Ned Resnikoff at The Baffler writes—We’re Living in The Thick of It:
WASHINGTON POLITICS HAS DEVOLVED INTO A BLACK COMEDY, but it’s difficult to say which black comedy. The truth is, much of contemporary American political satire is ill-equipped to reckon with the Trump era. It’s too gentle, too warm, too self-satisfied. More often than not, it’s unwilling to pay more than lip service to the possibility of despair. It’s a source of comfort when there is little real comfort to be had.
Whatever the considerable merits of Saturday Night Live’s vaudeville shtick or John Oliver’s righteous exasperation, neither is capable of reflecting the absurdity and horror of the past six months. Even HBO’s Veep, with its refreshingly jaundiced portrayal of Beltway culture, is brighter and cozier than the world it purports to skewer.
But that doesn’t mean satire has nothing to say about Donald Trump’s Washington. Comedians have, occasionally, produced works that are cold and bleak enough to resonate with the present moment—we just didn’t believe they could come true. The New Republic’s Jeet Heer has nominated Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers’ underrated 2008 anti-thriller, as the defining movie of our age, and that’s a fine, appropriately misanthropic choice. But for the defining television show of the age, we need to look beyond New York and Hollywood.
The Thick of It, a BBC sitcom that ran four seasons and two specials between 2005 and 2012, is the only political sitcom biting enough to draw blood in 2017 America. As the older, more depressed step-sibling of Veep—both were created by Scottish satirist Armando Iannucci—it shares a similar choppy aesthetic and taste for baroque insult comedy. But where Veep has long ago ditched any pretense to verisimilitude, The Thick of It always scrupulously mirrored—and sometimes anticipated—developments in U.K. government, from the waning days of the Tony Blair era to the height of the News of the World hacking scandal.
It might seem odd that a show that began its life as a satire of Blairism could say much about the politics of the Trump years; after all, Tony Blair’s smooth, post-ideological technocracy, we are led to believe, could not be further from Donald Trump’s hormonal right-wing populism. But The Thick of It remains relevant because it focused in on a social pathology that haunts us now more than ever: the capture of government by public relations. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Meet the new victims:
Have you heard the good news? Now that Barack Obama has been elected president, racism in America has ended. And we must turn our attention to the new racism—against whites. At least, that’s what Republicans would have us believe.
This isn’t exactly a new argument. In 1990, Jesse Helms, the senator from North Carolina, won his re-election with the infamous "Hands" commercial:
You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?
That was the argument 20 years ago—that undeserving minorities were benefiting from an unjust system that discriminated against whites.
And things really haven’t changed much. In fact, they’ve gotten worse.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Goodnight, Mooch. Trumpworld punked in (gasp!) private emails! Dad dictated Jr.’s collusion meeting statement and his lawyers lied about it. Dog eats sanctions bill. Fake news, meet fake legislation. Lindsey Graham wants to moderately nuke North Korea.
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