Family Guy and Cawthorn: premonition and trajectories

[Dr. Yakub]

Everybody in this thread is misunderstanding Family Guy in one way or another. Let me briefly outline why:

First, as to the claim of M. PSOL upthread that early-season Family Guy represents the views of the working class: no, except insofar as the working class is ideologically captured by Bourdieuvian high-economic capital low-social capital petit bourgeoisie of the type whose lives the show chronicles (a doubtful proposition even in the parts of the country where it is the most true, and absolutely not correct in Rhode Island). The main four friends of Family Guy are proletarian only insofar as the labor aristocracy in an affluent American suburb is: that is to say, not at all, except in the warped minds of the cracker punditocracy that passes itself for an intellectual class in this country. Quagmire is an airline man who can afford a massive house full of expensive industrial gizmos to facilitate his sexual escapades. Joe is a cop. Cleveland is a small business owner. Peter has the greatest claim to proletarian status, but is clearly under the employ of a boss who favors him above other workers, and has the sort of proximity to great wealth that precludes his ever experiencing the real precarity of working-class life in the United States (which does exist, just mostly outside the view of the burghers of places like Quahog. Consuela, a racist caricature born of what the Harvardmen who produced Family Guy imagine is the white working class mindset, is the most representative). This group is important in American elections, but ultimately not in the class struggles that I am sure we agree will decide a greater part of the future of this world. You are in no way "abandoning your caste" by consuming media made by others who incorrectly believe themselves to be abandoning *their* caste. Like others who imagine themselves to do so, Seth MacFarlane's politics are ultimately based on affect: after supporting Sanders in 2016 when it was the aesthetic preference of his type to do so, he was one of Pete Buttigieg's greatest donors in 2020. What his project really is is to incorporate the only group he imagines to be part of the working class (well-paid, mostly white suburbanites with varying relationships to the production process) into his own ultimately conservative-minded ideological bloc, much as he attempts to reincorporate musical theater into hegemonic white heterosexual masculinity. Despite all that, he remains a fundamentally honest artist: he allows a shade of his central impotent embourgeoisé self-loathing (a sentiment common to such artists for at least a century), which is "liberated" into the jouissance of violent action by the far right. It is here, and only here, that my Illinoisan friend has the kernel of a point.

So much for the OP. I now turn to those schoolyard moralists who disparage the intellectual and aesthetic worth of the show. Media are not inherently hierarchically arranged. They are tools, and a skillful wielder of any tool suited to their work can wring more or less anything out of a human soul, or put more or less anything into a human mind. M. PSOL's confusion on the subject of class relations is evidence that Family Guy has done at least one part of its, and done it well. Only, to repurpose the taunts of the philistines, an idiot would refuse on grounds of a definition of "taste" worked out for them by high-school curricula and pseudo-intellectual socialization to study at the feet of any master of a medium as objectively important to ideological and social reproduction as television when offered the chance.

I will include a more protracted reply regarding the remainder of this thread's errors when the fancy and the free time strike me.