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If Roseanne Barr is a poster child for anything, she’s a poster child for cultural brokenness. Consider, for a moment, the cascade of failures that brought us to today — a day when one of the most popular shows on television is canceled after its toxic star tweeted a racist insult of Valerie Jarrett.First, ABC shouldn’t have brought her back. She was, quite obviously, one of the more toxic and troubled personalities in American public life. This was a woman who, after all, trafficked in grotesque conspiracy theories, said that anyone who eats at Chick-fil-A “deserves to get the cancer that’s sure to come,†and defiled the National Anthem more thoroughly than a thousand kneeling football players . . . . . . But there was money to be made, so Roseanne limped from the locker room like a bizarro-world Willis Reed . . . To argue that companies should err on the side of free speech — as I do all the time — is not to argue that companies can’t have any standards at all. I’m not troubled by Roseanne’s termination. In a previous post, I endorsed a simple view of private employment: Do good work and be a decent person. It’s a viewpoint-neutral standard that applies directly to the situation at hand. Instead, the standards seem almost infinitely malleable, with even the necessity of quality work contingent on proper politics.Sometimes, a story fits no one’s political narrative cleanly. Sometimes, the story is the confusion and brokenness of our times. That’s the story of Roseanne, the populist, socialist, Green party, Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist who has now wasted what should be her last shot at relevance.
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Topic: Roseanne and the High Cost of Embracing Craziness (Read 259 times)
