Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Roseanne Revival Is Actually Anti-Trump
Despite the press constantly displaying Roseanne Barr’s politics, coining the recent revival a pro-Trump show, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says the opposite.
“It’s easy to miss the show’s uncompromising criticism of Trump because the star, Roseanne Barr, just completed an intensive talk-show publicity tour during which she adamantly proclaimed her support for Trump and touted that her show would articulate the feelings and frustrations of Trump loyalists,” he wrote in an op-ed with The Hollywood Reporter. “To some extent, it fulfills that promise through Barr’s character, Roseanne Conner, the loud but lovable matriarch of a blue-collar family whose modest American dreams have crashed and burned before ever leaving the runway. They are the walking wounded, causalities of America’s longest and most devastating combat: class war. They’re damaged but defiant, their tattered lives McGuyvered together with duct tape, job sweat, and grocery coupons. It’s a shag-carpeting dystopia. What makes them so compelling is that they face their disappointments with the kind of heroic grit they used to write folk songs about. Now it’s sitcoms.”
He continues: “But when it comes to politics, Roseanne Conner is more Archie Bunker than a right-wing Maude. In All in the Family, we were never meant to take Archie’s conservative rantings seriously, any more than his son-in-law’s liberal pre-fab slogans. Likewise, Roseanne Conner’s red-state politics are presented with the same cringe-worthy pomposity as her sister Jackie’s (Laurie Metcalf) kneejerk liberalism. Like Stephen Colbert’s empty-headed host character on The Colbert Report, both Roseanne and Jackie spout vague platitudes that are meant for comic conflict, not for formulating political opinions.”
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter.