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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31626 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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I see pop culture as actually having a fascination with poor or working class white people, just as long as they are quirky somehow. Or criminal. Tiger King. The hatchet-wielding hitchhiker. Former mobsters moving to Oklahoma (Tulsa King).

The media's attitude toward Tiger King was actually kind of a huge thing that turned me against them around 2020. I watched Tiger King and my takeaway was, honestly, that they look like they're having significantly more fun in their lives than me or anyone who was poo-pooing the show was having. It really made me realize that I don't want to live my life confined by the tastes of people who can make fun of Joe Exotic while their own lifestyle is probably a really depressing routine of uber eats and gray buildings.

Additionally, I think the time before 2016 was way friendlier to quirky white working class people. For example, indie films like Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, as well as indie folk music like Sufjan and Fleet Foxes were beloved by the NPR set until the entire indie folk quirk scene mysteriously vanished from the media's landscape in favor of queer/bipoc voices throughout the late 2010s

These are minstrel shows.

"Minstel show" implies that it's an act, that the ones in blackface are nothing like what they are acting as (or alternatively, that the black people on display are made to act in a less dignified way than they realistically are). I don't think Kai (the hitchhiker with the hatchet) specifically is playing things up or pretending, he seems like the genuine article.

I believe to steelman gilmore606's point, it would be that they are minstrel shows in the sense that the blue team viewers like to watch this media to laugh at the antics of poor white people. So this mimics the spectacle of white people watching entertainment that makes them feel superior and to be able to point and laugh at an inferior class of people (long ago it was blacks, today it's poor whites.) We have replaced acting with reality TV, so we don't need to have rich whites pretending to be poor whites (though there are plenty of examples of exactly that happening in Hollywood today.)

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