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Do you agree popular culture and Hollywood has engaged in consistent criticism of the WASP Country Club? Are you just going to point and sputter or participate in the conversation?
Point and sputter? Heh. Dude, you'd be more sufferable if you had some self-awareness and a sense of humor about it. If you can't put hands on keyboard without making it about Jews, just own it.
Making fun of WASP Country Club has been a thing for as long as there have been WASP Country Clubs (i.e., pretentious rich people to make fun of). Dickens did it. Austen did it. Freaking Tolstoy (one of the few people with less of a sense of humor than you who comes to mind) did it. Wodehouse definitely did it. It was not invented by Jews.
Can you elaborate on your argument? I've read Dickens but the mockery of the WASP country club that has been transmitted to me, and everybody else who hates Good Good for representing a "country club golf gentleman (fine member of high society)" has not come from Dickens, or Austen, or Tolstoy, it has come from difference sources, like the one I posted.
My argument is that country clubs are the modern representation of stuffy rich people. Ordinary folk have always loved making fun of stuffy rich people. The stereotype that rich people are assholes and stories about rich people being bested by pliebs is not a modern Jewish invention to subvert the white race. That you need this explained is my point about your Jew-obsession. If a Jew does anything, anywhere, it doesn't matter why he did it or that other people do it too, in your world he did it for nefarious Jew reasons. Story written by a Jew? There's an anti-white message somewhere. Film featuring a Jewish comedian? It's anti-white. No matter how tortured the interpretation, you'll find some anti-goy propaganda somewhere. In this case, there weren't even any Jews involved AFAIK, so you had to reach for a totally unrelated work that happened to have a Jew in it.
MadMonzer is right, and I'd go further, the authors you're citing aren't one tradition.
Austen and Wodehouse were mocking from the inside. Austen was inside the gentry's world, writing for people who knew its rules and her targets are the Mr. Collinses who play the game badly, not the game. Bertie Wooster is affectionate self-parody. The jokes land because the audience knows the rules.
"Stuffy" is the view from outside. If you don't know why the norms exist, all you see is the fence. You know you're outside it, but not what it's for or that it was never built with you in mind. The norms had a purpose, elaborate decorum takes years to fake, it screened for people shaped by institution, when business ran on reputation and a handshake. Understatement, discretion, not talking about money, these keep a small closed world functional across fifty-year relationships. The same code is also a moat against new money.
The insider satire says "this person is playing our game badly." The slobs-vs-snobs stuff says "the game is fake and the players are frauds." Dickens does some of the latter; Austen and Wodehouse mostly don't. Mocking the country club as presumptively illegitimate isn't a continuation of Austen. It's throwing stones from the outside from the 'money can't buy class' set.
That said I'd never seen nor heard of Good Good, it seemed like poor improv or sketch comedy to me. Are we supposed to desire the possessed driver? Is it like the ring from LotR? It didn't make me want to try the driver or see any of their other work. Perhaps someone could like the best example of their work.
Oh, absolutely not. My point wasn't that Austen and Tolstoy and Wodehouse were writing the same thing (I deliberately chose some very unlike authors) - my point was that SS is trying to gesture at a particular theme in fiction being a nefarious Jewish anti-white agenda (even if it's non-Jews doing it, they're only doing it because of Da Joos), and I'm saying it is none of those things. Even if you distinguish between "mocking from the inside" from "mocking from the outside," Jews are not the ones who began the trend of mocking from the outside, and outsiders throwing stones at a structure they consider illegitimate is not a uniquely Jewish (or woke, or anti-white) phenomenon.
I am interpreting the most iconic and influential cultural artifacts that elevate the Country Club golfer as the villain and the outsider, styled to represent the antithesis of Country Club culture, as the hero.
Happy Gilmore is one example, the other most influential film that explores these themes is Caddyshack where we also see a Jewish outsider, Al Czervik played by Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen), come into conflict with the Gentile Judge Smails (played by Ted Knight). Interestingly, Czervik tells Smails he did not come to the club as a guest in order to acquire membership but to buy the club. So there's another layer of meaning there- Czervik is not trying to gain access as a member he's trying to take over the institution. There's no question the film is getting at a deeper message of new Jewish arrivals, "guests", acquiring financial success and coming into cultural conflict with the WASP "old guard"- expressing as a struggle over the control of cultural institutions, and the criticism of those too closely associated with Whites.
It's a much stronger and less useful claim to say that these films "started the trend" of ressentiment towards Country Club golf culture, my claim is merely that they represent it through a highly influential medium. And in both cases the conflict between the Country Club golfer and the low-class or homo novus outsider is ethnically coded as a conflict between Jews and Gentiles, with the Jews winning and the Gentiles being humiliated. It demoralizes those who identify with that culture and moralizes the people who hate it, whether that hatred is derived from ethnic or class resentment.
There's no question that there are many instances of Country Club Critique in other films, like this comedic bit in Better Call Saul where Goodman causes a scene by accusing the Club of being antisemitic. The most iconic and influential films that explore this theme are encoding an ethnic conflict along with a class conflict, and that's largely why they are compelling to this day.
I mean, George of the Jungle doesn't involve golf, but the villain is very clearly a country club WASP, but I wouldn't say George is coded as being Jewish.
George from George of the Jungle was inspired by George Eiferman. So the character was based on a Jew originally, and the hunter villain is a WASP with an Oxford accent.
Brendan Fraser is not Jewish, although that's a popular misconception because Fraser played the role of David Greene in School Ties:
Of course his identity his exposed by Charlie (Matt Damon) and the whole school turns on him- bullying, Swastikas, etc.
The point is not that all myths or movies feature a "Jew versus Gentile" conflict, but to say "Jewish hero and Gentile villain" is a very common esotericism in film that transmits a certain, particularly Jewish perspective of ethnic conflict into the consciousness of mass audiences. Caddyshack and Happy Gilmore are two examples.
The same phenomenon appears in Hollywood mockery and criticism of Fraternities, like in Accepted, Revenge of the Nerds (who join the Black fraternity (!) to get revenge on Alpha Beta), Animal House, etc.
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