kontextmaschine:

Unpopular opinion: Pawn Stars is actually a really good popular history show; the bits explaining and contextualizing the artifacts “customers” “bring in” do a good job of exploring history through material culture in a non-academic register; the other stuff is a human interest/conflict hook but it works; if you (correctly) compare it to PBS kids shows it’s got as much or more history per minute as 3-2-1 Contact had science, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego had geography, or Sesame Street had shapes/colors/numbers/letters

and since Trump won it’s worth pointing out how the authorities on this show, the “let me call my guy who’s an expert on X” are weighted towards collectors and semi-pro hobbyists and appraiser types qualified by experience not academia

the same time, a lot of “blue collar” reality stuff on the old guy channels, you realize - this, the chopper building/car restoring/aquarium designing stuff, Ice Road Truckers -  is really about petit bourgies, small businessmen or the self-employed at least six-figure level who are “not white collar” in the literal sense that they wear polo or t-shirts, and I guess the figurative one where they tell dirty jokes to the woman with the waitress curls who’s basically their HR department

that and I guess there’s that other subgenre from Lizard Lick Towing to great-granddaddy COPS, where empowered “blue collar”-identifiers discipline the underclass for public entertainment

and the stuff like Duck Dynasty and Bear Grillis and all the Alaska shit that are about white guys having an authentic/mystical/instinctive relationship to the land that reminds me of the way I’m juuuuuust old enough to remember native americans being mythologized, like they’re working up a narrative of white indigeneity

same channels running Vikings and that…

some pretty interesting reactionary ideology going down on the minor cable channels these days, is what I’m saying