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Britta Perry: a Culture War time capsule
One of the fun things about reading old books or watching old movies is how you can be reminded of the way society changes. Obviously this is a somewhat trite observation, but it doesn't really make it any less jarring when something very casually conflicts with the subtle messaging you get every day in the present. Community is one of my favourite TV shows; it ran from 2009-2015 which isn't that far in the past, but I saw a Reddit post the other day that made an interesting observation about the zeitgeist it represented and how quickly we've moved on from it.
The female lead of the series is Britta Perry (played by the wonderful Gillian Jacobs), and in the first dozenish or so episodes of the show she's very much a conventional sitcom love interest: responsible, compassionate, earnest, striver for social justice, the Better Eventual Half of our morally listless protagonist, etc. This of course was bland and boring, so the writers ended juking things up and turning her into a much more interesting character. Rather than being the noble (and unfunny) stock liberal progressive, she became the annoying and semi-incompetent stock liberal progressive. She continues to be smug and overbearing about the same subjects, but she's flipped as a killjoy instead of righteous.
And it's interesting to see what the writers of the time considered to be the most annoying tendencies of white, urban, female, bourgeois progressivism. Yes, of course she complains about the patriarchy, thinks all her media consumption is about making a statement, she has to work her pet causes into every conversation, and she hates cops. But she's also a crusader for civil liberties, a big fan of Julian Assange, outspoken in favour of free speech, and paranoid about government surveillance. Even her evangelical vegetarianism seems notably out of place in 2023.
And of course perhaps what's most glaringly obvious is the subjects she DOESN'T care about: there's barely a mention of race (except for once suggesting they include an Asian member for more diversity!), she famously cares more about animal cruelty than racism, and not only does she never dip her toe into anything resembling bisexuality or gender experimentation, she's even portrayed as mildly homophobic. Until the last episode there's nary a mention of transgender people except for the transfer dance being referred to as the "tranny dance" in season 1 (in 2009, any idea of transgender people being anything other than a punchline was not even dawning in the minds of progressive Hollywood writers).
So this was the stereotypical annoying liberal progressive circa 2010. No mentions of black bodies and trans spaces, a lot of worrying about civil liberties. I guess we never knew how good we had it. I'll leave you with a link to an illicit streaming website which is one of the few places you can watch one of the show's best episodes, which got erased from existence after George Floyd for the crime of adjacent-blackface and features annoying Britta at her best.
I was gonna make a top level but I guess this is already tangentially the topic.
According to the New Stateman, Russel Brand is now far-right?
Glenn Greenwald (Dailystormer darling // He might be a homosexual Jew, but Glenn Greenwald is a legend and a hero, and his recent piece ripping apart the hall monitor censorship beat of the mainstream media is the article of the year.) comments:
Is it now right-wing to signal distrust of Big Pharma, corporate media and opposing desert wars?
If you dislike Big Pharma e.g. because you think it promotes drugs that aid kids being trans, you are not going to find left allies. If you dislike Disney because you think it will make kids trans through acculturation, you're not going to find left allies.
So superficially the right is running away right now with a lot of the left's historical whipping boys, but if you dig deeper there's a throughline, a continuity.
This puts the left in awkward position, yes, feeling the need to defend some of these institutions by default but having to squeeze in, "but..but here's the real reason you should dislike X corporation!", trying to steal back that thunder.
Of course if you are very young leftist you're not particularly interested in stealing back that thunder. It was never your thunder to begin with. You care about different things. A lot of it seemingly representational and media-oriented.
As a leftist, I want pharma companies to be nationalized, so that trans kids can have easier access to medicine they may have financial issues getting at the moment. Same thing w/ the vaccine - the doctors who made the vaccine are not the issue, it's the assholes who want to charge for it. Same thing w/ Disney - the problem with Disney is it's power through copyright and buying up other companies, not it's social views.
It's not really an argumentative problem for leftists, since most "leftists" were always fine with vaccines and also fine with minority representation in culture. It's some uneasy allies, but hey, we've team up with worse before to beat reactionaries.
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I can't find the source for this, as the internet is dead and all I can sniff out are the fumes of its rotten carcass, but back when I still listened to NPR I recall hearing one of their self-promoting bumpers using glowing language to inform me that they (and I am paraphrasing from memory) "give you not just the news, but the context of the story". I thank God for those practitioners of the dark arts who speak the quiet part out loud.
In America, political positions are often... mercurial, to say the least. The "facts" (a word I wouldn't have expected to lose so much meaning even a few years ago), such as they are, are immaterial. The purpose of these facts and their position in your given tribe's narrative, is what is truly important.
Near as I can tell these narratives now serve as a kind of post hoc justification for where and how our collective nannies must childproof our shared world; the Blues/Dems want things like absolute female liberation (including from the strictures imposed by external forces e.g. the function and purpose of the womb or any extant cultural understanding between the sexes), comprehensive public assistance, aggressive tax rates increasing exponentially by bracket, explicitly uncritical social mediation on topics of sexuality and family structure. Reds/Reps want things like universally available individual armament, enshrining the social mores of a previous generation, walling off educational institutions from social movements, a more generous taxation structure for high earners1.
The particulars shift across time as well, which can safely be atrributed to the constant influx of younger generations with their own inhereted versions of these positions, as well as their shiny new takes on such topics2.
Not exactly, but a principled position held consistently across time these days is interpreted as witchy behavior, at a minimum evidence of not being a REAL Scotsman. So, in practice, yes.
1These should by no means be considered comprehensive or precise lists, but the vagaries introduced by this fractious political pantheon are inexhaustible, and I am not.
2My cynicism and hard-earned paranoia wishes to point towards an occluded cabal pulling the strings, but there's little need when simple value drift will suffice.
"Philosophical consistency is not a tribal suicide pact," to remix a Bush era phrase.
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Was the dean a liberal progressive? Surely he had aspects of that archetype due to being an overeager and overbearing college dean, but he always seemed mostly just bizarre rather than belonging any particular sociopolitical stripe. His liberal progressive views, I thought, was more of a byproduct of liberal progressivism being the Hollywood default, rather than his particulars. Versus Britta, who I thought was clearly meant to be a stand-in for that type of person.
The dean would have worn an SS uniform if he though "Jeffrey" might like it.
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I can see the dean voting for the flamboyant Trump.
Now that I think about it, I'm actually surprised they never did a bit about the Dean being a secret Reaganite or something. A story about interrogating people's assumptions about his identity like that would have really fit the character.
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Yeah one of the most notable reversals between the left and the right is in regard to heath, fitness, and personal choice. Smoking on the subway is now being defended by the left...thought i would never live to see that happen. Consuming to excess, like overeating, is also defended by the left.
this blew up a month ago https://twitter.com/mindyisser/status/1623778595729547264
Conversely, the right has taken up the banner of personal health and well-being, especially since 2021 . Tons of conservatives posting about weights, cardio, etc. on twitter. I think this show how either the right-wing fitness market had been ignored, and or a massive explosion of interest in these topics. Obesity is a risk factor for severe Covid, so being fit was seen by conservatives as way of not needing to be vaccinated. Nike left a lot of money on the table by pandering to the left, ignoring the other half.
It's not obvious to me that these have really changed at all, because of the gender politics angle--it's male fitness that's right-wing and female fat acceptance that's left-wing. (Of course, that implies a tension between left-wing fitness for women and left-wing fat acceptance.)
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As a bonus tie-in to the post lower down about The Last of Us: Gillian Jacobs is apparently friends with Pedro Pascal, and so roped him into the table-read of an episode during the pandemic that he struggled to get through.
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Man, this is a great cultural example of how suddenly the perspective changed, and the extent of that change. As I've said here before, the entire narrative has changed. It used to be that "information wants to be free". It used to be that "sunlight is the best disinfectant". It used to be that these things held the rich and the powerful to account. Then, the rich and powerful of The Party was the ox which got gored. Now, information wants to be mal-information. The sun must be blotted out. Most of all, the suddenness of this transformation must not be recognized. The suddenness of this transformation is the justification which must still underlie all of Trump-Russia, which underlies why Trump is not just a political actor we disagree with; he is a foreign operative sent to subvert our democracy. Of course this narrative dissolves when you notice the suddenness of this transformation; therefore, the suddenness of this transformation cannot be noticed, and these things must be memoryholed.
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Making a character a vegan or an animal rights activist has been a very typical TV way of conveying that they're an annoying, priggish fanatical progressive. I'm not a vegan or any sorts of an animal-rights type myself, but I've noted this for some time now. Lindsay in Arrested Development comes to mind. Or having veganism being used to convey being a killjoy in general; Angela in Office (US) was no progressive, but still had somewhat incongruous veganism tacked on her to accentuate her being a stuck-up bore.
Of course, you also get progressive characters who are alternatively written as noble and annoying; some of Lisa Simpson's more annoying moments involve her veganism, and I hold that Hermione Granger's SPEW (which, today, seems to mostly be interpreted as some sort of a dis of antiracist activism, and thus brought up as evidence of Rowling's racism) is intended to rather be a parody of animal rights activism ("what if the animals actually WANT to be oppressed, huh?")
I've seen people on this forum and elsewhere bring to attention that Hollywood and TV shows often portray fundamentalist Christians as fanatics and bigots, but the equivalent treatment of animal rights activists (see eg. Straw Vegetarian page on TVTropes) gets less attention. I would guess most would just go "Well, but the vegans actually ARE that annoying!", though that view is probably also mediated by seeing examples of annoying vegans and animal rights activists being mocked on various types of media.
I've had one annoying evangelical vegan in my life, though as time went on they mellowed out a bit and I've become accustomed to working around their requirements (it helps to think of it as a religious belief; I'd try to do my best to accommodate someone with kosher or halal requirements, so why not treat vegans like that).
It is very annoying, though, when you're trying to provide something to eat or even give as a gift, to have the list of ingredients scrutinised and then rejected for one nit-pick reason (e.g. honey - I don't believe bees are being oppressed and it's certainly a long way from the reasoning behind objecting to slaughtering animals for meat).
Most of the annoying types are online, and I agree that the Very Online are a different breed. You get really stupid takes being passed around like objecting to shearing sheep for wool (I don't know if it was a deliberate troll or not, but there was one post on social media about how sheep were killed for wool) and sentimentality about farm animals in particular, where if you've had any contact with them you know it's not like that - chickens, man: the descendants of dinosaurs. Chickens would happily eat you if they got the chance. That's man versus beast on equal terms and respect the struggle. There was recently a sad but also sort of funny case about a man being killed by a chicken - a Brahma chicken which can be massive creatures, not your ordinary Rhode Island Red.
Real or photoshopped, "you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how yarn is made" remains one of my favorite internet punchlines ever created.
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We have pet chickens at my house. They are extremely loving animals if you get to know them. They'll roost with you, cuddle, ride on your shoulder... sure, they're the descendants of dinosaurs, and I'm sure you could befriend those too if we still had them.
Sure, the roosters can be insecure bastards. Sure, befriending animals can get you killed.. to say nothing of messing with them...
But seriously. Where are you getting this? Have you ever mothered a chick from an egg?
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I have personally known two very annoying vegan evangelists. One in high school, one as a college freshman. It's strange how similar those two vegan women were. They even physically looked similar. In my young mind they pretty thoroughly poisoned the idea that vegans are not hysterical moralists. And now later in life I see vegans online that appear to be equally annoying moralists.
No offense to any sensible level-headed vegans present, but maybe (the common outspoken ones) really are that annoying.
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I think there's merit to the straw vegetarian/vegan trope. I don't think I've ever met a vegan in person who tried to convert or harangue me. However, I have seen them on social media.
I guess that the mediating effect of being in person causes people to tone down their beliefs for the sake of social harmony. One assumes that the growth of the web and social media is what's driving the great awakening, rather than any deeper ideological shift. Freddie deBoer did an interesting post about a book from the 90s that mocked PC types from that era. Their beliefs weren't that different from those of modern progressives.
This sounds like an argument for why the straw vegetarians are less than warranted.
I dunno dude, there are some intensely irritating adverts on the web and on broadcast TV in the UK right now focusing on children calling adults "scared of change" for not being vegetarian. They have been outright despised by absolutely everyone I've talked to about it and almost every comment is negative. But obviously someone thought it was not only a good idea, but that it would work to sell their product, and nobody along the way pulled the brakes on it. So that brand of non-self aware annoying absolutely exists on that kind of scale.
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I honestly think straw vegetarians are much more a product of the cognitive dissonance of meat-eaters who realize deep down the incredible cruelty of the meat industry and on some level register vegetarians as a walking mirror of their own hypocrisy.
(I say this as a somewhat self-hating meat eater)
I think small family farms are an entire world of difference from industrial meat processing. I feel people who actually kill/process the animals the eat basically have no moral burden. They are willing and able to do the task themselves. I've killed animals before and have found myself able to have done so without self-disgust, so that somewhat mitigates the qualms I have about my meat-eating. As for the rest of it I try to only eat meat once or twice per week.
I've kicked around in my head the hypothetical of requiring people over the age of 14 or 16 to get a "meat-eater's license", i.e. having to kill/dress a larger mammal by themselves in order to qualify to eat meat. I wonder what percentage of the larger population would disqualify themselves from eating meat if they were forced to jump through that hoop. I do feel that if you cannot steel yourself to take the life of an intelligent, social animal like a pig or a deer or a cow, then you should not eat meat.
I don't identify as an effective altruist (but I generally shirk from labels, and I dislike that label for much the same reason I dislike "rationalist").
By your reasoning, is it hypocritical to be disguisted by watching or participating in gay sex, but support gay rights?
I don't follow this logic at all. Why would I be obliged to enjoy gay sex if I supported gay rights? It's not a question of taste: I don't think pineapple on pizza is unethical because I don't like it. I wouldn't seek to criminalize things that are simply not my preference. The hypocrisy would be to deny others the right to marry the people (i.e., consenting adults) they love, when I already enjoy that ability.
The crux is that you get meat by killing a sentient, emotionally complex, intelligent animal. I think that if you can't bring yourself to do that (and have to rely on the emotional distance of someone else doing the dirty work), then yeah, I don't reckon you should eat meat, because industrial meat processing takes that one bloody act and multiplies it billions of times yearly. We all have our hypocrisies and have to pick where to draw the extent of which we tolerate them, so I think if you can't stomach the very simple act the meat industry is built upon, you shouldn't seek to benefit from its utterly horrific economies of scale.
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In that case, the straw vegetarians/vegans are like the street preachers who try to convict us of our sins? And like the LGBT people who demand this be classified as hate speech, we recognise deep down our own depravity, hence why we project onto the vegetarians?
It's a theory, at least 😁
Thanks to the linked article, TIL the term "Jewitch":
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I mean, you don't have to believe me, but I have zero moral qualms about meat eating and still think most of the stereotypes of fanatical vegans are accurate. My only rule for animal cruelty is: does the cruelty serve some productive economic purpose? So long as the answer is yes I don't care how animals are treated.
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I don’t think it’s cognitive dissonance, since caricatures of other moral scolds like fundamentalists Christians are common. People don’t like being told they are sinners regardless of how true they think the accusation is deep down. If anything the more people genuinely believe the accusation is false the more they mock the moral scold.
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Yep you hit the nail on the head. I’m right there with you.
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"All gay guys are flamboyant"
"All vegetarians are annoying in-your-face activists"
etc...
There is a tendency to think that the most obvious in-your-face representatives of a group are actually statistically representative of the group, but in reality they might simply be statistically representative of the most obvious in-your-face part of the group. One might interact with a dozen gay guys every day and just not realize that they are gay because they are not flamboyant and straight is the default. One might interact with a dozen vegetarians a day and just not realize that they are vegetarian because they never mention being vegetarian and eating meat is the default.
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I don't think Lindsay was ever meant to be a fanatical progressive or even really a progressive of any kind. Her whole character is just supposed to be the faildaughter who's never worked a day in her life and has no idea how to make a living after her father's finances are frozen. She believes in whatever ideology will further her latest grift - by the end of the show she was a Trump expy Republican.
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Tangent incoming. Your post made me think of Assange for the first time in a while. I do not know if he is a rapist or a Russian agent or whatever but I am uncomfortable with how the mainstream narrative in the West, at least from what it seems to me, has made his story into a story of his sexual assault allegations or his Russian connections or whatever while largely ignoring the simple fact that he made most mainstream journalists look like the establishment drones that they are. The very existence of an Assange in the world, a journalist who actually plays power games and does what it takes to leak info, automatically by contrast exposes the typical journalist as a coward. As for the allegations against him, well if he is a rapist that is really bad and his victims should get justice but at the same time it does not make his work as a journalist any less significant. And if he is a Russian agent I really do not give the slightest shit because I would like for there to be a bunch of Russian agents leaking confidential info about the American establishment and a bunch of American agents leaking confidential info about the Russian establishment. That way I, as someone who wants access to more information about the world's power structures, win all across the board. Actually, given the recent geopolitical tensions between the US and Russia, I am rather surprised that the US has not leaked more information about Putin's theft of public resources or whatever. I would guess that US intelligence agencies have some good information about that. Being usually more of a believer in incompetence as opposed to complex conspiracies being the more significant driver of history, I guess I chalk it up to incompetence for now.
For whatever little it's worth, I'm totally with you. I've gotten in pretty angry arguments about him as the lefties abandoned him once Wikileaks published the DNC/News Media collusion evidence.
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I don't think that it comes down to a conspiracy or incompetence but more of a MAD situation. If the west released all their information on how evil Putin is, he can then just release all the information that his agents acquired over the years. I personally think that a release like that would cause such massive problems for western governments that there's essentially a gentleman's agreement not to share that kind of information.
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I'll add another shoutout to Community, great show if anyone hasn't seen it. It has some pretty hilarious takes on early wokeism.
What I love about the show is that it has complex characters, which really isn't a high bar but seems to be one which many cultural products no longer meet. Jeff, Britta and Annie all have well developed flaws, which is expected as the attractive white stars. But the shocking thing is even the minority characters have flaws! Troy, Abed, and Shirley are all well-rounded people who have good sides and bad, and don't blame all their problems on vague instances of racism. It's truly refrishing in this day and age.
I really enjoyed the first three seasons. Season 4 and the online seasons were significantly weaker.
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They also managed to have a well-rounded gay character (the 'pansexual imp' Dean) without getting all preachy.
I think the show's strength was that it simply assumed it's audience was on board with the modern liberal package, and so didn't have to convert them. Dan Harmon assumed his audience would be fine with the Dean being gay or whatever, so he was able to focus on funny plotlines that derive from that fact, rather than making his sexuality the point.
To bring it back to the original post about Britta, the finale actually had her imagine the Dean coming out as trans rather than continuing with the vague 'whatever this is' that he was doing before. It can be read as a criticism of the restrictiveness of the trans lobby's ideology if one were so inclined.
Most preachy shows also assume that - otherwise they wouldn't count on the audience to shell out dollars for watching woke tropes - but still preach like crazy. I think the difference is not that. There's two ways of promoting certain ideas in cinema. One is to have human attractive characters to act in accordance with these ideas and make the audience draw their own conclusions. So, if you wanted to promote racial integration, you just feature a diverse cast (hopefully avoiding blunders like casting a black person to play Bjorn Ironside) and make them act like it's normal, without mentioning it. The audience gets the message "racial integration is the normal thing". The other way is to draw attention to this fact constantly, lampshade it mercilessly and have the characters to pronounce wooden monologues about how happy they are that they have racial integration and how it's long about time they had it and how eager they are to have more of it, because nothing could be better than more racial integration. The audience gets the message "they really want to push racial integration on me, at the cost of sacrificing everything that makes movies fun". The Community manages to do the former, while most woke content past about 2016 do the latter with gusto.
What do you mean Anne Boleyn wasn't Afro-Caribbean? 😂
So objecting to the casting of Bjorn ironside or Anne Boleyn on the grounds that "but they weren't black" is racist, you bigot!
But Henry was white and, what amused me most, so was their daughter, Elizabeth. I suppose even for Channel 5 casting a biracial baby for an iconic historical figure would have been that one step too far?
I would love to live in a society where that actually would work - i.e. we don't fret about eye color or foot size of the actor not matching the same of the role. Maybe one day all the race stuff would be so trivialized that it would sound like complaining "we know from this obscure portrait that Anne had green eyes but this actor has brown eyes!" - but we're very far from it right now, unfortunately. Moreover, we're so far from it that the mere access to this idea is now gated by the wokes - you can only do race switches in a particular woke-approved manner with an explicitly stated woke goals, otherwise it's "blackface" or "whitewashing" or some other thoughtcrime.
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If they'd just called it "Anne Boleyn, Vampire Hunter", nobody would care that she was black.
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Good moment about wokeism is the college mascot on season 1, an 'ethnic free' person. The main character remarking how not being racist is the new racism.
Also reminds me about south park "took our jobs" episode, where people of the future is a mix of all races together.
Community has a lot of politically incorrect jokes, specially from the Chevy Chase character. Really funny.
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It happens once when Chang tries to get them to "bear down for midterms" but he's also insane
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