3 TV releases online over December/January managed to sum up the totality of the Western culture zeitgeist better than anything else, ‘Don’t Look Up’, ‘And Just Like That, and Louis CKs ‘Sorry’ all came out within a week of each other and it helps to outline the fractures of western cultural malaise as well as an Apocalypse Now/Sesame Street mash up.
Don’t Look Up
The pitiful shallow political leadership, the Aspie Billionaire rocket club, the banal celebrity obsessed public, the inarticulate scientific community with zero capacity to convince the apathetic voters – in the end you just started cheering for the fucking asteroid!
And that’s the true problem with ‘Don’t Look Up’, you are so sickened by our collective response that the only justice left is in deserving what comes next.
It’s hard not to support the asteroid.
And Just Like That
I remember Sex in the City, not so much the actual episodes or plot lines, but I remember the impact it had on the women I knew. The excitement they would use when talking about the show and it’s freedom and liberation of agency was a glorious thing to behold. With the reboot I’ve noticed a dread in those same women, a fear that a show that was so important to their growth would be ripped to pieces in these painfully woke times and the sacrifice of Chris Noth’s career on the MeToo altar using the same evidential threshold of the Salem Witch Trials, has managed to reset the show into where modern feminism is now. You laugh now fearful that if you don’t clap enthusiastically then you too shall be cancelled.
Louis CK’s Sorry
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal
Dropped on Christmas Eve like a despoiled Santa, CKs new show ‘Sorry’ opens with Bob Dylan’s ‘Rolling Stone’ and the lyrics are prophetic for CK after his cancellation. He is thinner, more burnt and is now the portrait of an artist cast out.
The comedy is his usual sharp, vicious catalogue of self hate and searing insight. The roar of the crowd is half anger at his banishment and half celebration of his art. In the matter that saw him banished, he says to the crowd ‘if you ask someone if you can masturbate in front of them and they say yes, – don’t’.
A climate crisis satire that has you cheering for the death of our species, a feminist satire that kills the career of its male lead in real life and a male comic banished from the mainstream.
This is western culture right now.
The petty low hanging fruit of neoliberal identity politics is the only value the progressive left can espouse because individuals no longer see themselves beyond the identity of their social media profile. We have lost collective solidarity via class for skin colour, gender and self selected identity.
Meanwhile the feral right with their ignorance and radioactive bigotry are further alienated and co-opt the language of victim catastrophe and start seeing themselves as a victimized minority!!! The most dangerous part of identity politics is when poor white men see themselves as the victims. When that happens, history seductively beckons and then vomits.
While those identities scream for social hierarchy in a never ending outrage Olympics and victim virtue signaling cacophony fed by Facebook hate algorithms, the corporations pretend they are blameless, Billionaires build bigger rockets and the Planet melts.
This is western culture right now.
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as per the old saying–“we may not be able to defeat the swine right now, but at least we don’t have to join them”…
I am not woke in the pejorative sense, I am a working class person with a marxist analysis of the world, became a union member at 18 years old and have participated in countless strikes, pickets, and activity that has benefited working people materially over many decades. And I support numerous solidarity issues around the world and locally. BUT if I see Louis See fucking Kay on this site again referred to in even a semi serious manner that is the end of TDB for me.
Never got into Sex and the City. It looked to me like a cross between a gay male fantasy and bourgeois feminism – nothing socialist or radical feminist about it. That sets the reboot being open to gender ID ideology and is not any feminism I can relate to. #metoo, also was individualistic bourgeois feminism, led by some women with a bit of power and status – served it’s purpose in highlighting a problem lacking a strong legal solution, but still hasn’t really found an adequate solution.
Love “Like a Rolling Stone” – one of my favourite Dylan songs. Very raw, and, back then, showed electronic popular culture could provide social and political critique.
Dave Chapelle will see us through.
GenZ and the Mellinials have shown us all how immature and underdeveloped their widdle brains are with the bs stunts and Nazi doctrine that they’ve rolled out over the past couple of years.
Let’s hope things settle down so that woman can be woman again and men can be able to say what the fuck they like without these little cunts having a tantrum because little Jimmy girl is kinda offended but just hasn’t figured out why they’re offended.
Bring back comedy with no holds barred.
This is why china is wining
The Louis CK quote you mention where he says to the crowd ‘if you ask someone if you can masturbate in front of them and they say yes, – don’t’. is from “Sincerely Louis CK”, his previous special. He didn’t mention that stuff this time. Just wanted to point that out but…great and concise review nonetheless. Loved your writing.
Thank you
“…. Poor white men see themselves as victims…” whenever I hear something along these lines, I feel that the person saying this really saying “for God’s sake man, you’re letting the white race down, any one would think that you’re a native chappie. Remember you’re British!
Poor white men have been victims long before the non white world was colonised. What disturbs me is the glee at which so called “woke” liberal middle class white people, will dismiss low class or poor white people. Apparently all the poor white person had to do was study harder at school.
I’ve been poor and white and struggling to learn at school, but because my parents were seen as working class, not one teacher spent any time with me. I was dismissed as no better than a Maori, or worse an islander, destined only to be a labourer.
Just because we are poor and white, it doesn’t mean we can’t read & write. I’ll wager that I’ve read and understood more literature than the average woke liberal middle class wanker. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stood by with a fixed smile while listening to really good “woke” (using today’s term) white liberal middle class people slagging off the poor white classes. And they think I’m one of them. Then when I say, but my father was a lowly truck driver, they have an embarrassed look, & say well you’re doing well, & you’ve come a long way, why you’re almost like us! Before they drag themselves & their daughter away from me.
We can see a hypocrite a mile off, and we don’t trust them. Poor white people may support The National party, because they know where the stand with them, they know that all they need to belong is to be earning enough money, even if they are just a tradie. We know we can never belong amongst the woke liberal middle class, we don’t have the right breeding!
Poor white people knew who Donald Trump was. He was the poor white mans revenge on the woke liberal middle class. The big FU! He didn’t hurt poor whites, because they were hurting already, and no one cared.
Maybe I’ll vote ACT!
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