#current affairs writer

[ilikefelines]

Downton Abbey and the Myth of the Good Aristocrat

The popular PBS drama is a gross woke-washing of a heinous class hierarchy.

Most painful, though, for any left-wing viewer is the character of Tom, a socialist Irish nationalist. Hired to serve as the Crawleys’ chauffeur, he develops a love affair with Sybil, the least unlikeable of the daughters. He refuses to fight in the folly of the Great War, a quite accurate portrayal of socialists at the time. “I may be a socialist, but I’m not a lunatic,” he says, ha ha. But Tom is soon portrayed as an abettor of revolutionary violence in Ireland, where he is involved in the burning of the grand country houses of the English-installed Irish noble families. There is zero mention of the evil settler role of those families and their history of abetting the outrageous acts by Britain against the people of Ireland, including ethnic cleansing of the native Gaelic Irish and rule of the island from London, which Tom is given a little screentime in one scene to decry. He says he found himself disgusted, though, at the sight of the Anglo-Irish families being thrown out of their mansions before the estates were burned. And later, he is painted as a coward for apparently leaving Lady Sybil to make it back to the U.K. from Ireland on her own. He is stricken by these experiences, and over time explicitly steps away from his youthful socialism, and is called by Lord Grantham “our tame revolutionary.” By mid-series, Tom is completely transformed into a capitalist, although he remains uncomfortable in the Crawleys’ refined circles. He lives for a time in Boston and falls in love with American capitalism, saying a working man can go “right to the top!” He works in a family member’s garage repairing cars, and this being the “top” is apparently not intended ironically. The character becomes a classic U.S. petty-bourgeois, thinking himself a king while running a penny-ante firm that will be swept away in the coming Depression. His character arc is quite cruel for the leftist viewer, and extends clear to the final film where he is made to decry socialism a final time (quote absent, as I was drinking in the theater). Series creator Fellowes, the Tory Peer in the House of Lords, does a far better job of belittling socialists than the usual reactionary slop that paints every social democrat as an embryonic Josef Stalin. This is done by making the character at first a sympathetic supporter of Irish freedom, with family members killed by the British occupying army, but who by the end of the series literally saves the life of the King of England. Pretty rich.

[ilikefelines]

https://yasminnair.com/the-plagiarism-papers/

I read all of Yasmin Nair's essays about plagiarism in publishing/academia a while ago. What really stood out to me was Nair's discussion of how classist writing as a profession has become.

She goes into some detail in her essay, 'The Corruption of Influence: On Dimes Square, Byline, and the New York Times'. Byline, a supposedly indie publication, doesn't pay its writers. What's striking is when one of the co-founder's of Byline, Megan O'Sullivan, was called out about this online, her response was:

Nair rightly points out that:

O’Sullivan has so completely naturalised the idea that only writing for free can get you gigs in publications that she presents the trajectory of her writing career as completely normal: “Without it, I don’t know that I would have gotten a start.”  Which reads as, “I faced exploitative conditions myself therefore I feel justified in exploiting others.”  And, for people like her and too many others, this is in fact true but it hasn’t always been the case and, much more importantly, it should not be.

Honestly, Byline is such a good case study for the publishing/journalism industry as a whole. Only upper-middle class (usually) white people can afford to become professional writers these days because there's an expectation in the industry that you work for free (this is also applicable to the UK). Working class writers can't afford to rely on parents whilst doing various unpaid internships, but for upper middle class ones, it's a different story. Until people within the industry accept that writers need to be paid properly - since upper class editors of publications all have the same class based expectations for their subordinates, formed from their own privileged entry into journalism further proliferating the issue - the media will continue to be out of touch due to upper middle class domination.

(Upper middle class overrepresentation, by the why, is probably half the reason why the New York Times Is Like That.)

TLDR - journalism and publishing is dominated by middle-class white people, which leads to myopic writing that can't empathise with the concerns of ordinary working people.

Full credit for the quotes and screenshot go to Yasmin Nair, of course. Read her essays, they're a thorough examination of how plagiarism plagues both publishing and academia. She's got more coming (including one called 'On Claudine Gay and Racism in Academia').

Thanks goes to Current Affairs (socialist magazine run by Nathan J. Robinson, you should read it!) for making me aware of Nair's essays by linking them in one of Nathan's articles (I've forgotten which).