Like most things on Slate—
I’m not sure I buy this. But it’s still interesting:
More often, though, as in the Rosemary episode, we seem meant to accept Liz’s Jack-ward drift, if not cheer it on outright, as part of her maturation. Jack is a target of the show’s ridicule, but even as his worldview is satirized, it’s often presented as inevitable. Yes, he’s an unfeeling, creatively inept conservative, but he’s also peerless when it comes to real-world maneuvering. When Liz gets in over her head at work, in life, and in love, Jack is both her foil and her life coach, on hand to swoop in and save the day.
I think it says less about 30 Rock itself than the weird inclination towards “balance” in a lot of television comedies. A show like The Simpsons, which clearly leans left, carefully makes sure to lampoon left-wing ideals; a show like Family Guy, which leans right (I think), seems to try to be even-handed in its dismantling of sacred cows. A lot of this is market-driven — you don’t want to alienate people with your politics, and dogmatic politics can sometimes be murderously unfunny.
But there’s also critical premium placed on politically cautious fiction, particularly fiction with left-wing sympathies that ultimately depicts those sympathies as useless or pointless. Small-c conservatism is the order of the day for most reviewers. Think about how much earnest praise Orwell has received for all of the “English values” bullshit he spewed during the Second World War, a bunch of crap about meat pies and shopkeepers that totally glossed over all of the ways in which he had previously shown how meat pies and shopkeepers are basically empty images that obscure real cruelty and oppression. Critics applaud people who entertain radical ideas, but end up concluding that whatever political/economic system we live in now is the best of all possible systems, because we live in it, and believing anything else is either naive (starry-eyed socialism), cruel (cold-hearted rightism), or violent (Communism, anarchism, fascism, whatever). Maybe it’s a natural inclination of people attached to institutions like the press, which is keyed to a certain class and needs continuity and middlebrow stability to survive. Or maybe conservative values really do make the best literature (broadly interpreted), because maybe literature really is just mimetic and can’t sustain any sort of critical motion without becoming turgid and didactic or just plain boring.
I guess I need some examples and some clearer thinking.
