From Roseanne to Hanson, a real week of idiocy

It’s a tremendous bit of kit, a bag fashioned from a bit of my small intestine, stitched up like a baseball by the surgeons to stop any leaking. It’s just six weeks old and the only problem is the neo-bladder doesn’t really know it’s a bladder and that means I need to be within a handpass of a brasco at all times or to put it kindly in stand up comedy speak, the front three rows will get wet.

It does provide a unique if occasionally dislocated view of the world.

All the unexpected interruptions notwithstanding, I think I have seen enough of this week to discern that it has had more than its fair share of idiocy.

As evidence, I offer the following:

Pauline Hanson’s claims that NSW PHON senator Brian Burston betrayed her by not betraying the agreement he and she had made with the Mathias Cormann over corporate tax cuts. This led to a smorgasbord of betrayal and from a distance it was difficult to know who betrayed whom first.

Reaching deep into her handbag for the victim card, Pauline turned on the water works on Sky News last night and now Burston is no longer welcome in the PHON tent despite him saying he still wants to be a member of the party.

In 2016, PHON had four senators. Now they can hold party room meetings in the back seat of a Kia Cerato. The good news for the freshly appointed PHON whip, Peter Georgiou, is that his job has just got a whole lot easier. He can discharge his responsibilities with a functioning walkie talkie.

Yesterday also saw a fight for supremacy between Environment Minister, Greg Hunt and Opposition leader, Bill Shorten over who can be ruder to women. Shorten had the runs on the board after abusing a woman in a shop over the availability of a hot pie back in 2012. Hunt’s expletive-laced spray directed at the Mayor of Katherine, 71-year-old Fay Miller was allowed to pass quietly through to the keeper for almost six months until the Herald-Sun ran the story on its front page yesterday. Hunt apologised both privately and publicly to Miller shortly thereafter, saying to do both was the “right thing to do.”

There’s nothing like a politician’s apology, with nothing being the operative word.

One must wonder about the US media and whether they’ll ever come to terms with Donald Trump. Yesterday Trump had a brief meeting with another former star of reality TV, Kim Kardashian. The New York Post ran a most amusing front page, but other media organisations regarded this meeting of minds and substantial backsides as a sign of the End Times, an impending planet destroying Armageddon on its way.

Had they forgotten about Richard Nixon and Elvis, Ronald Reagan and Michael Jackson, George W Bush and Bono, Barack Obama and just about anyone even vaguely famous who wandered by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Celebs have been visiting the White House since way back, when Abe Lincoln said: “I need a night at the theatre like a hole in the head.” But when Trump plays host, albeit with a low rent celeb, media orgs various lose their minds. This was barely a story and yet there it was, getting a run not just in the US but across all television news services in Australia and I watched every single one.

Who cares? They do apparently. Whether the audience does or not is another matter.

The biggest idiot of the week by far was Roseanne Barr. No contest.

When the Roseanne story first broke, my first thought was, “Wow, Twitter gets another one” but that is missing the point. Also missing the point was the congratulations extended to the US network, ABC, but I believe the plans they executed so swiftly had been in place for months.

Roseanne had to go. In fact, she should have gone long before, after various unhinged Twitter attacks on Chelsea Clinton and George Soros. But that’s not to say ABC was not complicit in Barr’s behaviour at least to a point.

There are a few things the media has largely ignored in this story. Firstly, Roseannerevamped contained just nine episodes when the norm for a sitcom in the US is 22. This tells me there was some scepticism about the show and that a plan B was in effect if it didn’t work or if Barr misbehaved. She was known to be a serious problem way back when Roseanne had its first incarnation and I believe the US network gave her just enough rope in the second.

ABC took the program on because they wanted a little of the blue collar pro-Trump action. It paid off to the tune of 18.7 million viewers on average across the nine episodes (the ratings did drop off in the latter episodes in the truncated series but only off almost record highs from the early episodes).

We often see journalists trudging around western Pennsylvania or in the backwoods of Wisconsin trying to understand the appeal of President Trump to working class Americans. Whether ABC understood it or not they decided they wanted to play to that crowd but they did so having five bob each way. Barr and her show were on double secret probation from the outset.

The US network regarded Barr as a loose cannon but one that could be disposed of quickly. Certainly, a second series had been commissioned but significantly the advertising had not been sold. It would have become almost impossible to do so after Barr’s racist tweet and the social media backlash.

A little digging of the kind I did earlier this week shows just how problematic Barr could be to any network and especially one owned by Disney Corp.

This excerpt from Barr’s blog was published well before she commenced her long walk to Trumpism. It is indicative of the risk ABC took. In relation to Roseanne’s many quasi-political rants, it is not exceptional. It is the kind of tirade she was well known for. It is virulently anti-Semitic, utterly without substance, relying on bizarre conspiracy theories and almost laughably wrong.

“Many of the Palestinian people are Jewish and became Christian after Israel stole their land and homes. They were dark skinned, and so driven out of their homes by a Cheney-ized Judeo-Christian Bushite America. The Jewish American socialists are sending a flotilla from America to break the blockade of the anti-Semitic Zionists in Gaza! Zionists are German. Weird hybrid. In order to defeat Euro-socialism, Hitler leveraged the rich Jewish industrialists against the working-class Jews. The Russian accounts say that the last trains to Auschwitz were first class, as that is all the leverage left to the Jewish oligarchs within the ‘Reich’, (other than the Jews like Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler at the top).”

I believe the ABC did not act swiftly as was reported but rather put in place some risk management procedures it had already developed should the star of the show go off the reservation as she very clearly did.

There are always risks for celebs using social media to push political barrows and when that turns into ugly racist rants, as it did with Barr’s tweet the new Hollywood or indeed Burbank post Weinstein is not about to protect the star or go to ground as it might have in the old days.

Now, I’d love to stay and chat but I really must go.

This article as originally published in The Australian on 1 June, 2018