When I was a kid, I watched a massive amount of television. I remember watching TV even when I didn't want to watch what was on. Sitcoms were bittersweet: I liked a couple of them, but it also meant that cartoons were over for the day. I watched Mr. Belvedere and Charles in Charge. I spent time with Family Matters and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I liked Full House (and totally crushed on Stephanie) and even tuned in to Home Improvement. Okay, so by saying "a couple of them", they obviously made a difference in my mind. Thinking back, the melange of TV shows I used to watch is essentially the feverdream fodder for "Too Many Cooks", isn't it?
Growing up with sitcom families, I did what (I think) most people do with shows and movies they love: They assume that there's a parallel between the lives on screen with reality. For example, I was always shocked and a little discomfited when one of the TV adults drank coffee. As a card-carrying Mormon family, we avoided coffee and hot teas (though herbal is kosher, apparently and thankfully). Not recognizing that my way of life was outside the norm, it always jolted me a little to see that discrepancy.
As I've aged and thought back to some of the values that I was exposed to on my childhood TV diet, I recognize that there were some really problematic texts that I was absorbing. And Home Improvement was certainly at the top of that list for problems. It had misogyny as its core feature, with a toxic masculinity that was only slightly subverted in the bumbling injuries of Tim Allen. But even these subversions were done at the expense of intelligence, portraying the idiocy of Tim Allen as endearing when it was instead normalizing an anti-intellectual approach. Wilson, the sagacious neighbor, pulled Tim out of every pickle he was ever in, using platitude and common sense that was so milquetoast that I was only inspired by it because I was ten. On reflection, Home Improvement's greatest problem, however, was the patriarchal reinforcement that filled almost every episode. The series itself was based upon Tim Allen's stand up comedy routines, and so I guess it isn't a surprise that Tim Allen himself supported and believed in all of the most damaging aspects of far-right conservatism that his show espoused.
Tim Allen's career has dwindled in the new millennium, but he's still a celebrity and so, therefore, his opinion matters (?). He recently was on Jimmy Kimmel and groused about being conservative in Hollywood. I agree with that point: I live in Utah and I'm left of center. That puts me in a pretty small circle, usually. But Allen continued to talk, which brought about my attention to him: "You get beat up if you don't believe what everybody else believes. This is like '30s Germany."
Here's the thing: America is in pretty bad shape. Despite some of my own optimism from a few months before (and I do think that we've been in worse shape, as a country, before now) being misguided, I stand by the fact that we are not Nazi Germany. Whatever we are now, we aren't that. The level of persecution, violence, and fear was intense, pervasive, and unremitting.
Additionally, Allen's parallel breaks down on almost every line save a martyr-complex: Nazism is a far-right ideology, built upon the concept of racial and genetic superiority, enforced through mechanized violence and warfare. The neo-liberalism of Hollywood is claiming a broad acceptance of others but rarely giving people of color or women a chance to tell their own stories. Is Allen's politics unpopular in his industry? Absolutely. Is it the same as Krystallnacht, or the policies that led to a targeted pogrom of killing 6 million Jews and millions of others? Not remotely.
Now, I'm picking on Allen because he's current, but the trend itself is an issue. The biggest deficit in our understanding--and this is broad, covers all of the political spectrum, and includes me in the analysis--is not that we don't know things, we don't know how to apply things. Knowing history has never been easier. The internet's ability to contain, with comparatively little effort, almost all that one needs to know* so quickly has been so frequently observed that it's now a borderline cliche. Yet it's still true: We can learn something almost as quickly as we can formulate the question.
But so what? We have data; we can gain knowledge; but do we have wisdom? I submit that the problem with Allen's comment isn't just the mild martyr complex he's espousing. It's an encapsulation of misapplying and, in many ways, misunderstanding history. Particularly when invoking crimes against humanity and some of the most demoniacal expressions of human hatred, it might be wise not to conflate Nazism** with "something that hurts my feelings and makes me feel sad at work".
Indeed, this is the entire moral of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which America got staggeringly, blindingly wrong most recently. When there are people who espouse alt-right and genuine tenets of Nazism within the government, then we need to start talking about how America is paralleling Nazi Germany. Indeed, that's the whole reason we learn about history. So we know how to use it when it genuinely matters.
---
* For instance, I couldn't remember how to spell Krystallnacht without a bit of help from Google.
** I mean, if Hollywood is as liberal left as I've been led to believe, invoking the specter of Stalin probably would've made his analogy slightly more historically accurate.
Growing up with sitcom families, I did what (I think) most people do with shows and movies they love: They assume that there's a parallel between the lives on screen with reality. For example, I was always shocked and a little discomfited when one of the TV adults drank coffee. As a card-carrying Mormon family, we avoided coffee and hot teas (though herbal is kosher, apparently and thankfully). Not recognizing that my way of life was outside the norm, it always jolted me a little to see that discrepancy.
As I've aged and thought back to some of the values that I was exposed to on my childhood TV diet, I recognize that there were some really problematic texts that I was absorbing. And Home Improvement was certainly at the top of that list for problems. It had misogyny as its core feature, with a toxic masculinity that was only slightly subverted in the bumbling injuries of Tim Allen. But even these subversions were done at the expense of intelligence, portraying the idiocy of Tim Allen as endearing when it was instead normalizing an anti-intellectual approach. Wilson, the sagacious neighbor, pulled Tim out of every pickle he was ever in, using platitude and common sense that was so milquetoast that I was only inspired by it because I was ten. On reflection, Home Improvement's greatest problem, however, was the patriarchal reinforcement that filled almost every episode. The series itself was based upon Tim Allen's stand up comedy routines, and so I guess it isn't a surprise that Tim Allen himself supported and believed in all of the most damaging aspects of far-right conservatism that his show espoused.
Tim Allen's career has dwindled in the new millennium, but he's still a celebrity and so, therefore, his opinion matters (?). He recently was on Jimmy Kimmel and groused about being conservative in Hollywood. I agree with that point: I live in Utah and I'm left of center. That puts me in a pretty small circle, usually. But Allen continued to talk, which brought about my attention to him: "You get beat up if you don't believe what everybody else believes. This is like '30s Germany."
Here's the thing: America is in pretty bad shape. Despite some of my own optimism from a few months before (and I do think that we've been in worse shape, as a country, before now) being misguided, I stand by the fact that we are not Nazi Germany. Whatever we are now, we aren't that. The level of persecution, violence, and fear was intense, pervasive, and unremitting.
Additionally, Allen's parallel breaks down on almost every line save a martyr-complex: Nazism is a far-right ideology, built upon the concept of racial and genetic superiority, enforced through mechanized violence and warfare. The neo-liberalism of Hollywood is claiming a broad acceptance of others but rarely giving people of color or women a chance to tell their own stories. Is Allen's politics unpopular in his industry? Absolutely. Is it the same as Krystallnacht, or the policies that led to a targeted pogrom of killing 6 million Jews and millions of others? Not remotely.
Now, I'm picking on Allen because he's current, but the trend itself is an issue. The biggest deficit in our understanding--and this is broad, covers all of the political spectrum, and includes me in the analysis--is not that we don't know things, we don't know how to apply things. Knowing history has never been easier. The internet's ability to contain, with comparatively little effort, almost all that one needs to know* so quickly has been so frequently observed that it's now a borderline cliche. Yet it's still true: We can learn something almost as quickly as we can formulate the question.
But so what? We have data; we can gain knowledge; but do we have wisdom? I submit that the problem with Allen's comment isn't just the mild martyr complex he's espousing. It's an encapsulation of misapplying and, in many ways, misunderstanding history. Particularly when invoking crimes against humanity and some of the most demoniacal expressions of human hatred, it might be wise not to conflate Nazism** with "something that hurts my feelings and makes me feel sad at work".
Indeed, this is the entire moral of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which America got staggeringly, blindingly wrong most recently. When there are people who espouse alt-right and genuine tenets of Nazism within the government, then we need to start talking about how America is paralleling Nazi Germany. Indeed, that's the whole reason we learn about history. So we know how to use it when it genuinely matters.
---
* For instance, I couldn't remember how to spell Krystallnacht without a bit of help from Google.
** I mean, if Hollywood is as liberal left as I've been led to believe, invoking the specter of Stalin probably would've made his analogy slightly more historically accurate.