[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

this wasn't the autobiography of malcolm x. of course it was a story about "the white man"-- that's who ran madison avenue (and still does).

one of the main points the show made (see the washington post's alyssa rosenberg's columns on it) was how in spite of all the upheavals etc only few people benefitted from social changes and how slowly things percolated through the world at large. shit that was rampant and damnable in the 60s *still happens today*.

to me, that's exactly why the show was compelling-- it wasn't really saying "look at them". it was saying "look at us". yesterday's tobacco is today's sugar. racism, sexism and consumerism live on. people are more than ever manipulated by advertising, which has become more pervasive, subtle, and omnipresent.

i get from your comment that the existence of "rich white people" fills you with hate and rage and it ultimately distorts your reading of the whole story. i would venture that you'd rather see them portrayed as one-note nazi supervillains rather than as complicated people with some good qualities and some terrible defects who operate embedded in a dysfunctional social system that no one person can control.

and that's exactly the problem with the superhero comic book morality you seem to enjoy instead-- it operates as a simplistic black-or-white system of individual choices to indoctrinate children. but while children need a clearly defined moral code, real life in the adult world is messy, difficult, ambiguous and rife with tradeoffs, where cultures and classes clash, and always with more questions than clear answers. this is exactly what good writing for adults illustrates, and what i'm referring to when i complain about a lack of adult subjects in fiction. to read about fictional complexity and social systems helps us to grapple with real complexity and social systems.

to read only simplicities... i think it makes us simple, and not in a good way. too much simplicity gives us puritans and torquemadas and all manner of absolutists, #MAGAs, science-as-religionists, creationists and bible literalists, and reduces all judgments to "this rules" and "this sucks". nature doesn't work that way. nature is an explosion of complexity-- and that goes for ecosystems and social systems and individual lives--and we have to learn to deal with it.

Great post!