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Mon, 15 Feb 2021 20:32:27

brightlotusmoon:
beelzebufo:
bogleech:
bogleech:
this is like just a fourth of a whole musical medley addressing that you can’t live like the simpsons anymore. harsh :(
For those wondering, the rest of the episode’s songs cover such topics as kids turning to social media as their income source, Fox News skewing the votes of senior citizens by just plain frightening them, that Bart’s generation has little option but to hope they can destroy and rebuild the system, and that if you do want a good middle class job, almost the only reliable one left is being a firefighter.
Moe also raps in case you needed to know this
We watched the episode and there’s this bit where when asked what to do about the shitty state of everything the janitor who leads the song pauses and says ‘burn it’.
That bit gave me chills. Because The Simpsons for the past 15 years or more has been a fairly good barometer of American popular opinion. Some folks are gonna be like ‘the Simpsons went radical!!!’, but, the Simpsons doing this shows that this is an opinion that is now -normal-. Two generations have been brutally disenfranchised and things are pushing towards a boiling point. I have 0 clue what that boiling point will look like but this is like steam raising from the pot.
Ah, you have articulated my own thoughts as a Gen X who has literally watched The Simpsons from the beginning. I still watch it, and I chuckle when someone claims nobody watches or likes the Simpsons anymore. It’s a Sunday night ritual. Remembering how anti-capitalist they were then, and seeing such a poetically logical end game now, gives me chills as well. I’ve been recommending “Poorhouse Rock” to everyone I know regardless of their views on the show.
I actually just watched the full episode and the Simpsons writers are bang on about the way it used to be in the 60s/70s/80s, and how starkly different today is. It is literally impossible to have the same life events happen. (see the song in the OP clip)
The only thing the episode got wrong was blaming this shift *solely* on the 60-80 year old voters hounded into terror by Fox Media. It’s the 50-70 year olds incharge of governance and policy that have caused the downfall of the such uniquely generous economic circumstances. And the people who vote them in or otherwise help put them in power are the 30-50 year olds who see the world that was promised them slipping away and instead lash out at whoever they think are upsetting the status quo.
The old scared voters do elect conservative leaders because Fox Media is very good at preying on emotions, but there is probably an even larger contingent of disgruntled, largely cishet white men who hate not being the center of the world anymore and are willing to violently capture this utopia they’ve been promised.