Shadow Valleys

I read Roseanne's Twitter tweets in The Washington Post, and I confess, my first thought, as with reading many tweets of famous people, was, this looks like mental illness to me.  This person has lost all grip on anything that ever seemed like reality and is now deep in some other land.

I often have that thought, as I said.  There are many reasons I don't tweet, mainly related to brevity.  But the last 10 years have given us cautionary tale after cautionary tale of people undone by their Twitter feeds.  I am overly cautious when it comes to bringing new media into my life.

I confess to surprise when ABC cancelled the new Roseanne show so quickly yesterday, but I didn't realize that an African American woman now heads the network.  I would have still been surprised.  The reboot of this show has been one of the more successful shows that ABC has launched recently.  It takes guts to kill that kind of cash cow.

I feel bad not just for the actors, but for all the people who rely on this show for their paychecks.  I also feel bad for the larger network.  I know that blockbuster shows are necessary to keep the smaller shows going.  Part of me says, "Well, you (ABC and all of us really) took on this woman with a troubling past.  Even before she started tweeting, decades ago, she was far from grounded and stable."

But then I felt sadness, because the show, while it troubled me, had such potential.  I've always liked the characters, even when they're problematic, and this reboot was no different.  I would love to see the show come back without Roseanne, but I realize it may not be possible.  Still, a show that explores the death of the matriarch could be interesting.  Or the mental breakdown.  There are many narrative arcs that such a show could take.

I feel like I should say more about the racist nature of her rants, and on the day that Starbucks was doing mandatory training to help people uncover their unconscious biases.  But others have done that better than I could hope to do.  I was one of those people who had hoped that with the election of Obama, the worst of our nation's racist past was behind us and that we were well on our way to a glorious post-racial future.  The past several years have made it impossible for me to believe that anymore.

But I do know that progress rarely comes in a straight line.  We make progress, we go backwards, we resist the pull of our worst natures, we zag forward again.  And with luck, we can avoid being sucked into a horrible void, like the 1930's/WWII--although I could make the argument that the sojourn in the valley of the shadow propelled us into a more egalitarian state than we might have achieved otherwise.

I hope the valley that we find ourselves in now doesn't have much more shadow to show us.  I am not liking these shadow selves that I am seeing.  I want to believe that we are better than this kind of behavior that so many engage in these days.  I want to believe that we can keep resisting and avoid falling off this cliff that looms before us.