Another T.V. Show
Yesterday Bewitched, today Upstairs, Downstairs the second, from 2010. Where will it all end? Donna Reed Meets WandaVision mashup? (Oh wait…)
Game of Thrones critique? Topanga from Boy Meets World married comedian who finds shrimp tails in his breakfast cereal? (no, that’s real too.)
The thing is — and as I said yesterday — the media we consume shapes us both consciously and unconsciously. So watching Bewitched, the average little girl learns that women are best at homemaking and baby-caring while men are best at going out into the big bustle-y world to earn a living — well, white men, and white women, anyway. Games of Thrones teaches that sometimes good people die, and I’m not talking about Daenerys, I’m talking about Ned. Donna Reed, under its warm fatherly wisdom, teaches that if a woman can’t do her housework in pretty dresses, high heels, and pearls, then she’s kind of a failure.
Which is all both setup, and distraction, from tonight’s episode of 2010’s Upstairs, Downstairs. This second installment of the 1970’s doyenne of British dramatic television had only 9 episodes across 2 seasons from 2010 through 2012, and covers the years 1936 through 1939 — tumultuous years in the world to be sure, as England and Europe again totter on the brink of war.
The episode I watched tonight — the second of Series 2 — “The Love That Pays The Price” is set amidst a downstairs squabble between Mrs. Thackeray and Mr. Pritchard, and the upstairs news that Lady Agnes has been told she can have no more children. The set piece of this episode, however, is the scene where 100 Jewish children, saved from Germany by a generous donation from an American millionaire who finds Lady Agnes a little too attractive, arrive in London by train and are taken by assorted foster families until such time as things calm down in their homeland and they can hopefully go home again. The last three children of the one hundred are taken by Mr. Amanjit and Miss Blanche to the school where Mr. Holland’s ward Lotte is staying. Mute at the end of Series 1 over the sudden death of her mother, at the end of this episode Lotte welcomes the three girls in perfect English and while that’s very touching, it’s the children disembarking from the train that made me think:
There is a difference between refugees and immigrants, did you know?
It is not against the law to request asylum as a refugee, did you know?
And all of the people who used to work at our southern border processing the paperwork for legal refugees have been let go/fired/laid off during the previous administration, did you know?
While all of these legal refugees along with some illegal immigrants wait in limbo, Mr. Biden has not been able to replace those office workers quickly enough to avoid a bottleneck which his RINO adversaries are making such a great deal of hay out of. “The Crisis At The Border”, they trumpet, as if they themselves didn’t have a hand in creating the very situation they’re now turning to their account. We need Miss Blanche’s organizational skills to create some kind of order out of all that chaos. And I find myself both wishing I could help with that, and trying to figure out, yet again, why we never seem to learn from our past but must instead keep inefficiently re-inventing the wheel every generation when the poison boils to the surface yet again:
The Kaiser. Hitler. Ferdinand Marcos. Stalin. Mussolini. Castro. Hussein. Franco. And I’m going to add Senator McCarthy to this list because while he was never exactly a dictator per se, he sure tried to make the world over in his image for the years he was in power. Also the former resident of the White House, for the part he and his played in creating that chaos in the first place.
Children should not suffer because of adult small-mindedness and ignorance.
