Sunday, January 16, 2005
PHIL DOESN’T UNDERSTAND
“How can Americans love The Simpsons yet vote for Bush?” asks Phillip Adams in a column stunning for its worthlessness, even by his standards:
Fundamentalist Christians see Los Angeles as both Sodom and Gomorrah, cities of Jews and liberals, whose salacious offerings are destroying the nation’s moral fibre.
Vicious Jew-hating Jesuslanders! They’re so bigoted. Unlike Phillip’s former radio partner.
But conservatives are on firmer ground when they instance the scurrilous and exuberant subversion of, yes, The Simpsons ... The Simpsons provides the clearest of cases - with its own axis of evil dominated by a Phil Ruddock lookalike who, consumed with greed, owns his own malfunctioning nuclear power station.
Speaking of Simpsons lookalikes ...
Among the most frequent targets of lethal satire are The Simpsons’ next-door-neighbours, archetypal Christian conservatives whose religiosity our hero, Homer, constantly derides.
Homer very rarely derides the Flanders’ “religiousity” (why would he? Homer attends church almost every Sunday).
Indeed, pretty much all the baddies in a Mike Moore movie can be seen in The Simpsons which, at its heart, is a never-ending version of Fahrenheit 9/11. Yes, it can be laughed off as a cartoon - but it’s a cartoon closely related to the cartooning of Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury.
Except that it’s funny.
The only significant TV series in which the lead characters would be pro-Bush is - The Sopranos. Their line on Muslims, the war in Iraq, let alone their ongoing prejudices against African/Americans, would put them firmly in the category of chest-thumping, white alpha males. Of course, at some levels, David Chase’s fascinating portrait of New Jersey criminality is a social satire. At others, it takes over where Coppola’s The Godfather left off - as a piece of symbolism of US capitalism.
The stretching involved here is the most exercise Phil has got since all those star-jumps to celebrate Whitlam’s election in ‘72.
UPDATE. What is with hefty bearded guys named Phillip Adams?
UPDATE II. Professor Bunyip also contemplates Phil’s vision of The Simpsons, “which he has apparently never seen.”