If The “Coastal Elite” Doesn’t Understand America, Why Does FX’s ‘Baskets’ Make Me Want To Be A Better Patriot?
Comedian Zach Galifianakis is celebrated by media obsessives, high culture seekers, and what Red pundits call the “coastal elite.” Yet his deserved reputation as an alternative comedy pioneer and intuitive artist does a disservice to his contributions to overall American culture, especially when you take into consideration his latest project, Baskets, the FX show about a classically trained rodeo clown in small town California, now in its second season. Hear this: this subtle yet poignant comedy from the North Carolina born-and-bred Galifianakis is not for “coastal elites” nor is it for their antithesis the “fly over whites.” It’s universally accessible (and enjoyable) to anyone who wants to see a new, American story.
Unfortunately that sales pitch is rarely pushed.
In this day and age, everything is sold to us. Take it from someone who used to work in advertising, television, food, gadgets, and politics are all packaged to the public with marketing tactics designed to prey on our minds to awaken if not manufacture desire and dependency. On a harmless, corporate level FX has played the sales game for Baskets by targeting fans of edgy comedy, usually male between the ages of 16 and 35 (wow, that’s me!). Political parties, however, unleash these tactics on a massive, corroding level. It’s the stuff of Glengarry Glen Ross, despite the fact the livelihood of the citizenry is what’s at stake.
The honesty that all Americans craved in the 2016 race was absent across the board — every candidate’s team and every faction’s organizers have been taking pages from the play books of advertisers, salesmen, and product pushers. The number one lesson they learned? Choose a label, make it hate the competition, and maintain a loyal consumer base — no matter the ethical cost. In 2016, one side played dirtier than the other.
So what makes the “coastal elite” class? Unless the beaches of Lake Michigan count as a coast and suburban California is the Midwest, geography is not a factor. The “coastal elite” label does certainly originate though from core interests like urban-chic couture, creative industry, technological ease and innovation, high end recreation (read gym memberships), and of course, brunch. In a nutshell, fancy stuff.
Beware of nutshells.
The ideology that built the majority of the American metropolitan class is composed of enterprise, pluralism, and an attraction to new thinking and facts-based expansion. However, the not-so-incorrect reality that rural and working-class, often White America picks up on (albeit through a keyhole-sized perspective) is that the mindset that now fuels our cities is a warped offshoot: excessive high-end consumerism, outright rejection of antiquity (aka old values), and pop progressivism. To someone outside of this culture, one of its subscribers is easily considered condescending at best; destructive at worst.
That is a nutshell perspective, however, and I cannot warn enough against those. When we cast off the oversimplification of the complicated and focus on the simplicity of the core: Americans are quite similar no matter their interests or background. Consumerism is a cornerstone of our modern culture — it’s simply products and brands that differ between cultures, and there’s often a lot of crossover that is underrepresented. Income plays a major role in what Americans buy, but many Americans are making the same, insufficient amount of money these days. Brands do not care though. They care that you spend it, preferably on what they’re selling.
One big cultural difference that clouds the fact that most Americans face similar economic realities is that many cosmopolitan transplants, especially émigrés from “fly over country,” often buy into an escapist (and of course manufactured) dream of purchasable, wearable, participatory “culture,” which covertly means, superiority. In response, rural working class people “left behind” and possibly feeling subconscious abandonment, double down on their circumstances. Parties seeking to capitalize on this then commodify it into a subculture obsessed with the unrefined and conservative, complete with arch-nemeses — the “snobs” who left. Then the rhetoric writers and puppet masters egg on the fake culture war that rakes in big profit and power in politics. Like race, class ghettoization and segregation is a factor that is too often absorbed into sales strategy rather than corrected.
It’s the stuff of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ , despite the fact the livelihood of the citizenry is what’s at stake.
The zeitgeist’s cherry on top distractions are two fold: The first is nostalgia, the metaphorical drug du jour that all Americans are being dealt, incessantly, by brands and pundits, be it film reboots, 80s-inspired music and style, Trump’s nationalist “Great America,” or simply the past experiences we post that Facebook constantly wants us to commemorate. Tangible drugs meanwhile permeate through all stretches of generally White American life, be it marijuana, cocaine, Ritalin, and psychedelics for the self-proclaimed intelligentsia of the cities or the oxycodone and black tar heroine of the suburban and rural working class. An unfortunate activity they share: drug usage.
One side, however, has been ravaged by it.
When President Obama addressed the American Opioid Crisis in 2015 my first reaction was, “Where is this coming from?” It was the first time in my adult life that I truly felt blindsided by an event in my own backyard. The jab of “coastal elite” truly applied. While my focus on systematic racism and police brutality dominated my scope (and continues to be my highest priority safety issue in American politics) I realized that I was completely out of touch with the struggles of too many of my compatriots. I was plain old ignorant.
I did, however, do something to improve myself.*
Today, I pride myself on digging into lots of different sources of information on a daily basis. Besides reading print, I am an internet fiend. I gobble up as many editorial gems as possible while equally subjecting myself to all the fodder that the web coughs up. My spectrum of information goes from Mother Jones to r/interestingasfuck. Meanwhile, from my less internet-savvy mother I get lefty/moderate clickbait. Lastly, my semi-retired, unintentional luddite father, out of a bizarre fascination, has converted my parents’ living room into a glorified dentist’s office waiting room, complete with a minimum of 6 hours of Fox News programming juxtaposed against 6 hours of CNN. Every visit home is also a vacation to the land of what some dangerous people dangerously call “alternative fact” with a detour to the realm of talking heads and their unhelpful input.
…I was completely out of touch with the struggles of too many of my compatriots.
It is crucial that we, as a nation, adopt a habit to see past the artificial and the sales techniques in order to jump into human commonality, the most common being the fight to end suffering. We must push back against the widening gaps by realizing that humans are suffering across the racial, class, and geographic divides for different reasons and that one problem is not necessarily better or worse than the other — they all need to be fixed. Some entertainers are already doing this, many on FX actually, but TV is still sold mainly to factions, often subsections of the media-driven “coastal elite.”
That’s where Baskets comes in.
The first episode of the new season of Baskets (which aired on January 19) sees the show’s hero, the tragically luckless Chip Baskets (played with farcical malaise by Galifianakis himself), living life as a wandering hobo after dejectedly abandoning the rodeo as well as his family and friends. He feels lost and unwanted in America so he’s going it alone.
Eventually he chances upon a troupe of wandering street performers and, as a trained clown, he quickly becomes a lucrative asset and welcome member of the group. The performers are all fellow suburban runaways, resembling the young hippie-punk homeless that live in America’s major cities, complete with tragic Bogosianic pasts and, as Chip naively discovers, drug addiction. Not just any drug addiction, the most American of them all: pills and heroin.
The episode concludes with the arrival of police after the troupe breaks into a home to enjoy their “snacks” as they call them. Innocent Chip is seized by harsh awareness of the realities of low (in this case zero) income Americana. It speaks to a larger pain that flows through the veins of the United States. It’s a pain that too many Americans feel, too many have proper assistance for, and a select few, like the new Whitehouse, misdiagnose treatment for, just like the pushers that started this mess. Those who turn a blind eye (usually by ignorance not contempt) are generally the ‘coastal elite’ that Galifianakis is unwillingly slotted into.
Clearly, however, Galifianakis, his co-producer Louis C. K. , and all the other “coastal,” “Hollywood,” “media,” and “creative elite” that make his show are very aware of that pain and their gut-wrenching, un-romanticized portrayal of it serves as testament.
I am fully attentive now. I’ve woken up to an unfortunately additional domestic danger that is being further and further politicized while more people die and progressive bystanders like me keep sleeping in our artisanal beds (mine’s from IKEA, actually). I can only assume, out of my last shreds of humanist optimism, that fans of The Blue Collar Comedy Tour, America’s Got Talent, and NASCAR can also wake up to the human tragedies I and millions of other “coastal elites” want fixed if they read, listen, or watch something despite the feeling (or Netflix recommendation) that breeds the thinking it’s “not their cup of tea.” Positive, all-encompassing American remedying is dependent on ignoring labels.
Baskets is peddled at an interesting crossroads as FX leans left, but is a subsidiary of right-wing sensationalist Fox. Despite its target audience, Baskets inherently refuses to adhere to the artificial divisions pushed by the new Whitehouse in 2017 or “liberal” media outlets that oppose them for profit instead of genuine ideology. Simply by presenting its tragic tale in apolitical absurdity, Baskets bridges the information gap and, for me, makes the case to be a better, more caring American and pay more attention to those who suffer and happen to be on the other end of the ideological spectrum.
Galifianakis and his team have crafted something sad, beautiful, funny, and uniquely American. Through thoughtful, human storytelling we all can see the universal themes that bring us together in solidarity against real threats, not the ones sold to us. Yes, it’s tempting to subscribe to something, and it’s validating to surround yourself with more and more stuff like what you already have, but rather be the kid in the after-school special who “just says no” to the pusher telling them what’s really good; what’s “cool”. You don’t need to be “cool.” There is no “cool.” You need to be an individual, so that you can pursue your dreams, even if everyone around you thinks they’re a bit clownish, because that’s what America is supposed to be about.
The following is a nonpartisan list of sources on the Opioid Crisis that I find particularly compelling and helpful for those looking to learn more:
Listen:
Read:
- Mr. Quinones’s book, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic
- Heroin in the suburbs: An American epidemic from Fox News
- 6 Ways to Fight America’s Heroin Epidemic from Time Magazine
- This town is at the epicenter of America’s heroin epidemic — The Week
Watch:
