Springfield WASPs vs Quahog Ellis Islanders

Where I win a bet with Walt Bismark that I can say in twenty pages what he says in 5 sentences.

Noted right-wing culture wizard¹ Walt Bismarck said a funny thing the other day.

And then he expanded on this concept.

I don’t know a better way to put its effect on me than this.

Yeah. Walt’s words were so accurate they penetrated the brain of a man who would speak to you in a Joey meme. Wizard.

As amused agreement slowly became ascension to a higher plane of cultural understanding, I burped out what’s basically the Cliff Note for this entire post.

I wanted to say even more. So, this is where I’m saying it.

I. Springfield’s WASP coding

A W.A.S.P is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a phrase popularized in the 60’s to help progressive academia center on who the enemy was. In this instance you can expand that a bit to the protestant whites that showed up in the United States before, during, and just after the early establishment of the U.S.A. If you want a big historical marker, you could say those protestants that showed up before the Civil War although it’s really not tidy like that.

What helps pin the identity down for this discussion is that the various Dutch and English protestants that made up so much of the early US aren’t best seen as belabored religious minorities like cartoons about the Mayflower like to portray them.

If there’s anything colonialism was about, it was hugs!

Rather, they were whites so into power and money that they would rather cross an ocean and take their chances in the Pilgrim killin’ wilderness than take a backseat in Euro-religious politics. A backseat mind you, that would be to other whites that were almost exactly like them except that the ones who stayed in Europe were possibly less jingoisticly dickish and greedy somehow. And the other whites were happy to see the buckle-hatted backside of the colonials as they left.

Fuck the haters, tho’; these early off-gridders did pretty much establish the entire U.S. in the face of crazy opposition.

And it was in this U.S. which serialized cartoonist Matt Groening would pitch an idea for a cartoon short to the Tracy Ulman show. (I’ve spoken briefly about the origins of The Simpsons before.) Groening was going to pitch his Life in Hell cartoon strip but he quickly swapped that out for a pitch about a dysfunctional family starring a mashed up cartoon version of himself and his brother whose name “Bart” was an anagram for “brat.”

Thank Christ they’re labeled.

Keep in mind that Groening was still centering himself in his work, but he was also distancing himself. His Life in Hell comics were mostly about a rabbit named Binky and his slightly deformed bastard son Bongo. They were both underachieving slackers who still found it in themselves to be disappointed in how much everything sucks despite all the effort they don’t put into it, probably as a way of protecting themselves. Very “Low Boomer” (a term well explained here in Generations Done Right by Mr. Walt Bismarck himself) especially considering Groening was making it as an artist.

The Simpsons were a Nuclear Family That Didn’t Work™. You could call it something of a punch against the Status Quo, but because of Groening’s Low Boomer background the set-up is already close to being a Dead Trope. Marge as an ineffectual 50’s/60’s housewife was already not the norm in the 80’s where 4 out of 5 moms had jobs outside of the home. Hierarchy and gender dynamics (same thing) play roles but the whole thing was mostly just a set up for quick laughs.

Until it became a half-hour long.

The whole thing had to expand and the setting of Springfield, an actual AnyTown AnyState USA was created. Homer got a job at a nuclear power plant. This joke probably doesn’t work so well now, but the liberals had very much won the propaganda war against nuclear power and Homer swapping rods around for an evil overlord at a Nuke Plant was a fitting role for his establishment backing idiocy. In the earliest episodes there were heavy handed signs of Marge being a woman trapped in domestic chains, with episodes where she briefly found comfort in wine and almost had affairs. Lisa got strong hints of depression that her budding genius was overlooked and ignored partially thanks to Bart’s bombastic hogging of her parents’ attention, although this wouldn’t last much longer than 50’s housewife Marge.

The Simpsons was very much the result of its creators negotiating with WASP sensibilities.² Remember that WASPs were a “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” group. These guys were the first out of their British Imperial household and in 1989 they were clearly winning so hard they were bigger than their ol’ British dad was. Plenty of WASPs hated the Simpsons but if you think they were against it as a whole you are confusing WASP with “Conservative.” These are people who famously notice differences present in their own in-groups and then happily bifurcate along those lines to have massive power struggles. They were also used to winning; every true group of WASPs is the one that beat the last group of WASPs. Throwing WASP poors under the bus to own WASP cons is morally easier than fudging your golf score for an elite WASP lib.

Brutal WASP honesty.

Anglicans like linear “Just so” moralistic stories. They revolve around people getting what they deserve. Snow White and Cinderella get hot husbands because they are hot and go along to get along. Jack gets fat cash and a harp that probably symbolizes the giant’s daughter because he is brave and clever. Crystal Lake campers get killed by Jason because they fuck and smoke pot, but one girl survives because she does not do those things and is female.

The Simpsons are lower-middle class because their family is poorly set up. Homer is lazy and stupid. Bart is destructive and also pretty stupid. Marge is a victim of a patriarchal narrative where she’s obligated to let her husband lead and she fails to stand up for herself. Lisa is a victim of a patriarchal narrative where her achievements are ignored and unrecognized because he’s a girl and she’s too young to correct this. If anything it’s implied that Homer has more than he should because of male privilege and dumb luck. They are sympathetic, but in a rut for all the right reasons if you’re a Liberal WASP.

The Man=Bad/Woman=Good got so ham-handed that there’s an episode where Homer and Bart are explained by a male-specific degenerative brain disease in the Simpsons lineage.

Each episode tends to follow A-plot, B-plot lines that lead from Red-Herring Conflict to True Conflict that is resolved by upholding a WASP value and a Lesson Learned that is completely useless in the face of the episodic show having to return to status quo.

At first the show had a very Boomer and Generation Jones kind of tone, but also did well with the Xer’s.

Here’s an interesting thing—if you take the median birth year of the X-er (1975) and go up to 18 years to get peak dawning of the X generation, 1993, you see a year that births Beavis & Butthead and has Nirvana’s In Utero topping the charts. It’s not the only subculture but 1993 is spiritually X-coded time in a lot of ways.

However, the Simpsons was already starting to fray around the edges. By 1993 Bartmania had already come and gone; Homer was the ostensible main character of the Simpsons. Although the show was still in the range of what most fans consider peak Simpsons, it was already fielding an episode with the title “So It’s Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show.” That’s a sort of sincerity but it’s also defensively using post-modern meta and self-referencing humor.

Then there’s “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet” which had backstories that defied suspension of disbelief so it could all be one long Beatles reference, signaling the shows willingness to twist itself in knots worshipping celebrity culture and chasing Boomer nostalgia.

Simpsons is a dead show; miss it, miss it.

This was all part and parcel of the show’s liberal WASP sensibilities. Clinton had just become president a year ago and his victory was clearly heavily influenced by a liberal sympathetic media that helped split the conservative vote. The WASP need for winners had been met.

The was result was cockiness. The Simpsons didn’t care as much about mass appeal, youth culture, or authenticity. It was beginning to wreck the show’s ability to give a shit. By the ass end of the Clinton administration, the (in)famous “Homer’s Enemy” episode (a popular shark jumping marker) had come and gone. 1999 saw the Simpsons doing “The Simpson’s Bible Stories” and by this point the show was moving into its run with Lisa as the main character. It was a treadmill of guest celebrities, self-referencing meta humor, and pop-feminism—it had become “Neo-Lib Political Viewpoint: The Show”, as far as morality was concerned.

“Who Shot Mr. Burns” parts 1 and 2 are also nostalgia Boomer/Jones era TV references that get cited as “Jump the Shark” moments. Of course… so is the phrase “Jump the Shark.”

Sadly, for all that the Simpsons obviously scratched some kind of itch when it first appeared, it was always just water flowing into an empty vessel. It started life with Groening holding it at arm’s length and was largely a stitched together attempt to ride a wave of popularity it could not have seen coming. By this point Groening was already working on Futurama.

WASP media, especially its humor, always tends to attack but you get the best results when it thinks it has a dangerous opponent. It was more than ready for some real competition, and it was about to get it.

II. Quahog’s Ellis Islander Coding.

This one’s a lot more fun.

Ellis-Islanders were basically Euro-American 2.0, with waves of what amounts to the Europoors after initially leading with the Eurorich. It’s really the “Protestant” that does the heavy lifting in WASP because these waves of Irish, Italian, Greeks and other Mediterraneans, Russians, Polish, and Eastern Euros were much, much more Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish and still just considered White today. (Honestly, what’s missing from just saying Anglo-Saxon Protestant?)

Egypt was troubled by the horrible ASP. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There had always been some of these groups in the US, but now they were coming in numbers that allowed them to ghetto up together and culturally define entire sections of major cities, if not states.³ Although each of these groups very much has their own identity they have a lot of commonalities. Like how they tell stories.⁴

Where WASPS like very linear moralistic stories that tell you everything is as it should be, or will be soon if you just follow the rules, Islanders like to tell two types of stories the most: Event stories and Consequence stories.

An Event story is basically just saying something that happened. “I was walking to work one day, almost there and— BAM! Pigeon shat on me. Had to rinse it off in the bathroom sink. It sucked.” It’s just an odd, interesting factoid and half the charm of the story is in how you tell it. Hand gestures, eye contact, crazy sound effects, swearing— the special effects of intercommunication— these are key elements because the point of the whole thing is human interconnection.

A Consequence story is a very “Result B follows action A” style story. “Oh, you don’t want to wear a hat outside? You don’t like hats? Well, I was walking to work one day. Forgot my hat. Well, no problem. It was a beautiful day! I was almost there and— BAM! Pigeon shat on me. Had to rinse it off in the bathroom sink. It sucked.” Same story, different flow. It’s a Consequence story now. It’s very similar to a Moralistic story in that it it’s a form of guidance but results are not so abstract.

More to come, but for now let’s take at look a specific Gen Xer and American Irish boy named Seth MacFarlane.

Patron Saint of the Shit-Eating Grin

Seth got work with Cartoon Network in 1995 after he wrote a short, animation/live-action film called the Life of Larry that was just an obvious prototype of Family Guy (half the jokes were recycled directly into the final product). He made a more family friendly entirely animated pitch for the Network’s Cartoon Cartoon show called Larry & Steve.

It didn’t take.

During the entire time he was working with Cartoon Network he pitched Family Guy to Fox, but they wouldn’t take it until after King of the Hill succeeded and proved The Simpsons wasn’t a one-time thing. Even then they were going to make it into a series of shorts embedded in MadTV like The Simpsons originally was (not MacFarlane’s idea) but their deal with MadTV fell through. Finally, Seth got his show greenlit and in 1999 Family Guy dropped and it was incredibly popular…

This shit’s not labeled. Which one’s the fucking dog?

…and canceled after three seasons.

It would have stayed cancelled except that the DVD sales for the show and ratings for the episodes rerun in syndication were so high Fox was basically forced to own their error and bring it back.

So this show is obviously incredibly personal to Seth and was an absolute bitch for him to get going. Even the deal he got from Fox in the first place was a weird 50,000 dollars to make a pilot (the normal cost is a fucking million) and he had to basically animate the entire thing himself.

I mean it was probably hard for Matt too. I mean, let me check… Yeah, he walked into a newspaper and showed them Life is Hell and got syndicated. And then a friend he knew through his script writing was like “Hey, you should make a pitch to this turd sketch show that’s about to happen.” And then The Simpsons happened without him hardly doing shit with it.

Truly a Boomer vs Xer story.

It makes sense that the show was hard to greenlight. Family Guy wasn’t doing what WASPs would typically want. A good WASP show about the poors is supposed to show the poors consistently dissatisfied with their lot, but the Griffins are just a stage to a punchline and don’t give a shit. Like a lot of Xers, Seth MacFarlane was obviously partially raised by a television set full of syndicated crap and while his jokes might build off the absurdity of a 70’s sitcom like the Brady Bunch or a musical like Music Man, he obviously loved the fucking things. He’d make jokes that hit targets that were actually subversive like women, gays, non-christians, and foreigners; worse they would go unanswered without a member of the good demographic popping up and making a much more scathing joke about christians, straight, or dudes—Or just having an anvil hit Peter on the heads, moralists aren’t subtle.

Perhaps the biggest sin of all was that Seth MacFarlane was belittling the entire medium of television. Not fighting it, not “Let’s rage against society, kids,” but full on “Isn’t it cute, this dumb shit we do?”

While television used to be made up of Event and Consequence narratives, that was because WASPs had generally disregarded it at first. They applied their moralism through non-narrative controls, actual laws and groups that made sure there were no drugs, no crime, no sassy kids, and no minorities. They didn’t carte until after television proved its power by helping turn around the popular opinion on the Vietnam war. This wasn’t just a way to jangle keys for the idiots, this was a way to control how people think.

1971’s All in the Family became one of the earliest TV attempts to paint a normal, white conservative leaning guy as the crying Wojack. I find it pretty hilarious that the Family Guy theme song directly references that opening before dissolving into brainless spectacle.

Those were the da~ays!

The episodic lack of progression you were seeing in WASP media like The Simpsons was useless for Islander communication. With no chance of having a consequence that ever mattered, Macfarlane used everything as an excuse to go into an event, to show a joke or a calamity. Characters who should have major impact like the Main character, a genius talking dog, a super-genius evil baby, and Death himself— they all just show up and fall into the gag. Half the time they don’t even do you the SNL style favor of making themselves the center of the bit. And why should they? Peter’s not actually going to get anything from an episode where Meg wants to get her driver’s license, so crashing a car through a wall and having a drunk dog make a joke about Italians is at least a way to juice something of interest out of the situation.

That said, Seth MacFarlane wasn’t trying to take the piss out of anyone. He’s very much a liberal good boy. Let me take you back to part of Walt’s original observation—

Lois is a WASP princess and a civilizing aspirational force for Peter’s retarded Irish shenanigans but he rightly views her as fundamentally stuffy and square and provides the household with its essential thumos; like Reagan and Clinton and all other great Micks he charmed his way into the country club and became genuinely accepted on his own terms.

A lot of how Family Guy finally came into existence was a negotiation with the environment Seth had to work in. Lois was just a supportive nothing in the original prototype, but she became the embodiment of the environment Seth is working in. Walt is right that Peter is the thymos— the spirit and motivation of the show—and Lois is his constraint.

The show has obviously always been near to Macfarlane’s heart, and I want to point out another metaphorical self-exposure he commits. The three male characters he voices: Brian the Dog, Stewie the Baby, and Peter the Griffin all represent parts of his psyche.⁵ Initially this is:

• Brian as Superego

• Stewie as Id

• Peter as Ego.

It’s always tempting to make the dumb and impulsive one the Id, but it’s really about desires you cannot manifest. And Stewie’s initial shtick was that he was an immoral genius who wanted to kill Lois, the avatar of everything making Peter behave, and Lois has absolute control over him. Brian, mostly just a pure copy-paste of MacFarlane’s idea of his own personality, just sits back and judges like a disappointed liberal and a major part of his early shtick is that he has major crush on Lois.

Most of MacFarlane obviously loves traditional television media, but it’s also why he can’t get anything done and he secretly resents that. After he’s canceled and comes back with the masses on his side, and hardballs FOX into paying him serious money, a lot of the show’s aspects change.

Stewie’s personality changes from evil genius to camp glass-closet gay. Brian went from sardonic drunk who judges the others to dopey status seeker, contrarian and self-important hack whose crush finds the idea of fucking him laughable. And Peter becomes more openly hostile and dismissive to his wife, who becomes notably more bitch coded. It’s revealed that Lois isn’t just a weird smart-hot-wife TV contrivance but a weird sex-addict who likes chaos and genuinely wound up with Peter to own her WASP father.

There’s a fucking toy for the most famous scene where they’re performing bondage with each other.

Stewie was now far closer to the Superego as a flamboyant, culturally obsessed, hypercritical gay; while Brian as a poser and attention whore was closer to the Id. And Peter had a lot more interest in things outside of Lois (his three buddies Quagmire, Joe, and Cleveland) their power dynamic shifting slightly in his favor.

Maybe you just realize who's actually behind the wheel, FOX TV-I mean, Lois. Lois.

Peter’s airtime as part of a duo with Brian as his dry WASP-liberal-emulating-commentator were heavily cut back in favor of the dog and baby forming a comedy duo that was somewhat detached from the family.

A man doesn’t make this many Bob Hope references in his show unless a TV raised him.

Better showing the tone is that with Meg, who was originally just an awkward teen girl, was cemented as the shows unwarranted butt monkey. (If you like metaphors and want some for the kids: Meg is the essentially abandoned female audience and Chris is the unimpressive but easier to please male audience.)

Where The Simpsons was ham-handed in its gynephilia, Family Guy had become low-key misogynistic, what might actually be one of the biggest differences between the two shows. This wasn’t in any kind of “I hate women” way as much as with Seth always sticking to his Ellis-Islander version of honesty—he’s just owning the fact that women can suck too, actually and weren’t in any ways the primary enablers of his success and never would be.

III. The Epilogue. Let Them Fight.

Let who fight? The Simpsons and Family Guy, WASPS and Ellis-Islanders, or feminists and dudebros—Take your pic.

As Family Guy soared to Simpsons-challenging-heights, MacFarlane would let more and more of his Ellis-Island coded idea of what stories are supposed to be slip and do actual character arcs and life changes (Peter has had multiple job changes and they’ve stuck for several seasons. Brian died for the better part of a season. They killed off multiple characters and its stuck.) The Simpsons has gotten more and more self-referential, celebrity obsessed, and liberal ass-kissy. The over-the-top faith in all of womankind hasn’t flapped either.

The crying Wojack, I say! Cryyyyiiiing!!!

While Family Guy has takes just as liberal but somehow even more realistic and funny despite looking like they came out of a fever dream.

The slowly vanishing tan was a great gag.

Those two images trying to get the same Anti-Trump vibe are the WASP and Ellis-Islander style in a nutshell.

I gave examples of moralistic WASP fairy tales early. Let me give you an Islander one.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf. There was a kid who kept pretending there was a wolf attacking him so he could laugh at the people who ran to help him. Then a wolf showed up, nobody ran to his cries, and it kills him.

The Moral: Lying is bad. But it’s very consequential, if you lie all the time for short gains no one will believe you in a crunch.

The WASP version, in today’s age would go more like this.

The Racist Boy Who Cried Wolf. There was a racist kid who kept pretending to be attacked by a wolf in a field so he could sneak off and steal from the very good People of Color who would leave their houses unguarded to rescue him. Then they wised up and didn’t come the next time he tried it and he couldn’t steal a thing. On his way home a wolf attacked him and nobody saved him. And everyone clapped.

The Moral: Racists suck and deserve to be eaten by wolves. Oh, and uh only Racists are stupid enough to lie. Don’t be like a racist. Don’t lie.

The thing about Friday the 13th, Snow White/Cinderella, and The Racist Boy Who Cried Wolf is they obscure what will actually save you (nothing actually, being hot, honesty) with vibes approved social essentialist behaviors (chastity, obedience, anti-racism).

Much as I’m obviously biased to be less annoyed by the Masculine, Xer, Irish-coded bombast of IF X THEN Y (+Fight Scene) style of communication, I’m not actually saying one of these styles is superior to the other. They’re the strategies and tactics of different psyches and societies.

Most human interactions have weird subconscious power dynamics in them. It’s a weird monkey-brained desire to make sure this whole society thing is still getting you more bananas and pussy than you would get all by yourself and the other monkeys aren’t getting one up on you.

The Ellis-Islander method isn’t just honesty; in fact, a lot of Islander tales are straight up lies. How many chicks you’ve banged, when you lost your virginity, whether or not your uncle Ronnie actually beat up Sylvester Stallone in a bar fight. They’re often such whopping sacks of bullshit that you and the audience know damn good and well you’re lying— half of the audience should be calling you on this even when you’re telling the truth or it’s probably a lame story, anyway. The point is holding attention and being good at it, and looking for opportunities to say shit like “Shut up, Paulie. We all know that hooker with a dick talked you into reciprocating,” without getting your asked kicked.

Telling the Biggest Fucking Lie Possible is sometimes a goal in both styles of story-telling. But the Islander version encourages audience participation and pushback, works off of it even, but the WASP version very much doesn’t. The power behind WASP lies isn’t knowing everyone’s secrets or being super good at it, it’s holding all the chips and controlling the house before you even start the game. The WASP lie is closer to a patch install where not accepting the terms and service means you don’t get to be part of the process.

Tactics and strategy actually follow logistics, and this is basically the same thing here. Europoor and Eurorich strategies are mostly haves vs. have not fights. It even shows in ways you might not think about. WASPs like character arcs with growth and self-contained stories about Good overcoming Evil. Islanders tend to like static characters and mythopoetic epics where someone keeps doing cool shit until they die.

Like the Fast and Furious movies; truly they are a Cú Chulainn style epic of the now.

It’s because the Haves would very much like the society to fold the individual while the Have Nots would like the individual to be able to challenge the paradigm. Simple as. WASPs know that justice comes from writing the laws; Islanders know that justice comes from having the most friends and the largest families when the fighting starts. And they’re both right.

1. Consider that the closest thing you’ll get a trigger warning. The phrases left and right have gotten so all over the place that it feels like an idiotic mischaracterization anyway. Just know that if you’re fairly normie brained you’ll get a cultural jump scare if you try Walt out.

2. I have to take a moment address an alt-right elephant in the room. There’s a contingent of antisemitic folks that would scream at me for failing to ‘notice.’ “The Simpsons is actually Anti-WASP! Anti-White! Anti-Family! Anti-American! James L. Brooks, Sam Simon, David Silverman, and David X. Cohen get the ((parenthesis)) you cope kool-aid chugging idiot!” Only there’d probably be an N-word directed at my white ass somewhere in there.

Antisemites act like the Jews have the ability to grab both sides of your head and force you to watch anything they want you to. There’s a Jewish aspect to the writing in The Simpsons, sure. It is legacy television after all. But while the WASPS had been taking hard punches since World War II, their power was notably waning, and shit was really hitting the fan as we marched into a more globalist 80’s and 90’s, they were still the dominant cultural force. Arguably still are.

3. There’s a lot of flex room in this. Are the Scottish Eurorich or Europoor? Are the French Anglo-Saxons? What are Nords and Swedes? What about Spanish and Portuguese Euros or their barely indigenous white-passing Latin descendants? I don’t know. Draw your own lines.

4. Full warning, because my adopted father’s is Irish and I even have a little Irish half-sister, and a last name that… really doesn’t look at all Irish because of an ancient spelling error, and Seth MacFarlane is Irish— Well, this is probably clouding my perspective.

5. See? I know some ancient Greek too. No snow on me. (I live in Florida.)