13 Oct 2014 4:40 am
Of course, we have not simply seen an unbroken, level descent of The Conservative in popular entertainment. Burns himself was replaced with a Bostonian named Winchester, who seemed to hearken from a past era. He was silly, of course, but he was presented with comparative sympathy.Cannonpointer » 13 Oct 2014 4:35 am » wrote:
Yes, our rejection of conservatism was cheered by the television - by the programming and especially by the commercials.I remember looking at M.A.S.H. as rather offensively ham-handed propaganda. Hawk Eye and BJ always got the clever lines and the moral lines - whereas Frank Burn and Hotlips Houlihan never had a sympathetic scene. Burns was a weak, sniveling, hypccritical fraud with an enormous sense of entitlement. As I gained experience of the world, I was astounded to find that the producers of M.A.S.H. were not so much striving to be propagandists as they were emulating documentarians, The Frank Burns character, which I had naively seen as a bad compendium of worse ideas was, in fact, a brilliant and extremely accurate character study of the average neoconservative.