Trump: Less Grim Revolutionary than Jim Belushi-onary
What a groundbreaking new course for the nation from the White House-turned-TV studio: ubiquitous pap cynically broadcast to Middle America wherein no problem can’t be resolved by the top of the hour and the put-upon white guy always has right (and/or a disproportionately attractive woman) on his side.
The new president fancies himself a maverick. He deems himself a barrier-breaking original, a chimera beset on all sides by every conceivable unfair attack yet somehow simultaneously loved and admired more than any chief executive who has come before him. This paradox — like all that apply to him where the basic laws of mathematics and accuracy seem not to apply — likely only enhances his stature among his small, unwavering band of supporters (you know, the ones who have been with the 70-year-old “leader” going allllllllll the way back to his political debut, a year and a half ago).
But this is not John McCain taking the Straight Talk Express to every Elks Lodge and Rotary Club in New Hampshire that would have him, fielding questions from Joe and Alice and drawing upon his years of legislative and military experience to delineate how he would actually veer from the course of his more staid rivals.
Nor is this Bill Clinton hustling to every diner and potluck in towns large and small explaining how he would chart a new U.S. direction away from both the Republicans (who had controlled the White House for 20 of the preceding 24 years) and the establishment Democrats (who had largely ceded the South and the West to conservatives for a generation while and doubling down on East Coast politics).
He certainly isn’t Harry Truman, traversing the nation on the first whistle-stop tour — in a time of post-World War fragility and anxiety and international famine — listening to crowds of twenty at train stations in the middle of the night (as opposed to crowds of twenty thousand in choreographed televised “populist” rallies in sports arenas).
No, like the lazy, cynical, ratings-obsessed TV producer he is, Donald Trump is filling prime time news with a stream of broadcast programming (and social re-programming) even more intellectually anesthetizing, stereotype-reinforcing, reductionist and anglo-masculine than the highly profitable, artistically bereft, white- and male-dominated pap of prime time sitcoms.
In short, Trump’s an extremely malevolent Jim Belushi (or Kevin James or any other cookie-cutter real American guy from highly lucrative and syndicated “family” programs and beer/chips/truck ads): the titular star of his own show, a misunderstood “victim” of a changing society that doesn’t hold his values, a shlub who somehow always has an adoring, sexy, much younger wife, a man for whom everything works out in the end (week after week) because that’s what the narrative demands.
[A couple caveats: A) I am not stating that new president is merely as vacuous as a CBS sitcom protagonist…he is dangerous, careless, bigoted, misogynist, vengeful and willfully ignorant. B) I am not implying Jim Belushi, himself, is Trump-like.]
Belushi’s type of ubiquitous broadcast presence is a benign analogue to Trump and the simplistic messaging he cynically and profitably aims at an audience that wants to be neither challenged nor questioned in how it views the world. Shameless capitalizing capitalists like CBS Honcho Les Moonves (he of the infamous “Trump may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS” quote during the election) gleefully green-lights and perpetuates these archetypes of televised soylent green because it reinforces a normalized, airbrushed, ersatz “back to the good ol’ days” version of the Trumpian message.
Why am I drawing parallels between a powerful man with pathological psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies who gleefully antagonizes people and the “benign” broadcast programming customs that — while they won’t win any screenwriting awards — aren’t overtly oppressing anyone? I admit, it’s nuanced…Basically, the art we take in, that we tolerate, that mollifies us, that we identify behind — these things say a lot about what moves us, what inspires us, what shocks us, who we empathize with, and who we think most deserves (and in turn doesn’t deserve) to be the star of the show, the lead role…our American representative on the world’s stage.
In an age when viewing options have never been more available, content-creators more diverse, audience feedback and demands more heeded, it is instructive that television viewing — once an overwhelming shared American experience and touchstone — has cleaved as much as any other demographic split in our red vs. blue nation. (Obviously, having more than just the Big Three networks of 30 years ago is a large factor, but the disparity is larger than that alone would explain.)
To go back to CBS — which, as the proud owner of the title “America’s Most Watched Network,” makes for a good test-study subject — it is correlative, at the least, to note that the network with the highest ratings and the oldest viewer-age average almost defiantly sticks to a recipe that’s heavy on easy money and light on artistic or social gravitas:
- Bank on the white leading man, especially if he is already a known commodity (Six new CBS series, six white male leads. With prime-time diversity growing, how did the network fall behind)
- Basically give your audience two options: put-upon every-man navigates out-of-control, zany world/wacky family, maaaaaaaybe with a person of color adding a quip here and there, OR heroes with badges and guns keep our families safe from constant threat of terrorists, kidnappers, drug dealers and gangs. (CBS serves up ‘comfort food’ on Friday nights and it’s paying off)
These two main options for escapism function for the largest chunk of the viewing public as shared cultural currency and reinforce a point-of-view of an America that is not only unrecognizable to John Q. Public, but constantly in need of “take charge” people of authority to make us safe again.
Again — not coincidentally — this squarely feeds into Trump’s messaging and “governance style.” He IS the man on the proverbial wall saying, “I alone can fix this!” He is asserting that PC Hollywood, “taking” minorities and “mouthy” single women don’t speak for real Americans. (Duck Dynasty cast members can stump for him, though, because — you know — they do). He plays the victim of constant attack who simply knows better than everyone else — gifted with both “all the best words” and “alternative facts, not fake news.” Obsessed by televised images, two-dimensional storylines and all things bombastic, he fashions himself — in turn — the scion of true America speaking for all the average joes out there, the charismatic life of the party all the men want to be and all the women want to be with, and the fearless lawman protecting all the innocents from “dangerous elements…and you know what I’m talking about.”
And, when you look at the viewing demographics and ratings maps of the mainstream programming most matching his worldview and compare that to the demographics of geography, gender, age and race that filled his arena rallies, vaulted Breitbart from the shadows and cobbled together an Electoral College victory for him, you have a pretty seamless fit. The twin pillars of Middle America’s televised tropes of choice have mirrored — as much as he can be nailed down on such things — Trump’s policy-centered guiding principles: Turning back the clock on cultural miscegenation in order to “Make America Great Again” and heralding the return of “Law and Order” (the Dick Nixon, George Wallace dog-whistle variety, not the Dick Wolf procedural with iconic song-and-dance-man-turned-glib-detective Jerry Orbach).
A lot was said about “low-information voters” this last election cycle. That term doesn’t mean these people weren’t watching TV or searching the internet. You can watch a tremendous amount of television and have your fears, prejudices and worldviews reinforced without consuming a single program containing quote-endquote news.
An electorally-powerful amount of people gather nightly around the tube for three hours of watching people who look like them and almost everyone else they know fight valiantly against the tide of modernity, get the girl, get the laugh, or stop the bad hombres from winning.
They echo our new president’s fact-free assertions about the last eight years of declining economic trends and hiring statistics, dystopian urban hellscapes of nonstop racial violence and burned out factories, and the disproportional burdens and attacks facing traditional, hardworking Americans (i.e. white, heartland folk).
You might say, by the way, why should a network care about anything other than money and ratings? And why shouldn’t people just want to be entertained? Anyway, isn’t artful, socially-relevant programming just a ratings millstone around a network’s neck? That may seem true, but it is not. In the 70’s and ‘80’s the shows of Norman Lear and others combined comedy and commentary that challenged norms and featured intense storylines that reaped both high ratings and critical acclaim. Some could never be run today on broadcast primetime and would be relegated to the smaller niche audiences of cable or streaming services (Good Times, M.A.S.H., All in the Family, the Jeffersons). Others might make it on, but wouldn’t do well across the nation, seeing how they tackled gender, traditional family values, race and politics: (Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Cosby Show, The Wonder Years, Family Ties, Roseanne, One Day at a Time).
Can you imagine a mainstream primetime show that featured highjinks, one-liners, biting social commentary and painful peeks behind the curtain of the workplace ineptitude of…the wartime US Army? That would never get greenlit for broadcast today — anybody associated with it would be tarred and feathered as unpatriotic, terrorist-sympathizers who didn’t “Support the Troops.” Yet, M.A.S.H. is one of the highest-rated, most highly-regarded shows of all time, bringing the plight, heroism, existential quandaries and — even — silliness of war and military life into most of the homes in the nation. If we can draft our sons or recruit our daughters to fight on the other side of the world, can we — at least — explore the ramifications of doing so with all of our human and social tools (not just rote pledges and token public gestures at sporting events and parades?)
Can you imagine a comedy show garnering huge ratings, launching multiple spin-off shows and the careers of TV and film heavyweights, all while making its audience squirm and confront issues of homosexuality, race, white supremacy, misogyny, sexual assault? All the in Family did just that — 40 years ago — smack dab in the middle of the Nixon Presidency, the Sexual Revolution, Roe vs. Wade, the crescendo of the Vietnam War, the early days of the Gay Rights Movement and the latter days of the Civil Rights Movement.
Oh, and it was funny as hell.
You would think that the country would have had enough of the heaviness and severity and turmoil of current events in the ‘70’s and just want to escape to some new-fangled version of The Beverly Hillbillies. It didn’t.
Culture informed art, and art — in turn — transformed culture, moving it along quicker to grapple with issues it couldn’t even in the very recent past. In All in the Family, you see swastikas painted on the family’s front door, the mother attacked by a rapist, homosexuality vilified and challenged, racist words and ideas argued in the open…again, this was a comedy…one that trusted that the American people could handle the world like grown-ups.
Here’s the really crazy thing, though — All in the Family (and other shows, as well) could have just mailed it in and settled for the broad strokes. Hey, Archie Bunker was a shlubby white guy in an “average neighborhood” with “crazy kids” and a wife who was on his case…he could’ve been a Jim Belushi/Kevin James clone in ‘70’s pants and wide lapels. But he wasn’t. His wife, Edith, who nagged him, she became the voice of the show, the conscience. Archie had conflicts about his supposedly concrete views. Instead of poking fun at the “fruity leftist radicals” of the era, the show humanized them and the righty stick-in-the-mud who never asked for the world to change on him.
Unfortunately, what today garners the most viewers around the nightly television set is eerily similar to what is dominating the daytime news broadcasts, live and direct from the new home of must-see TV, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the same boiled down scripts, performed by an over-acting dumpy white guy, getting by on the same shtick he’s been using for years, waging a lonely battle against a world gone mad, where he always gets to drop either the big zinger on the audience or the big hammer on the bad guy du jour, then go upstairs to his trophy wife (you know, if she’s in town).
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