Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
What does popular culture tell us about the times we are living in?
Did popular culture change during Covid? Did it change when the former present was in office? Has it changed during the these times of living in a world where half the country seems to want to turn back the clock? Is there a role for popular culture in our fight for democracy in the rule of law? Are more mysteries being written, and filmed, because stories where the bad guy gets caught and gets what’s coming to him in the end are a comfort?
Is popular culture being used to control people? Or is popular culture organic, something that can not be controlled at all?
What does it say about our culture that Katie Britt’s rebuttal video is seen so differently across the cultural divide? Are there actually two different cultures America today? Perhaps not just two, but many? Is there black culture and asian culture and white redneck culture and MAGA culture, and now – with new awareness – I might suggest “fundy” culture. Is there special “fundy” porn? I have never heard of it, but I suspect that it may exist.
Can the videos that have been made in response to Katie Britt be seen as part of popular culture? I think I would answer yes. Is politics part of popular culture? Or does culture exist outside of politics?
Does culture bring us together? Or separate us?
Baud
Yes.
Omnes Omnibus
Rule 34 says yes.
MattF
I guess I’m in the liberal bubble— haven’t seen or read anyone defending Britt’s ‘rebuttal’ to the SOTU, even the usual ‘conservative’ suspects. I guess I’d have to watch FOX (or a FOX imitator) for that, which is never going to happen. And I don’t feel that I’m missing anything.
different-church-lady
I got the impression both sides viewed it as a disaster.
different-church-lady
@MattF: I mean, Stephen Miller did, but what else would you expect?
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s not even all that special.
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady: You checked?
Baud
Doesn’t everyone love Dolly Parton? She transcends cultural divides.
Chetan Murthy
@different-church-lady: Thu night (is that when it was?)) a commenter here (I forget whom) mentioned that over at RedState (I think it was) they were bellyaching about how awful Sen. Stepford’s performance was. I took a mosey on over, and yeah, they sure were unhappy. So there’s that little data point, for your conclusion.
ETA: on reconsideration, maybe it wasn’t RedState. I don’t remember which conservative site it was, I guess. Ah well. But it was one of those that was pretty popular, back in the day: enough that I recognized the name. Ah, well.
ETA2: It was Free Republic: https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4222761/posts
Urza
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m pretty sure daddy/daughter covers most of it, but there are many varieties practically tailor made for them.
HumboldtBlue
The folks on the right weren’t upset with her lies and bullshit, just her silly delivery. It was bad optics, that’s all, particularly in light of how well Joe’s speech was received.
MattF
@Chetan Murthy: Well OK, but then how did it get to a nation-wide presentation? Someone in the R chain-of-command must have thought it was good enough to rebut Biden.
Chetan Murthy
@MattF: Oh, I think we agree on that: a bunch of honchos thought this was an excellent presentation, excellent delivery, excellent ASMR breathy whispers! Ha! I think it’s more that after-the-fact, everybody recognized what own goal it was. As for Free Republic, these are the proles, not the leaders.
piratedan
guess its a matter of who your trusted voices are and the interconnectivity on who or what is influencing them. Most of us have at least one person in our circle where you try and understand wtf is going on with what they are saying.
Some of them are willing to listen to an opposing view but then its like a weighing/comparison on who is trusted more and your sources versus another’s.
dexwood
@MattF: Because some powerful Grand Old Pervert gets off thinking about her.
mrmoshpotato
Did a bunch of Trump trash let their horrible ids out into public?
Gonna go with YES! And fuck ’em!
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@MattF: The same way Lil Marco and Bobby Jindal got green lit…they think it’s gonna be dope until it isn’t.
Is there Fundie porn? Yeah it’s just called porn. They watch more than anyone.
Starfish
@MattF: I can only explain it as “an attempt to appeal to women as directed by incels.”
Mr. Prosser
Cheryl Rofer has an interesting post over at Lawyers, Guns and Money which talks about a book called Fascinating Womanhood which came out in 1963 as a response the Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique which codifies a set of behaviors as an expected norm for women. According to Rofer the book is now in its 6th printing and has become the go to manual for women in fundamentalist culture. Read the post at https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/03/worlds-in-collision
HumboldtBlue
As this is the culture section, I was just recommended Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese, and it comes very highly rated, anyone here read it? I’m currently re-reading Wolf Hall.
FelonyGovt
During TIFG’s reign of terror, I was convinced that if a character on a TV show said some of the things he did, that character would instantly be recognized as an asshole- even by members of his cult. It amazed me, and still does.
I was in a bookstore the other day and I overheard someone telling the bookstore owner that she had gotten sick of reading (fiction) books about the pandemic and was now just about sick of reading books about climate change. FWIW.
CaseyL
There have always been different popular cultures in the US. There have been distinct regional differences since forever: that’s why we have different musical genres. Bluegrass, jazz, Country & Western… are all from different popular cultures.
Movies may have been seen as a great unifier: there were only a few studios making and releasing movies, so everyone in the country saw the same ones. But that didn’t last long at all: post-WWII saw the rise of studio output divided into “A” and “B” films, not to mention the rise of film noir, technicolor film spectacles, and horror/scifi.
I think – after the advent of TV and network television, but before cable; and after the emergence of hugely popular and influential rock’n’roll bands but before MTV – I think we lulled ourselves into believing most people in the country shared a popular culture. But I don’t think that was true even then.
I think the barriers to entry are lower now for people who are not traditionally part of a particular popular culture to influence it, precisely because the popular culture landscape is so fractured. (Imagine, someone like, say, Diana Ross trying to do country music in the 1960s the way Beyonce has just now.)
By the same token, though, the impact each of those cross-overs has is reduced, because the culture they influence isn’t shared by nearly as many people.
MattF
OGLAF has an explanation. Note that OGLAF is usually very NSFW (consider yourself warned), but this particular one is merely blasphemous.
Mr. Prosser
@CaseyL: You summed up the situation perfectly.
Chetan Murthy
@CaseyL:
I certainly thought we were getting a single national culture in the mid-90s: everywhere, young women talked like they’d walked off the set of Beverly Hills 90210, or so it seemed. Ah, well. So much for a pretty theory.
Parfigliano
@Urza: Daddy/Daughter. AKA Trump family home movies.
Starfish
@FelonyGovt:
The reader may have a point.
There were a lot of pandemic-themed books during the pandemic (because a bunch of writers were stuck at home writing), and there are a lot of books with climate change themes that just slam you too hard with the theme.
I think it was hard to read pandemic-themed books as we were living through one.
I read Severance by Ling Ma last year. This was interesting because it was written years before the pandemic, and there were so many things correct about what happened. Then there was Lucy by the Sea where a woman runs off with her ex husband during the pandemic, and I think they are trying to convince their kids to get out of the cities too.
I read Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson, and there were two people concerned with climate change and clean water. I didn’t care that they were going hard on these themes, but my book group felt like it was too preachy. They are not people who don’t believe in climate change. It just felt heavy.
kalakal
@Baud:
I think she does, also David Attenborough
FelonyGovt
@Starfish #27
I wound up reading several pandemic-set books as well. It seemed like too many of books of that genre involved well-to-do white people who could afford to leave the cities for “safe” outlying areas, and it got old really quickly.
laura
During Spring of 2020, I thought that if ABC reached way into the back of the vault and hauled out Wide World of Sports and showed episodes 3 nights a week, it would have had a hugely unifying effect. Sadly, I was not in charge of either squat nor diddly, so it didn’t happen. Apologies.
Brachiator
@MattF:
I haven’t seen any defenses either. I wonder what the hell were they thinking?
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator: Sen. Mitt R-money did. I saw the tweet: https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/1766853692454556006
zhena gogolia
@laura: The thrill of victory . . . the agony of defeat . . .
zhena gogolia
@Chetan Murthy: Oh, god, what a load of BS.
laura
@zhena gogolia: log rolling for a new generation! What could have been. Everybody would be wearing Jackie Stewart tams.
Anoniminous
can’t get the links to work so ….
never mind
UncleEbeneezer
@Omnes Omnibus: There’s a whole genre of Mormon Porn, or so I’ve heard…
Scout211
Looking back over the 50s, when I had my first taste of popular culture via television, books, movies and music, it seemed like the creators were not producing entertainment reflective of the culture at the time but more wishful thinking about how we as a culture should be, in their eyes. Then the 60s came and everything was turned upside down, with popular culture starting to reflect more of the actual culture, with sexual themes social issues and societal conflicts now out in the open. Think Father Knows Best vs. All in the Family and so many more. Popular music and novels seemed to take the lead and television and movies followed.
The MAGA political movement today reminds me of how it was in the the 50s (as it is designed to be) but most of the fans of MAGA weren’t even alive in the 50s. So they really don’t know how repressive and horrible it was for women and marginalized groups. And how so many families had to scrape and save just to survive financially. It is definitely being propagandized now as some sort of cultural nirvana back then.
Cultural trends are like pendulums that swing back and forth from old to new and back again. MAGA will move in to something else. I hope it just happens soon.
NotMax
@laura
Unifying the country over dislike for Howard Cosell.
//
Chetan Murthy
@Scout211:
Not to take away from what you write, but …. that repression was pretty horrific in my childhood (70s and 80s in Texas), both for women and LGTBQ, as well as Black people. Those MAGAts were alive then (hell, they’re my age) and they probably view it as the best of times. Or as they (we) used to say: “back when men were men and sheep were scared”. [the implication of course being “women were scared”]
Anoniminous
@laura:
That means one of the epic scenes of American cinema is meaningless to tens of millions of people.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: Broadcast TV was the dominant medium in day-to-day popular culture for about 30 years, and it was limited by physical bandwidth in the electromagnetic spectrum, which in a US context led to three commercial networks dominating the distribution of content. That artificial constraint was an apparent unifying force. But it was because a lot of voices were being excluded.
It also made things like the Fairness Doctrine possible.
Mathguy
@zhena gogolia: Oh, please, don’t put her on the ballot! We’re so scared , Mittens!
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: We were thinking more Jim McKay.
mrmoshpotato
@MattF: LOL! Looks like I got a new online comic to read.
Brachiator
@Mr. Prosser:
Never heard of it and wonder how popular it is. I never lived in the world of expected norms for women, and don’t really give a shit. I suppose if people voluntarily choose to live by these rules, it’s not my business. It’s only when fundies go nuts with authoritarian bullshit that we have a problem.
kalakal
As an elderly shutin ( thanks Omnes) who didn’t grow up in the US I can’t say much about how things have changed over the long term but I definitely get the impression over the last few years that cultural markers have become used as a ‘fuck you’ to other groups by MAGAs in particular, the red hats, the flags etc.
Always existed, it’s that they no longer feel the need to hide their hate
The performative aspect reminds me a bit of the original punks in 1976, they’d have loved “Fuck your feelings” as a T-shirt slogan, except punks would have despised the GQP and TFG* or indeed any organised political movement and had no wish to force others to conform to their own views
Tony Jay
@MattF:
That was an enjoyable diversion. Just my level of silly/funny/pointy body parts.
Adventure Cube deserves a graphic novel.
NotMax
“Popular culture comes in, popular culture goes out. No one can ‘splain it.”
:)
Miss Bianca
What do you think Katie Britt’s whole speech was? The Sound of Freedom? Trafficking and child sex abuse is *titillating* to them.
bbleh
MY theory is that she’s auditioning for VP, or at least discussion as a possibility for VP, because right now that’s all that matters in the Republican Party. Senate leader? Who even knows who’s in contention? House Speaker? Who wants THAT job? Principal Obnoxious Loudmouth? Admittedly that’s something worth working toward, but right now MTG’s got that pretty well locked up.
Her performance was CLASSIC Confederate Stepford. It was obviously very deliberately that, SO obviously that it was tagged for the SNL open within an hour. And that in turn is exactly what TIFG wants in a female — maybe enough to get the nod or at least be talked about for the nod. And in today’s
NaziRepublican Party, the Approval of the Leader is ALL.Pure brand maintenance for an audience of one, IMO.
bbleh
@UncleEbeneezer: Oooh, oh, DIBS on “Mormon Porn” for a band name, or a book title, or the name of a science fiction character or … oh man, there are SO many possibilities!
AlaskaReader
Some of the finest writing I’ve had the pleasure to read for quite some time.
The Tie That Binds
NotMax
Tangentially reminded of a quote it took some time to dig out of a memory hidey hole.
“Beauty he loved for its own sake; ugliness, which more often than not was a form of inverted beauty, fascinated him. Life offered far too little of either, and far too much appalling mediocrity, which he thought hideous.”
– Lloyd Biggle Jr, The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets
On a lighter note,
“I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.”
– Orson Welles
.
MattF
@bbleh: As long as her brand includes flat-out dishonesty.
Miss Bianca
@AlaskaReader: That bio is a bit behind the times. Kent died quite a few years ago.
Cathy, as far as I am aware, still graces this earth with her presence. I’m friends with her daughter.
(And yeah…his work is well worth reading.)
bbleh
@MattF: I still go with Frankfurt’s “bullshit”: it’s not lying, because lying implicitly recognizes the truth. It is an utter disregard for the difference between lying and truth, for the concept of truth or honesty itself. It’s whatever works, whatever sounds good at the time, whatever makes your audience cheer or you feel good. “Lying” or “dishonesty” is in a way too good for what TIFG does.
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m not sure in what universe a lot of voices wouldn’t have been excluded from network TV: they were businesses, and ratings were everything.
It’s not that they hated the idea of putting excluded voices on the airwaves; they may or may not. The issue was how much of an audience they could pull in, and would it be enough to pay for the show?
People did like seeing new stuff, but only in smallish doses Hence The Ed Sullivan Show and The Wide World of Sports. The whole point of those shows was that you’d see something you hadn’t seen before. (Though what you could do if you wanted more of it was kind of an unaddressed question.)
I could make an argument that network news was the driving force in bringing excluded voices to the forefront. How aware of the civil rights and anti-war groups would people have been, if the news hadn’t been covering the marches and demonstrations? (Which were themselves novel at the time; the novelty has worn off, which is why marches and demonstrations don’t move the needle anymore.)
Jay
The Oscar for best Long Documentary has gone to 20 Days in Mariupol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvAyykRvPBo
cope
My theory, which is mine and which I just came up with is that in the 20th century, the mass media (TV, movies, music, print) drove popular culture. This century, the fact that people are mostly selling themselves and parts of themselves on social media demonstrates how popular culture is now driving the mass media. “Reality” TV, Tik-Tok and YouTube videos and music, blogs, podcasts and such are truly “bottom up” instances of that.
NotMax
Popularity is an archipelago on the ocean of culture, with beachy atolls and mountainous islets one can freely visit among. Over time some of the lands disappear beneath the waves or become barren while others arise fresh. Call it fete tectonics.
;)
AlaskaReader
@Miss Bianca: The bio quoted off the link to Powell’s,
…his unfortunate early death causes me to wonder what accolades he may have added to his list.
• 1986 – Whiting Award for fiction
• 1999 – Finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for Plainsong
• 2005 – Colorado Book Award for Eventide
• 2005 – Finalist for the Book Sense Award for Eventide
• 2009 – Dos Passos Prize for Literature
• 2012 – Wallace Stegner Award
• 2014 – Folio Prize shortlist for Benediction
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I never lived in the world of expected norms for women, and don’t really give a shit.
I don’t know how old you are but it sure was that way when I was young. But then I was born in the first half of the last century. My sisters (older than me) went through that and my parents, especially mom, were very aware of it. It started to change as my sisters were reaching adulthood.
AlaskaReader
@Ruckus: There has never yet been an age or era when there were not, …and are not still, …expected norms imposed on each and every gender.
Steeplejack
@kalakal:
Just Some Fuckhead, 2013: “[. . .] a blog audience that is largely elderly white shut-ins with four or more animals living vicariously through a near-recluse hillbilly in West Virginia.”
AlaskaReader
@kalakal: I have to speak up for Punks here,
…Punks were not at all vindictive,
…nor did they wish to hurt or bring harm to others.
The ‘Fuck your Feelings’ MAGA slogan wouldn’t be admired by the Punks,
…that slogan is enthusiastically embraced by Bigots, the Nazis and the Fascists,
…none of which can ever be considered Punks.
Peke Daddy
@Starfish: She may want to read books about solutions, like the efficiency and renewables revolution, or the possibilities coming out of the current phase change going on in technology and the economy. Opening up to the demonstrably possible helps booster the stance of hope.
Ruckus
@dexwood:
Wanna bet it’s more than one?
Paul in KY
@bbleh: Any attractive woman who TFG picks for veep slot will be propositioned. No doubt.
Paul in KY
@AlaskaReader: ‘Stomp Nazi Assholes’ was/is alot more punk, IMO.
linnen
@CaseyL:
It is one thing to have 100 choices and can only show 5 of them. That is not excluding voices. It is another to have 100 choices, all of them pre-selected to be white, and then only showing 5 of them. That is excluding voices. Television shows were white dominated to the point that having non-white actors/actresses was exceptional, much less giving them speaking roles. EVEN as servants. The shows in the 50’s were also male-dominant to the point that not even having a woman at all was unexceptional. And that was if the woman was not the McGuffin that disappeared by the next episode.
As for television placing a marker for being more inclusive by showing the civil rights marches. Sure that is an argument. It’s not a very good one. Look up, for example, the difficulties Gene Roddenberry had putting a multi-racial cast with women offices on the bridge for his show.
AlaskaReader
@Paul in KY:
The Only Good Fascist is a Very Dead Fascist
Ruckus
It seems to me that a lot of the problem with conservatives is that they want a world which never really existed, even though they keep telling themselves that the world used to be exactly what they wanted. They seem to hate that the world, that humans change, evolves as it were. They want a simple world that looks, feels, is familiar to them, that makes sense – as long as you don’t look at it too hard or too close. They want conformity of everything so it is easy to understand and easy to get along in – as long as you fit into their mold. Which of course most, including them – don’t. Their goal is a gingerbread house and that everyone agrees with everything so there is no decisions, debates, differences. It isn’t a real world and it will always have outsiders that think they are full of shit – because they are. The world isn’t simple, it can’t be one thing, one way, one concept. And it only gets worse as the population grows and they fall farther behind in building their perfect play/doll house. We are all flawed in some way(s), smart/forward looking thinking people and should want a world that allows/welcomes/demands that differences be allowed, welcomed, revered even. People with extremely tight fence lines on everyone else’s lives never get what they think is right, because it’s humanity. Notice how conservatism is getting worse as the population grows and their concept that everyone/everything has to fit into tiny little boxes designed by who the hell knows, and they can’t do anything about it because so many of their controls actually makes their ideal world worse, given the reality of humanity and living, and of just plain differences. It’s humanity, in all it’s glory, all it’s crap, all it’s possibilities, all it’s restrictions, all it’s differences.
Revel in it, enjoy it, wonder at it, learn about it, experience it, because not doing that always makes everything worse.
Paul in KY
@AlaskaReader: Rock on!