RUTHFULLY YOURS

“When the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife,” wrote Frantz Fanon, the seminal theorist of anti-Western Third Worldism and, not incidentally, college touchstone of President Obama. By now, Fanon has been completely internalized by … Western culture.

The cast of “Midsomer Murders”: What’s wrong — what’s very wrong — with this picture?
That’s the conclusion I draw on reading this news report on the “suspension” and pending “investigation” of the producer and co-creator of a TV detective show with the termerity to be set in an English village peopled by indigenous “white” English people (still just hanging on by a thread at 92 percent of the British population). Suspension? Investigation? This so far beyond Orwell that no one even notices.

From the AP:

LONDON (AP) — The English county of Midsomer is rural, picturesque, astonishingly murder-prone and completely white.

Already a psychotically cockeyed way to frame the fictional output of a milennia-old civilization. How about: The Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights are rural, wind-swept, tragically star-crossed and completely white. Or: The London workhouse of Oliver Twist is urban, unspeakably inhumane and completely white. …

It’s also fictional, the setting for “Midsomer Murders,” a TV series that has run for 14 years, offering a steady diet of violent crimes in leafy lanes and villages, all reassuringly solved by avuncular Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby.

Now Midsomer’s cozy world has been rocked, and its producer suspended Tuesday, after he said that the show “wouldn’t work” if there were any non-white people in the cast.

“We are a cosmopolitan society in this country, but if you watch ‘Midsomer’ you wouldn’t think so,” executive producer Brian True-May told Radio Times magazine, adding that “quite honestly I wouldn’t want to change it.”

“Quite honestly” is his mistake. Rather, he should have gotten down on his hands and knees and begged forgiveness for himself and his lineage, said multiculturally disparaging things about Agatha Christie, and promised to put Lord Peter Wimsey into sensitivity training.

“We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work,” he was quoted as saying.

No, it wouldn’t; it would be something different. Everything is not everything else, if you know what I mean. If True-May were producing a series following a narrative derived from “Roots,” for example, it wouldn’t “work” with a “non-minority” cast.

“We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.”

Fiction.

ITV, the network that broadcasts the show, said in a statement that it was “shocked and appalled” by True-May’s comments. It said True-May, one of the show’s co-founders, has been suspended by producing company All3Media pending an investigation.

True-May’s equation of “English” with “white” was strongly condemned by some, but defended by others, who say he is simply telling it like it is: the vast majority of non-white Britons — who make up about 8 percent of the total population — live in cities or suburbs.

Daily Telegraph columnist Christina Odone accused a “metropolitan creative elite” of trying to rewrite reality by foisting “multicultural fantasy worlds on viewers and listeners” ….

It’s not only rewriting the reality of the (“white”) English village ; it’s damning it as illegitimate in every way. Thus, it is dehumanized.