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Jeremy's avatar

My primary take away is that the innocence of the late 80's/early 90's really shows in those episodes. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and we Americans are encouraged to trust and have faith in the system.

Mr. Burns fools everyone for awhile, but in the end he's exposed for what he is. The people reject him, thus vindicating his opponent's high-minded resolution to rely on their intelligence and good judgment. Sideshow Bob is brought down by the simple hard work and virtue of two ordinary citizens.

Then there's the episode where Lisa writes an essay about America's greatness, only to fall into cynicism and bitterness when she witnesses a politician taking a bribe. But at the end of the episode, it is the very system itself that fixes things, the politician is arrested and served justice by dedicated civil servants who nobly defend what he is trying to corrupt. Lisa's cynicism is proven wrong, and her original idealism is proven correct.

The message in each episode is the same: sure, there may be parasites and leeches trying to feed on the system, but there are far more good people than bad people. The rotten apples are eventually dealt with, because the self-correcting, self-cleaning mechanisms inside the system still work. The system itself is imperfect, but it's also miraculous and wonderful, worthy of our love and respect and loyalty.

2024: Does anyone believe the self-correcting and self-cleaning mechanisms in the government still work? Anyone?

You couldn't make these episodes anymore. The portrayal of the system's fundamental goodness is too heartfelt, too genuine. No one would take them seriously in our current age.

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Matthew Carlin's avatar

"""Enough. The debate has already been discussed ad nauseum, and I’m not qualified to make any political predictions. It just drives me crazy that the coarse electioneering logic The Simpsons satirized in 1990, and which by all appearances was going to determine the rules of the game indefinitely, should have been turned on its head by someone so completely unfit for public office."""

Look, you don't live outside of history, and nothing stupid and absurd ever fails gracefully.

Burns wasn't going to fall to Mr Smith, or Cincinnatus, or Sorkin's wonks or anything so dignified as all that. He was going to fall to absurdity of the highest degree, and it's telling that the part that was still apt in real life, on Thursday night, is that he was unable to make a convincing show of swallowing the toxic fish.

Trump didn't succeed (then and now) *just* because he's a human youtube sidebar with an innate sense of the arresting and cartoonish stuff that holds human interest. He succeeded because the inauthentic managers got too old and tired to hold their own charade.

Sucks. Maybe now we go back to kings and queens, and in a few hundred years whenever someone suggests democracy, *they're* laughed at, "you mean that thing with the pathological liars and drooling old folks falling asleep?".

And if that happens, things will be more okay than people think. We'll feel the sting of losing political power, for a generation, but they'll look back on us and say we never really had it in the first place. We lost, we *are losing*, the somewhat pornographic fiction of having real political power to shape the human world around us. We haven't had that power for at least seventy or eighty years, maybe more.

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