Roseanne's Downfall is Nothing Short of Tragic

It can be easy to overlook what a massive cultural figure Roseanne was at the height of her career. Roseanne was once the volcanic cultural force behind one of the most important, popular and groundbreaking television shows of all time.

It’s similarly easy to forget what a potent and positive force Roseanne was during the heyday of her eponymous sitcom. When Roseanne debuted she didn’t look or talk or act like any of the other mothers on television. 

She was overweight and unapologetic in a culture that despises women who do not meet our culture’s impossible beauty standards, particularly if they exacerbate that unforgivable transgression by being loud and confident and not mired in shame and self-hatred. 

Roseanne was everything a sitcom star wasn’t supposed to be: big, loud, vulgar and unapologetically working-class. Yet the public adored Roseanne and its star because of what they perceived as her rough, raw, rugged authenticity, the sense that she said whatever the hell she wanted to say and got away with it because she was that popular and that good. She consequently cannot get away with saying anything she wants anymore because she is no longer popular or good, except for people who subscribe to both Twitter and  Fox Nation, which hosted her most recent special, entitled, you guessed it, Cancel This! She probably would have chosen Triggered but that title has already been taken by thirty five other specials from right-wing comedians.

Roseanne was unsurprisingly a controversy magnet pretty much from the moment she exploded onto the national scene.

She was rumored to be a tyrant on the show that made her rich and famous. She was infamous for firing people for the smallest transgressions and demanding control. 

In a world that demands that women who look like Roseanne should be chaste and asexual the superstar comic wanted the world to know that she was banging dudes, and also the dudes she was banging, most notably an affable Midwesterner named Tom Arnold who was perceived at the time as a gold-digging opportunist but who has gone on to establish himself as a good person, genuine talent and someone with strong progressive politics. 

Tom Arnold basically turned out to be what we expected and wanted Roseanne to be. Roseanne, unfortunately, turned out to be something no one other than Tucker fucking Carlson wants her to be: a conspiracy-obsessed right wing extremist with an unfortunate genius for saying and tweeting the worst possible sentiments. 

After decades in the pop culture wilderness, Roseanne was given the opportunity of a lifetime when ABC ordered a reboot of her old show. The rebirth of Roseanne afforded her an opportunity to be back at the top of the A-list, making tens of millions of dollars by bringing back one of the biggest sitcoms in the history of television. 

All Roseanne had to do was not do, say or tweet anything egregiously racist or psychotic. That, alas, proved impossible. 

When Roseanne published a tweet comparing an African-American Obama advisor to a character from The Planet of the Apes Roseanne was fired from a show with her name on it and her career cratered. 

Roseanne has depressingly if predictably recreated herself as an Alt-Right, anti-Woke, Clinton-hating, conspiracy theory-touting Culture Warrior.

I don’t know if the Roseanne of 1989 would recognize or approve of the woman she would eventually become. She went from being a progressive hero to someone possibly too unhinged and hateful for a Republican Party whose whole deal is being unhinged and hateful. It’s like when the GOP was very excited about Kanye hitting the right-wing press circuit to promote his latest hateful beliefs until he started talking about how much he loved Hitler. They seemed a little excited about him being a Republican after that.

Roseanne claimed not to know that the woman she was tweeting about was a person of color. She also blamed Ambien for the tweet though lots of people take the popular sleep aid. I’m pretty sure that racism is not one of Ambien’s major side effects. 

Roseanne recently went viral for another statement her people are now claiming was purposefully misunderstood by a media intent on vilifying her. 

In the clip Roseanne says that nobody died in the Holocaust but that there should be a holocaust now because Jews are responsible for all of the world’s problems. 

It’s a statement so extreme and unsupportable that it’s almost impossible to take seriously, particularly considering that Roseanne herself is Jewish and her belief that the Democratic Party hates Israel is partially the catalyst for her extreme right-wing shift.

Here’s the thing: those words and that appearance do not read as sarcasm. Sarcasm has a very specific, ironic, biting tone. That’s not Roseanne here.  She’s saying hateful things in a zombie-like monotone, a vacant expression in her eyes.

You know you have failed at both sarcasm and life when the public overwhelmingly assumes that your comments about how the Holocaust didn’t happen but should happen because Jews are responsible for all the problems in the world are sincere because you seem that violently divorced from reality. 

It’s sort of like how when Donald Trump got called out for saying something egregiously, unforgivably awful his go-to line was to say he was just kidding but the press does not understand his sophisticated sense of humor.

Roseanne’s life used to be a feminist, working-class triumph. Now it’s an Alt-Right tragedy.  

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