Because bastardy is chock full of hilarious hijinks and blandly beautiful people.
I was a little disappointed to read that, All My Babies' Mamas, with that guy named Shifty Law or Shitty Low (or whatever the Hell his nom de hip-hop is) had been cancelled. While it's apparently okay to broadcast a show depicting his fundamentalist Mormon counterparts out in the hinterland (in not just one show, but two, with a bonus fictional depiction) Oxygen discovered to its surprise that their show was just too much of an on-the-nose portrayal of the stereotypical urban "playa" for our politically correct betters. You can make a crazy Christianist out in Utah look like an irresponsible cad for his serial sperm donations but you daren't do the same to a rapper, with his "game" turned up to eleven, in a sophisticated urban center like Atlanta.
You might be tempted to think that there are two sets of standards, based in no small way on race, at play here. (You might be tempted, but DON'T DO IT!)
I'd like to join Steven Crowder and encourage Shawty Lo to be a man and take responsibility for his actions, but why bother? As Crowder points out, "The problem is that this kind of behavior is becoming increasingly indicative of men in the 21st century." Being raised insufferably middle class in a previous era, I never imagined that I would know a man who would have three children by three different women while being less than a third of a father to each, but I do. I very quickly learned that offering up any level of criticism, constructive or otherwise, would not change this man's behavior and help him to become a responsible father. I would be surprised if anything at all would cause him to change his behavior, and why should he? He gets the emotional fulfillment he wants from having children and pseudo-"wives"/girlfriends/whatever with the all-important bonus of not being obligated, by law or social convention, to stick around whenever things get just a little too heavy for him.
As time passes I find his situation to be less and less abnormal. While the never-fully-formed family seems to have become de rigueur, no matter how many times the Left tries to soften reality with Orwellian terms like "alternative family", it doesn't change the fact that the fatherless home is associated with serious problems for children (including the increased chance of becoming a fatty — which I'm sure sends Daniel Callahan into a fit of statist rage). But don't expect them to do much about it beyond creating more federal programs which enable fatherlessness, because they have bigger fish to fry.
When the new hotness in feminism is embodied by Sandra Fluke and Lena Dunham, a pro-abortion position is treated as the sine qua non for women voters, and Roe v. Wade is an object of light amusement, it's clear that solving the problem of fatherlessness is far down on the list of priorities. Feminists, you can spare us your outrage, disgust, and tut-tut-tutting over Shawty Lo's outrageously irresponsible behavior because we don't believe you. We don't believe you because we know that if anyone is responsible for creating the environment which fostered the baby daddy phenomenon, it's you. Demanding that men honor the sanctity of your Precious Flower while simultaneously demanding that we respect your right to give it away whenever the mood strikes you made men like Shawty Lo who they are today — swooping in for the sexual gratification and then bugging out as quickly as possible.
My disappointment over the cancellation of, All My Babies' Mamas, is that America will not see the fruits of the decades of work wrought by feminism and "social justice" played out in an entertaining format which viewers enjoy. It would be Must See TV for those who think that Obama's inaction on entitlement reform and demands that the government subsidize individuals' sex lives is just fine.
[UPDATE]
Read this from Sarah Hoyt. DO IT NOW! DO IT!
I want a world where you can be what you want to be, regardless of what’s between your legs and some desiccated woman’s revenge-agenda.
King Shamus on January 27, 2013 at 9:05 am said:
Thanks for linking my piece, homie. I appreciate it.
This brings up something I've been thinking for a while. Jonah Goldberg wrote a column a while back that argued for Obama discussing the importance of fatherhood in the black community. I wrote a response to his essay, saying that the president will never do that because it is in his and his party's interest in keeping black women dependent on government.
There are far too many people in this country who need people in a state of semi-permanent multi-generational social dysfunction in order to advance their political agendas. Big swaths of the Democrat Party understand that people like Shawty Low and his progeny make up a big chunk of their voter base. That's why it's very fucking stupid for anybody to the left of George Will to expect liberals to do anything meaningful to address the problem of fatherlessness. Modern progressivism loves it when American citizens are hopelessly dependent.
Starless on January 27, 2013 at 10:19 am said:
Modern progressivism loves it when American citizens are hopelessly dependent.
And they love to get outrageously outraged when Rush Limbaugh calls Sandra Fluke a slut or when so-cons accuse them of trying to destroy marriage and the family. As with, All My Babies' Mamas, the outrage doesn't come from a concern for the individuals in question, it comes from having their agenda exposed to sunlight. They want sluts and the destruction of marriage and the family because both things give them more power. It's possible for women to have "choice" and for "alternative families" to be socially acceptable without partisan rancor, but that's the last thing Progressives want.
Starless on January 27, 2013 at 11:06 am said:
And lemme just say sumthin' here: DrewM has been making a very convincing case that the country has proven itself to be more Liberal than conservative by voting for big government, and while he's technically correct I think he's missing something more basic. My own amateur opinion is based on a fundamental which I first learned from Heinlein: it's easier to give something to someone than it is to take something away, and what the Democrats have consistently succeeded at doing over the last two presidential election cycles is convincing voters that the GOP will take more away from them than the Democrats will — abortion, medical coverage, mortgage forgiveness, entitlements, and so on. It's really been a perversion of the notion of liberty, not a question of partisanship.
What I think is going to happen now is a race to see whether voters will figure out just how much they're being hoodwinked by Chicago Machine tactics before the 2016 election — will the Democrats keep making unforced errors and pretending that it's no big deal (payroll tax, "What difference, at this point, does it make?", Algeria, etc) and will the GOP help voters understand that they're being conned or it will continue on, business as usual, making themselves look like asses?
Mike G. on January 27, 2013 at 2:58 pm said:
It's all in the marketing. The Dems have it and the GOP doesn't.
Starless on January 27, 2013 at 3:31 pm said:
As in "framing the narrative"? I dunno. I think there's more to it than that.
Mike G. on January 28, 2013 at 7:01 pm said:
The Dems are better "story tellers" than we are. We (Conservatives) promote a logic based political philosophy while the Dems operate on an emotional level. We're not seen as empathetic to the problems of the less fortunate even though the policies we promote would do more to help the poor than the failed policies of the last several decades promoted by the Dems.
Starless on January 28, 2013 at 10:33 pm said:
Yeah, exactly.
I've taken the last two presidential elections and the establishment GOP's sneering response to the TEA Party to mean that they really do believe that rational argumentation will win out over emotionalism and histrionics.
They are wrong, of course.