Who needs unions at Downton when you have a benevolent elite taking such good care of their workers? American viewers are into the fourth week of the fourth series, and I really don't think I can stand it much longer. … The politics of the show are excruciating for anyone with a progressive bent.*shrug* Go watch something else, then. Or read a book.
But for all their faults, it is not the rich who make me squirm the most each Sunday night. Rather, it is the fawning servants who seem to spend their days endlessly worrying about the wellbeing of the very people who are working them into an early grave.You mean ‘employing them’..? The bounders! Far better they be left to starve in the gutter, eh, Gail?
And if ‘Downton Abbey’ causes her this angst, well, ‘House Of Cards’ drives her even more insane:
These "individual" men – and it is almost all men – rule as a class with collective economic interests, and we get to see the seamless web that links the captains of the global economy to government, and how the rest of us are simply outmanoeuvred, outplayed, and outspent.It’s only fiction, love…
What is so depressing about this show is not that it tells lies about the rich, but that it provides an image of the world devoid of any class resistance. Rarely do you see any evidence of unions, non-governmental organisations, or any activists who in reality are thorns in the side of the elite.They are..?
The only way out of this mess is a mass movement of resistance, one that refuses to buy into the paralysing ideology that the benevolent, kindly rich are deserving of their wealth, or the equally paralysing view that there is no hope for change.Time the BBC repeated ‘Citizen Smith’, I think. Just for Gail…
"Rarely do you see any evidence of unions, non-governmental organisations, or any activists who in reality are thorns in the side of the elite."
ReplyDeleteShe presumably doesn't mean the NGOs and activists who are mainly funded by the elite (through governments and other NGOs) and whose leading lights are usually on their way into, out of, or on the carousel in between, political positions?
For example, most prominent climate scam activists are either the monied offspring of the elite, and/or funded by the very politicians they are supposedly "thorns in the side of". (i.e. contributing to the fiction that it is public pressure which is driving politicians to take measures they want to take anyway)
Come back Wolfie, all is forgiven.
ReplyDeleteThere was a short lived series called "Comrade dad"? It had George Cole in the title role. Now that was very subtle in it's message, but it came out at the height of Thatcherism, and was I think way ahead of it's time.
Sounds like Gail Whines needs a judicious dose of CiFalitic's Imodium. Maybe then she'll quit talking uncontrollable lefty shite.
ReplyDeleteAlas, another academic who sees a piece of fiction drama and because it is in the past thinks it is right. As someone who has flogged his way round very many of the upper class households and many more the world of Domestic Service in the past was hugely more complicated and intricate than is realised both by fiction writers and the great majority of academics.
ReplyDelete@Demetrius
ReplyDeleteAcademics cure disease and design rockets.
Gail Dines just gets her chair sticky watching a piece of fiction. She is paid more than men who do dangerous, difficult jobs, such as scaffolding and rubbish collection, yet has no shame or even wonder at her exalted status.
She is the stain on the shirtfront of a society so decadent that it can give people like her a job - and a well-paid one at that.
Is this the cr@p that's being taught at our Universities ? If so, are we paying for it ? If we are, then why ?
ReplyDeleteWHat I love about articles like this is that these columnists are parading themselves as if they were academics when in fact thier articles prove they barely have the intelligence to monitor the self service tills at Aldi.
ReplyDeleteAs the phrase says : It's better to appear stupid with your mouth shut than open it and remove all doubt.
I avoid reading the Grauniad altogether. It is not renowned for accuracy or balance.
ReplyDeleteI would comment there, but sadly the Guardian has me on "pre-moderation" now, apparently because I said in reply to a heart-rending description of a "trans woman comedian" who was shamefully put in a men's prison in the States, that "she" is actually a man. It didn't go down well.
ReplyDeleteI thought my reasoning was fairly sound. "She" was put in a male prison because "she" has a penis, and "she" also has a girlfriend, who "she" rogers with "her" penis. Ergo, rather than being two lesbians, they are two heterosexuals, the male of whom dresses in ladies' clothing.
They didn't like that at all, the Guardian.
Anyway, what's up with Gail Dines turning into a bad TV reviewer? Her usual Andrea Dworkin impression not bringing in enough money, or something?
The Guardian usefully serves as a sort of fish-tank where the leading lights of the lunatic Left can be observed and marked for future.....re-settlement.
ReplyDelete"She presumably doesn't mean the NGOs and activists who are mainly funded by the elite.."
ReplyDeleteOf course not!
"Alas, another academic who sees a piece of fiction drama and because it is in the past thinks it is right. "
I rather doubt she ever learned any history herself.
"WHat I love about articles like this is that these columnists are parading themselves as if they were academics when in fact thier articles prove they barely have the intelligence to monitor the self service tills at Aldi."
Indeed!