Monday 14 November 2016

Alf Garnet and Archie Bunker return in the UK and US respectively (and we are not laughing).

What is one of the  leading left wing  Blog s AAV has written on the The psychological impact of Trumps' victory

He  writes

 An awful lot has already been said about the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. One thing that really struck me was a comment by the US political commentator Van Jones.

In his reaction to Donald Trump's unfolding election victory he said 


"It's hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids 'don't be a bully'. You tell your kids 'don't be a bigot'. You tell your kids 'do your homework and be prepared' ... Then you have this outcome. You have people putting their children to bed tonight who are afraid of breakfast in the morning. They're afraid of 'how do I explain this to my children'."
AAV continues

The point he raises is an extremely good one. How is it possible to explain to children what has happened? It's not just the parents of American children who have been left asking this question either. Pretty much any child with access to a television or the Internet will have had countless hours of exposure to contemporary liberal American values and they'll have also have seen clips of Donald Trump behaving atrociously (like this one my kids showed me).

Practically every American kids' TV series is rammed full of moral messages promoting tolerant socially liberal values. The rude, bigoted, dishonest and lazy characters always get their comeuppance, and there's almost always rewards in store for characters who choose honesty, kindness or hard work. These are undeniably the cultural values American TV has been instilling in generation after generation of children all over the world.

In some ways I see that as the problem  US Television shows have tended to gloss over bigotry and present  a false image.

Even in historical programs  Racism hardly ever rises its head and Black characters are sometimes portrayed as  having position in society that in reality they were excluded from .

There were exceptions in the In the Heat of the Night tv series 1988 until 1992, based on the film the Virgil Tibbs The show dealt with a variety of issues, including racism, police brutality, hate crimes, drug abuse, alcoholism, rape, AIDS, misogyny, incest, child abuse, anti-Semitism, prostitution, government corruption, domestic violence, gambling, mental disorders, dysfunctional families, suicide, poverty, homophobia, and drunk driving

But there was one line from Tibbs which summed up some attitude in the US he said;

In the Northern States They didn't mind how uppity Negroes got so long as they didn't get to close Whilst in the South they didn't mind how close Negroes got so long as they didn't get to close.
Have things changed Black Lives Matter , I suspect would sau no.
Although AAV may be right about the " cultural values American TV has been instilling in generation after generation of children all over the world"

There has also been a  long  tendency in American cop shows  to portray Gangs as foreigners, Originally it was Italians but ow its Eat Europeans or Chinese Triads,

Organise Crime it seems is always the fault of Immigrants either illegal or a legality that is open to question .

Both Trump's Presidential campaign and his Victory has exposed  an open sore in  American Society and I wonder how those Americans have reacted to the Bigots and Racist they have been led to believe  were an ignorant minority  may be living next door.

Here in the UK we have the same problem 

It is the Alf Garnet factor

Writer Johnny Speight often commented that the character was supposed to be a figure of ridicule, but admitted that not all viewers saw the satiric elements of the character.Speight defended the Alf Garnett character, saying:


 "If you do the character correctly, he just typifies what you hear - not only in pubs but in golf clubs around the country. To make him truthful he's got to say those things, and they are nasty things. But I feel as a writer that they should be out in the open so we can see how daft these comparisons are."[

 Instead of laughing at Garnetts Bigotry many agreed with him.

Brexit and Trump's victory has led to Alf Garnet and his Us  analog. Archie Bunker , believing they have a voice to express their bigotry.

Only this time we liberals are not laughing but now look at them with fear and loathing,

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