When I was about 14, I got obsessed with books of various descriptions and started ordering volumes practically at random from overstock houses like Publisher’s Central Bureau and others. One of the mail-order books I pored over was an oversized tome titled Prop Art, which I still have in the bookcase in my office. It’s an illustrated history of propaganda posters from the late nineteenth Century up until the 1970s, and some of the most memorable illustrations were those of pseudo-scientific racist posters and handbills from one of the neo-NAZI stormtrooper organizations in the 1960s. One sickening example presented a comparison between a black person and a gorilla, arguing feature-by-caricatured-feature that the two were very similar and that the “Races are definitely NOT equal”.

I thought of that poster this week when the Rosanne Barr story broke. I will admit that I was never among her fans, but I like to think that fandom would not have kept me from despising her when she started hurling racist epithets. The fact is, that did not start this past week. Since her hey-day in the 1980s-90s, apparently Barr has been careening to the right, adopting and promoting bizarre-ass conspiracy theories, endorsing an increasingly more militarist and oppressive Israeli government, race baiting black women and Muslims, and so on. Clearly, ABC – which has garnered a lot of pundit credit for having fired Barr so quickly – never should have hired her in the first place. But then again, they are in business to make money, right?

We may as well face it – when it comes to the major media content corporations, the bottom line is the bottom line. ABC had a big hit on their hands with Barr, until she, quite predictably, shit all over it by letting her bigoted freak flag fly. They probably made some of the money they were planning on making. NBC did the same thing with Donald Trump. As Lawrence O’Donnell has pointed out, NBC made Trump’s bones as a reality television star, kept him on the air through his racist “birther” campaign against Obama, and ran his election rallies from end-to-end during the campaign. That, more than anything, made that bigot president. But it also made NBC money. And as that CBS chief executive said after the election, it may be bad for the country but it’s good for the corporation.

So I guess some congratulations should go to our corporate media for propelling the descent of man that is the Trump era. Nice work, folks.

luv u,

jp