That’s exactly it, I almost used the good cop/bad cop analogy for my original comment. It’s been glaringly obvious that the dems are just a pressure-release valve for people’s anger for some time now. They never live up to any of the expectations that people have for them. At this point it is a cruel Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown facade. And democrat voters eat it up every time.

Now the biggest sentiment from liberals is “this is your fault, if only you’d voted for the dems”, when it is largely irrelevant if voters do. The dems are just a friendlier looking version of a corporate controlled imperialistic government. The sooner the people realize this, the sooner we can actually mobilize people against the real enemies of the people, which is corporate control of both political parties. Until class-consciousness manifests itself on a much larger scale, we’ll continue to play these stupid corporate controlled dem vs repub games and win more stupid prizes.

It’s this rhetoric that plays perfectly into the class divide that the corporate asshats want everyone to fall for. “It’s your fault for not voting for the other corporate shill party!” Disregarding the fact that the main difference is one party is just mask off, and the other is mask on fascist. As many people rightly point out, the dems are controlled opposition. If they weren’t there would literally have been much more fight and pushback from them for the four years before Trump 2.0 (especially since they knew it was coming faaar in advance) rather then the milquetoast response we got from them, this was made quite obvious by the dems moving right in many policies and stumping with Cheney of all people. If these people really gave a shit about appealing to their constituents, they would’ve listened to the damn voters. This is all beside the point as modern American voting IS NOT determined by the voting public, but much more powerful interests. If you really believed your vote was effecting something in this, or any other election in the past 20+ years, I have a bridge to sell you in the Sahara.

Right on. The small snippet I read was intriguing. I look forward to it.

Ooo, sweet. I enjoyed The Plague. I’ll take a look. Thanks ;)

Haha, thanks. I’m surprised there’s someone out there that isn’t even familiar with Rent in passing. My ex was a theater major and she looooved Rent, but even I had heard of it before that. I’m not sure I could survive watching the movie again. I think seeing a stage production of Rent would have been awesome though, especially if I knew someone in the play. I DO dig the overall perspective of it, from what I do remember of watching it years ago.

Thanks! Those all look pretty interesting. I’ll probably watch Vast of Night over the weekend.

Interesting, however sitcoms in general really aren’t my cup of tea as well. It was mentioned in other places that Roseanne was one of the few shows to depict working class life somewhat accurately, and with some dignity. A lot of the time the working class is shown in a shallow, stereotypical depiction of what upper-class people imagine it’s like.

Yes! Kids shows are particularly egregious about this. All the kids shows are about rich kids and their rich parents. That’s not to say that kids shows need to explicitly put the problems of class society front and center (although, some small discussion of class and social relations would be nice) but consistently showing kids living out these hyper-capitalist consumerist fantasies is pretty cringe-worthy.

Exactly. The thing that repulses me the most is the fake-y, artificial looking life that is so often represented in entertainment, and then that is what is spun as “normal”. Which I imagine is why these upper-class people even in real life look like the shallow Stepford Wives aesthetic that the movies and tv depict them as, life depicting art it seems.

In my initial short searches I did earlier, Antonio Gramsci comes up as addressing the issue of “cultural hegemony”, where art and entertainment tends to represent the dominant bourgeois culture, which makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard of Gramsci in passing, but haven’t read anything by him yet. I think it’s a good place to begin regarding a critical analysis.

Although, even without a thorough critical analysis, it’s pretty straightforward to realize that the economic barrier for art, entertainment and creating media in general leads to an over-representation of the wealthy since they have the money and means to create and distribute media to the masses, which in turn consolidates their dominance of the popular narrative.

What’s particularly sad about this, is that people that grow up working-class are absorbing messages from media that marginalize their narrative, and cause them to internalize a narrative that leads them to being oblivious towards their class standing and even hostile towards it. The whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” concept that causes people to denigrate the poor and working class, even if they themselves are a part of it.