I’ve been thinking about this and how the Simpsons called it and I think maybe they just read the room way better than anyone else.
1. trump being (the former) president sounds and is and was just absolutely ridiculous, but even back then people knew he was a con man with exactly as much unearned and often pretend wealth as it would take to successfully buy the presidency, the conman’s instinct for finding out what people wanna hear and saying it over and over and the ego to be magnetic to those who are, frankly, pathetic. The Simpsons was a show that started out being reviled by a lot of Middle America. The creators were always aware just how backwards America could be, how much conservative backlash we were capable of. And trump banked on that. And he was the kind of guy that the people who were in a position to stop him would dismiss with a, “pfft, he’s a sideshow, he’ll never make it, it’s absurd”. Right up until he’s dismantling democracy from the Oval. The Simpsons was known for imagining ridiculous but not 100% impossible scenarios and just flying with it. They were the walking definition of “your chances of being killed by a cat are extremely, extremely low, but never zero.”. The chances of trump being POTUS were extremely, extremely low but sadly not zero.
2. Any female head-of-state would have to have a certain look, because misogyny. They’d have to ride the line between not too masculine (so no strong blues or reds, no neutrals) and not too feminine (no pink, yellow or pastels), not too adorned and not too plain, not so rich looking it puts the middle class off (no diamonds or big stones) but appropriately coiffed enough to make her success evidence (so some jewelry must be worn). A cool purple is a good color because it can feminine-to-neutral (a male executive could wear this as a tie color and no one would think twice) while still lending itself to an outfit that’s the spiritual heir to Hilary’s power pants suit. Pearls, as well, ride that line. They’re classy, but not flashy, they’re classic but never outdated. Reasonably good looking fakes can be obtained by the lower classes yet the upper classes continue to wear them so their status as a class marker remains.
If I were thinking carefully about how a smart, determined woman like a grown President Lisa Simpson would present herself, I’d pick just about this outfit.
So, I think that’s how we got to this place. Perceptive writers in the past, keen design sense, America being exactly as fucked up as they imagined and yet containing enough people determined to keep marching forward so that a woman could be President or Vice President.
I totally agree with your analysis but also please consider the much funnier alternative:
Kamala Harris saw this episode and did it on purpose.
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
“Your regulations are written in blood.”
These regulations were not written on a whim.
They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Anyone who supports deregulation needs to read The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum (or watch the documentary). If only to learn about “embalmed milk,” a.k.a. milk preserved with formaldehyde, which killed thousands of children.
Regulations protect you from people who don’t care if you die as long as their profit margin is higher. Never forget that.
