sanders had already been flat out dismissed as unelectable by a large number of Democrats, including the almost entire lot of their operatives, and certainly by the traditional news media, because of his sharpened manner of Brooklyn-ese speaking and his supposedly disheveled hair and clothing, and those obstacles were insurmountable to him despite the fact that he managed to outpoll both Clinton and Trump among all registered American voters at every point from the start of the campaign to the end of it.

But I digress. Back to the Arab part. Roseanne's politics as a Jewish feminist woman have swung over time from the extreme far left, where I admittedly (and proudly) reside, to the extreme far right. When she was an option on the Green Party presidential ticket, she was a scathing public critic of Israel's expansion into the Palestinian settlements. She once went so far as to call Israel "a Nazi state." But ever since she kicked up her feud with the Greens and with the 2012 nominee that defeated her, Jill Stein, she has become an extreme advocate on behalf of Israel. Personally citing a newer, better education into the issues, her Twitter account for a few years now has been one repeatedly bashing anti-Zionists and backers of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Movement. In 2016, via Twitter, she had swung so far away from the idea of a Jewish Nazi state that she proclaimed that the University of California at Davis should be "nuked" after the students voted for university divestment from Israeli businesses.

So here we have headlines entirely focused on the "ape" part of her most recent tweet when Barr is simultaneously, almost entirely without public reaction, reinforcing again the alleged connection between the Obama inner circle and Islam (specifically the Muslim Brotherhood). This is just puzzling to me. Again, I'm just trying to dig into the nuance, but the part that interests me is not the crude references to Jarrett's appearance, but the religious instruction Barr has evidently been receiving, and the extent to which American-Jewish leaders and Israeli ministers might actually talk like this in private as well when referring to Obama's supposed anti-Semitism and alleged secret Muslim sympathies. It's worth noting that financier George Soros was the other target of Barr's recent savage tweets, and he's a favorite villain of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. None of these earlier tweets caused ABC to drop their relationship with her or cease work on their developing re-boot project.

Roseanne also serves in the vital public role as comedian. Comedians are our national truth-tellers, and so I'm also sparring psychologically with this terrifying idea, again reinforced by Roseanne's cancellation, that we can't allow our national truth-tellers to ever step-- or even jump-- over that edge of proper public decorum. Not only should such an overjump be permitted to happen, it's often required of the job. One of the tragic results of having a president that detests all aspects of proper decorum is that his critics have decided that the nation, collectively, now has too little respect for decorum. It's not true. We have just about the precise amount of disrespect for it.

And of course, this story explodes even larger because Roseanne was that controversial show. The series that critics seemed to begrudgingly concede was pushing the right buttons to stimulate audiences, but that the individual critics on the mushy left simply couldn't bring themselves to fully embrace because its identity center, and her character, were unapologetic Trump backers (even as the series as a whole attempted to represent all viewpoints). As a result, this cancellation of the extraordinarily popular series (far more popular with audiences even than with critics) comes as an absolute godsend before work can begin on the first follow-up season to the re-booted series. No more conflicting sentiments, no more headaches, no more need for nuanced political treatises for people that simply want to write about entertainment.

Roseanne Barr, an Obama voter in 2012, so despised Hillary Clinton and her political machine that she backed Donald Trump, of all people, in 2016, and then seemed to have his malleable, but increasingly angry and resentful politics morph into her politics as well. Sound like America to you in a microcosm? Hmm, let me think. Well, her show brought in an estimated $45 million in advertising revenue to ABC, and it aired at that in only nine half-hour installments from March to May. It averaged 18 million viewers per week. Only Sunday night NFL football and NBC's This Is Us averaged more for the entire season. And before you think that network censorship at ABC is limited to Roseanne and Roseanne Barr, note that executives pulled an episode of black-ish prior to air earlier this year, for undisclosed content reasons, and now the show's African-American show-runner, Kenya Barris, is in negotiations to leave his contract and go to work at Netflix and its advertiser-free format instead.

This is the new America. We send this one away. Her show reflected economic resentments apparently quite accurately for realism-- mounting health care bills, fear of Mexicans and Muslims, and the desire for economic decency, but we're not comfortable with the existence of any of these things. Hollywood doesn't even like to show us working class people on television, yet audiences are apparently starving for it. We not only send her away. We throw away the vehicle for all of this that she created (and by the way, there has always been resentments between the comedian and the network over who created and who was responsible for the success of the series). We want to send these others away too because they came to her defense on late night television, or were just affiliated with her. These are terrible losses because they come connected to someone that tried her best to bring political populism back to the side it belongs-- to the left, and also back to the arena that populism belongs-- economic, rather than cultural. These are terrible losses also because it's an unequivocal sign, perhaps the last necessary one to get it through my thick skull at least, that liberals don't intend to begin engagement with Trump voters in the slightest, and will continue dismissing them in the fervent but futile hopes that they will simply go away.

posted by CM @ 8:51 AM