Sarah. 27. Hairy-legged women's libber. Not strictly a Billy Joel fan blog. ***REVIEWS*** "as interesting as a piece of cardboard, with the moral backbone of a chocolate eclair" -anonymous "finicky and kind of an ahole" -anonymous
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I don’t know what the demographics of the Studio 60 writers’ room were and I really want to because I need to know how much self-awareness was involved in the storyline about hiring more Black writers on the in-universe show.
“The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:
If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.
‘Those are the terms’, indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat’ or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!’), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?
This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away’ does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise’ is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).
But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away’ as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here’, the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away’ might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty.”
- Kurt Schiller, from “Omelas, Je T'aime.” Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.
Apparently someone left a lighter in their pocket and all of That is from the gas released when the lighter ruptured
So there’s slightly more to it than that, that dryer is a natural gas dryer rather than a purely electric one. So when the lighter went off (the initial small explosion) it damaged the sealed drum enough to get to the gas lines in the heating element of the dryer which then allowed the natural gas and oxygen to mix, hit the fire from the lighter, and result in the second MUCH LARGER blast.
This is one of the many reasons why you always check your pockets, and also why I’ve never owned a natural gas dryer, even though they’re way more energy efficient than an electric one.
Everyone sympathetic’s acceptance of Klinger is great but there is an argument to be made that they’re so accepting because they know Klinger is straight. Henry even tells the psychiatrist in Divided We Stand “he goes out with girls!”
M*A*S*H had a groundbreaking, landmark pro-gay episode in its second season, where everyone gangs up on Frank and Margaret when they try to have a gay soldier thrown out of the military.
You can learn more about it from this excellent video
So no. They’re not “only ok with Klinger because he’s straight.”
Listen, Klinger may like girls, but whatever he is, Straight ain’t it.
Canonically Klinger is straight. You can interpret him however you want.
Until we came up with space shuttles that had more technology and room for mission specialists, astronauts had to be able to do everything, so the first three generations of them (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo) were just absolute gigachads by necessity.
Imagine being the only person alive who can say this
buzz aldrin and neil armstrong liked to do a thing where they’d tell unfunny jokes at parties about being on the moon and when people were confused they’d go “guess you had to have been there”
I’m trying to “be more social” and “do more things” so I agreed to go to a pride bike ride on Saturday and I’m going to have to use a public bike I’m going to regret every minute of this.
Everyone sympathetic’s acceptance of Klinger is great but there is an argument to be made that they’re so accepting because they know Klinger is straight. Henry even tells the psychiatrist in Divided We Stand “he goes out with girls!”
M*A*S*H had a groundbreaking, landmark pro-gay episode in its second season, where everyone gangs up on Frank and Margaret when they try to have a gay soldier thrown out of the military.
You can learn more about it from this excellent video
So no. They’re not “only ok with Klinger because he’s straight.”
I’ve written posts about this episode. It’s a great episode and yes it was groundbreaking. I was talking about the characters in-universe and I wasn’t even saying none of them would accept Klinger if they weren’t confident that he was straight, but that that could be a reason for his widespread acceptance. I’ll also note that that episode only really establishes Hawkeye and Trapper as fully accepting of George’s orientation. Henry doesn’t think George should be reported or have his life ruined, but it’s not clear if his acceptance goes beyond that. Margaret isn’t shown to support Frank’s attempt to report him, but she also doesn’t try to stop him, and she’s not entirely comfortable with George’s orientation, either. Other characters don’t appear in the episode, so their opinions aren’t established.
It’s not an interpretation I personally agree with, because I think what’s more in line with the show is that any sort of deviance from expected rigid norms is respected (except by antagonists, of course). However, if you want to consider why, realistically, a man wearing dresses might be mostly left alone in the army in the early 1950s, it’s worth considering whether Klinger would get away with it so easily if he were engaging in sexual behavior with men instead of marrying his high school sweetheart and taking girls dancing. I’m just saying there’s room to consider it.
Mash’s George episode is of course amazing!!
But it just is interesting to consider the aspect that everyone knows that George, as a non-permanent fixture, is going to leave. Patients always leave.
Whereas Klinger lives with them. He is a permanent fixture in the 4077’s lives.
And sometimes people are okay around people when they know it’s temporary - but sometimes it can become a totally different scenario when that person becomes someone you know and is close to you. Someone you live with, eat with, joke with, shower with, work with, bunk with, drink with, etc.
This effect still happens in modern times! “I’m okay with [x people] really I am! But I just wish my [best friend, coworker, relative, doctor, etc] wasn’t one.”
This isn’t to say that the 4077 would automatically not accept Klinger had they thought he wasn’t cis and/or straight. It’s just an observation that their acceptance does have the undercurrent of the fact that they do think he’s a cis man and a straight man.
Yes, exactly!! This is a great way of explaining it, thank you!
I guess Frank’s reaction to Klinger is homophobic but like… man that’s such a complicated thing. Most of the time he’s more angry that Klinger is flaunting regulations than anything else, and of course Klinger is wearing the dresses to flaunt regulations. But this all comes back to the central point that gay themes on MASH are used to make a point about authority.
Exactly, because essentially fanatic love of authority is one of the core principles of Frank’s character and so being homophobic leans more towards an afterthought when Klinger is out of uniform.
“How dare you wear that hat while in uniform” is an example how it’s more about the perceived “disrespect” (lack of total obedience and often fanatic displays of unquestioned orders) taking place towards authority/military patriotism than the actual clothing items and/or gender in of themselves.
I also think that choice is reflected in basically the entirety of M*A*S*H, beyond just the moments surrounding gay/homophobic/gender-non-conforming characters, which is part of what makes the show as funny as it is a lot of the time.
So many of the best gags (at least in my opinion) in M*A*S*H result from the explicit subversion of audience expectations of how a character will react to a given situation. To me, the way Klinger is reprimanded for how he dresses, and the ways he reacts to them, are the inverse of the scenes where the camp is being shelled, but because of the bureaucracy of the army, they’re told they are not being shelled.
The expected reaction in both of these situations from the audience’s perspective is fairly clear. Kilnger will be shamed for wearing women’s clothes, and the shelling will either stop, or at least the person on the phone would be apologetic and frantic. But neither of these happen, and the scenes are funnier for it. They pull the rug out from under the audience in a way that make the whole thing funnier, because they don’t go for the obvious joke.
On top of that, this style of humour also helps create the sense of alienation in the audience that the characters are also feeling. Klinger being reprimanded for being out of uniform rather than being shamed for crossdressing throws us off of what we at home are primed to expect from a situation, and helps establish just how strange and different being in or around the Korean War, the military, or conflict in general can feel. Same with the shelling sequence.
The Late Doctor Pierce uses this concept for the entire episode, and uses it both for humour and for pathos. Ultimately, I think this subversion of expectations is what makes M*A*S*H so funny and so charged while not (or at least not always) coming off as preachy, and why the show has endured so long.
I think if Trapper had stuck around they could have done something with worsening anger issues as the war drags on because he got angry in season 2 and almost committed murder about it.
