https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/abc-sitcom-the-conners-the-struggle-is-real/
Life expectancy for Americans has fallen to an average of 78.6 years. This is a drop from the most recent estimates—indicating a downward trend that is virtually unheard of in Western countries. A report just released from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls this "a disturbing result not seen in the US…since 1915 through 1918, which included World War I and a flu pandemic." The report blames the downward trend on increases in opioid abuse, suicide, and diabetes.
Photo by Eric McCandless, ABC
So perhaps it is fitting that when ABC debuted The Conners, a spinoff from last year's canceled Roseanne, the writers decided to kill off Roseanne Conner by having her succumb to an opioid addiction—an addiction so secret that even her husband, Dan (John Goodman) was shocked when his daughters started unearthing random bottles of pain pills around the house after Roseanne's death.
The real life Roseanne Barr is still very much alive, as she reminded her fans when The Connors debuted in mid-October, tweeting, "I'm not dead, b*&%#es." But it was a tweet last May that killed Barr's tenure at ABC. She tweeted about President Obama's close advisor, Valerie Jarrett: "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj." At first Barr blamed the tweet on the sleep aid, Ambien, and then she claimed that didn't know Jarrett was African American. Finally, she apologized: "to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me—my joke was in bad taste." But the damage was done. ABC promptly canceled Roseanne, calling Barr's tweet "abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values."
Sara Gilbert, who plays Roseanne's daughter Darlene, and Goodman scrambled to find a way to keep the show alive. Indeed, the Roseanne reboot was Gilbert's idea in the first place. They were also concerned about the ability of the hundreds of people employed by the sitcom, in front of and behind the camera, to keep their jobs.
Ironically, perhaps, some have argued that The Conners is just as good—and maybe even better—than Roseanne. The show was always an ensemble piece, and every actor associated with the reboot has remained. Even better, D.J.'s (Michal Fishman) African American wife, who last spring was off camera fighting in Afghanistan, is now back from the war (Maya Lynne Robinson), and there are delightful cameos by Johnny Galecki as Darlene's ex-husband, Matthew Broderick as Jackie's pompous Halloween date, and Jay R. Ferguson (Peggy's bearded coworker from Mad Men!) as Darlene's new boss at a tabloid newspaper.
Michael Schneider writing for Indiewire suggests that without the distraction of Roseanne Barr's politics the show can go back to doing what it did so well in the 1990s: chronicling the woes of the working class. The Conners struggle with many problems familiar to working-class families: the grief from losing someone to opioid addiction, the additional loss of Roseanne's income, alcoholism, being fired, being underemployed, being forced to work in crappy service industry jobs because nothing else is available, blue collar jobs that suck, dicey sexual situations in the workplace, and a threadbare house that is falling apart and which has to hold several generations because of finances. The Conners also face less class-specific problems of tween sexuality, teenage sex, divorce, religion, politics, and a multi-racial family.
One of the most interesting consequences of the Roseanne reboot, its subsequent cancellation, and its rebirth as The Conners is that television critics are talking about class on television. These discussions fall into two oddly contradictory threads. Some argue that television has never properly addressed class, arguing, as Pepi Lesteinya did in Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class, that television has either long ignored, mocked, or derided the working class in its portrayals. The other thread, which seems to belie the first, is that in the good old days television represented the working class with love, but that now those days are gone.
The truth is more complicated than either of these claims.
First, working-class people have always been featured on network television in greater numbers than we have been able to see as scholars, in part because there are simply too many hours to count, watch, and apprehend. From my own research, I can assert that 1950s television was weird, heterogeneous, ethnically and racially diverse, full of working-class characters and themes, and ideologically diverse as well. While this is not a view in the scholarly mainstream, I have allies for this argument in the scholars who contributed to The Other Fifties: Interrogating Mid Century Icons, and, especially, Horace Newcomb's chapter, "Meaningful Difference in 50s Television."
Despite the seeming scarcity of working-class themed television comedies, many such shows have been at the center of a canon of the most watched and re-watched series in television history. The 1950s offered The Honeymooners and The Life of Riley, game shows like Queen for a Day, and variety shows featuring diverse casts such as The Milton Berle Show and The Red Skelton Show. The 1960s and 70s brought dozens of television series about public sector workers (nurses, teachers, cops, and fire fighters) and classics like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, and Laverne and Shirley. Don't forget the longest running TV series in history, The Simpsons or more recent series such as Two Broke Girlsand Superstore. Across these eras, working-class characters, working-class writers, and actors from working-class backgrounds have always been a core staple of the small screen. A quick visual for this comes from Vulture's timeline of working class sitcoms on network television.
Despite all this attention to the working class, one thing is for sure: television is bad at class struggle. On rare occasions, such as with the 1990s drama WWII era Homefront (1991-1993), unions are portrayed with dignity and realism, but for the most part television either ignores or distorts class conflict. On the other hand, the most consistent theme of most working-class sitcoms, including The Conners, is that it is a struggle to be working class.
In an op-ed last week David Brooks mused about the decline in life expectancy for Americans, concluding that since the economy is currently going gangbusters, that the only thing that can explain the uptick in opioid deaths and suicides among working-class Americans is some strange brew of economics, philosophical rot, and moral decay. But Brooks is wrong. Whatever the GDP might indicate, the American economy has been in decline for working people for a long time—even more so since the financial collapse of 2008. There is no single state in the US in which a minimum wage job can afford a worker a two-bedroom apartment. Inequality is more pronounced than in any time in US history. African American poverty in the South is considered by the UN to be some of the worst anywhere in the world. And as Forbes magazine reported in August, the real economy isn't booming.
For now The Conners remain on the air, with their lives and their dignity intact, if only just barely. I hope that ABC and its viewers will keep the show on the air long enough for us to keep talking about class and culture—and about class struggle. The struggle is real.
Kathy M. Newman
-- via my feedly newsfeed
WASHINGTON, DC – At the G20 Summit in Argentina this weekend, US President Donald Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk, above all, about trade. If their discussions do not go well, Trump could follow through on his threat to increase tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods. But the stakes are even higher than that.
More broadly, Trump argues that the World Trade Organization has failed – for example, with regard to China – and that the United States should withdraw from the organization. Threatening to leave the WTO makes no sense even as a negotiating strategy, let alone as a policy, but it could still happen. The consequences for the US economy and for the world could be calamitous.
Ostensibly, Trump's current priority in discussions with the Chinese is stronger protection for US patents and copyrights. On the face of it, this makes some sense: it is estimated that various forms of "theft" of intellectual property cost the US economy at least $225 billion (1% of GDP). Protecting intellectual property has long been an important part of US trade policy, as reflected, for example, in the Uruguay Round of negotiations that concluded more than 20 years ago. And there have been conspicuous cases of industrial espionage that allegedly involve Chinese companies (or perhaps some branch of the Chinese government) stealing trade secrets from firms with operations in the US.
But some of the most prominent American concerns about China's intellectual-property regime today come from companies that want to invest in China, including the establishment of productive capacity there. China conditions these investments on technology transfer – a point highlighted by the US Trade Representative in a report released earlier this year, and now one of Trump's talking points.
China's insistence on technology transfer increases the short-term cost of doing business (for US and other foreign direct investors) and creates the threat of future competition from Chinese firms. Trump vows to "bring back" manufacturing jobs to the US. How does making it easier for American companies to manufacture and innovate in China contribute to fulfilling that promise?
Perhaps Trump's agenda is the more conventional aspiration to "open markets" for US exports, and it is entirely possible that the Chinese will offer to buy more of some category of goods after the G20 summit. Trump likes headlines and most likely he would prefer a favorable news cycle or two, given the recent gyrations in financial markets. But such deals are typically meaningless – the goods were going to be bought anyway in some fashion.
A more likely outcome, at the summit or soon after, will be another lurch in US policy against the existing WTO framework. The US is already blocking the appointment of judges to a key WTO appeals court. If this continues, the WTO adjudication process will effectively grind to a halt, perhaps as soon as next year. This would be a major loss: the WTO's dispute settlement process is essential to rules-based global trade. And, contrary to what Trump claims, the US wins far more often than it loses at the WTO. From 1995 to March 2017, the US prevailed in 91% of cases that it brought against other countries, according to data from the conservative Cato Institute.
But the US stands to lose a case brought against the Trump administration's recently imposed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, because they most likely violate WTO rules. So the White House now wants to undermine the WTO's legitimacy and rescind US commitments to a multilateral trading system more broadly.
Could the US actually pull out of the WTO? Chad Bown and Douglas Irwin of the Peterson Institute for International Economics have written a careful analysis of the possibilities (I am also affiliated with PIIE, but I was not involved with this work). In their view, the power to do so more likely lies with Congress. But Trump certainly could issue a declaration of withdrawal, and then litigate his authority to implement it. Which way would the Supreme Court decide? It is very hard to predict.
And while that litigation continues, there would be great uncertainty about tariffs and much else. Bown and Irwin point out that, given how the system works, tariffs that are currently below 5%, on average, could jump to nearly 30%. There would naturally be retaliation in the form of higher tariffs imposed by America's trading partners, which is exactly what happened after the steel and aluminum tariffs were imposed earlier this year.
There are definitely valid concerns about how China conducts trade, including what Pascal Lamy, a former WTO director-general, calls "opaque, trade-distorting subsidization of high-tech products." But, as Lamy says, a more effective way to deal with this would be to strengthen WTO rules. Plenty of other countries would like to join the US in such an effort. Unfortunately, as in so many areas, Trump prefers unproductive confrontation to cooperation.