Girth of a Nation

I wanted to like the Roseanne reboot, I suppose; at the very least, I resolved not to let it be a political decision, which appears to be something of a feat for many folks these days. But let's not kid ourselves -- the show's namesake has gone out of her way the last few years to be (or at least make effort to appear to be) a repellent troll.

As her bumptious political opinions have pinballed around the dial throughout her tumultuous public life, one thing has remained consistent for Roseanne the person:  she seems to place an inordinate value in being tough to pigeonhole or defend. This would be worthy of note if only she'd ever had an opinion on any subject that was worth repeating or endorsing. But her main goal has always been simply to be a pain in the ass. Like her ricockulous orange golem idol, she can't stand to be ignored. Unlike Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, she doesn't care if you like her or not.

But again, I don't want to be one of those Zhdanovite douchebags, stress-testing every note of every song and every line of every show for absolute alignment with my own view of the world and its sorry inhabitants. Ultimately, either the show is funny, or it isn't.

And the show is funny....until it isn't. There are a lot of nice little moments, and some decent laughs. John Goodman fits right back into the Dan Conner (easily the best character on the show, then and now) role like a comfortable shoe. The original kids are all back, as is Laurie Metcalf. They all fall right back into familiar rhythms.

But the first two episodes, which aired back-to-back last week, submerge the viewer in tone and smarm and reverse PC winks. It's likely that the writers were going for an Archie vs. Meathead dynamic between Roseanne and Jackie, but Michael Stivic was actually allowed to make a point once in a while. Jackie is simply a hopped-up caricature of every conservatard twitbag's laundry list of imaginary grievances:  shrill, smug, self-righteous, pedantic. It gets old quickly.

Roseanne, on the other hand, is never ever wrong about anything, just ask her. She defends her choice of a moronic grifter with a vague grumble about "jobs" and brooks no further disagreement. We'll see how that all goes with the jobs and the health care booming along as they are in that part of the country. The bottom line is that it becomes difficult to separate a show from its politics when the show is so blatantly political at every turn.

One of the plots in the second episode encapsulates the dilemma of the show pretty well:  younger daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert, who is producing the reboot) has moved back home with her teen daughter and tween son, the latter of whom is, as the kids say in the 'hood, "gender fluid." Ultimately the grandparents' initial discomfort with a ten-year-old boy wearing unisex clothes and nail polish gives way to the predictable trope of fierce family protection.

All well and good, except this is precisely the same demographic that, in real life, could not stop braying about the looming danger of transgender bathrooms and such like. The lack of empathy in the real people the Conners are meant to represent is palpable, and the feeling that they (Roseanne and Dan) would have jeered at the same kid if he were in a news item at a school is inescapable. That's how they are -- they didn't give a fuck about heroin addicts, until it hit their trailer park. And they didn't give a fuck about jobs until theirs went to China and India and Mexico.

The preening arrogance of these people -- the real white working class and their teevee avatars -- is just exhausting. They seem to think that their diet of deep-fried twinkies and Bachelor offshoots confers some sort of "realness" upon them, that they are somehow more genuinely American than someone who (hurr!) reads hard-cover books and pays attention to actual news. That's really the worst out of all of it, you know, that they really seem to believe such bullshit.

Mostly though, the show is just old Thunderbird in a new-ish box. Underpinning the entire operation is this endless, constant, overweening grievance. It's the conservative reactionary version of that dreaded word, entitlement. To listen to these jabbering maroons, you'd never guess that their guy won, that they have a majority in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, that every thing their dotard has been criticized for has been well-earned. Seriously, these are the sorest fucking winners ever.

It is not the pussy-hat crowd's fault that the doddering grifter keeps shooting himself in the clown shoes every week, nor is it their fault that it turns out that -- surprise! -- all of his promises were predictably empty, that the widget-stamping jobs aren't coming back to BFE, and in fact his tiny-dick-waving stunts with the Chinese are threatening a trade war that will specifically target these salt-of-the-earth rubes.

For several years running, we've been entreatied to "listen" to a cohort of hostile, incoherent jokers who can't muster any facts, and blame everyone else for their manifest failures in life. There is never any countervailing voice, never anyone in the supposedly liberal media, and certainly nobody on the "conservative" side, who ever bothers to even suggest, Hey, more people voted for the other person, wonder if we might listen to them just once? I've gotta listen to them, over and over and fucking over again, but god forbid they'd ever come around to listen to me. Well, fuck that shit, as my great-grandmother used to tell her Sunday school class.

I don't know why that is, and I give up asking. All I know is that I've seen and heard enough plaints from these fools in real life, and I don't need a thinly fictionalized version of their nonsense to drive the point home. They'll never be happy, because they'll never get an even break, and they're never going to be honest with themselves about why that is. So why bother?

There was a time when Roseanne was ground-breaking in many respects, and downright hilarious much of the time. Now it just comes off as preachy and predictable, every bit as smug and spiteful and ill-informed as the loony lefties it lampoons.

But at least that should serve as an object lesson for any would-be liberals. Roseanne does deserve credit for telling her story her way -- loud, brash, aggressive, fuck you if you don't like it. If there are any real liberals (in entertainment or government or news) left, maybe they should consider doing the same thing for once, instead of meekly waiting around for Cadet Bonespurs to send us into a recession and nuke Tehran as a distraction. Waiting for Mueller and/or November is not a strategy.

In the meantime, instead of bothering with the nattering narcissism of the Oracle of the White Workin' Class (when she's not farming macadamia nuts in Hawaii), do yourself a favor and check out The President Show's special. Kathy Griffin's portrayal of soulless homunculus Kellyanne Con-way steals what was a pretty solid show all the way around.