Remembering "The Old Man and the Lisa"

Reading about John Swartzwelder's time on The Simpsons had me looking anew at not just the famously divisive "Homer's Enemy," but also another, less notorious, episode of his, "The Old Man and the Lisa," frankly for the same reason, its being a piece of right-wing satire. After all, consider what we have in the episode--a billionaire losing his money, but totally regaining his fortune by episode's end on the basis of plain and simple "entrepreneurship" on an implicitly "level playing field," with the result that where we all know Monty Burns to have been born to wealth and privilege, here he is "reborn" as a "self-made man." As Kurt Vonnegut might have had it, the episode makes making a dollar look very easy--so that those who haven't done so well at that game are left with nothing to do but "blame and blame and blame themselves" for the fact, perhaps the more in as far from being able to attribute it all to under-handedness on the part of an evil man, Montgomery Burns this time around is presented as a kindly, honest individual who means to make the world a better place, and deal fairly with the little girl to whom he owes the idea he used to make it all happen.

It seems fair to describe this course of events as a paean to the Social Darwinistic notions of the inherent superiority of the rich at the money-making that they hold to be the ultimate test of a man's mettle, the cult of the "entrepreneur," the validity of "bootstraps" ideology, the idea that everyone of any merit who is not a billionaire is only "temporarily embarrassed" that way, and to capitalism more generally, while it is also a blow against the tendency to villainize plutocrats so much a bugbear of the right to boot (the more obviously so as Swartzwelder's writing credits on the show include the episode in which Homer's more fully self-made half-brother Herb managed an even earlier return to riches after "losing it all," and other episodes which showed a softer attitude toward Burns as "Rosebud," or more respect for his abilities, like "Homer the Smithers").

However, on top of that there is also the specific entrepreneurial project Burns used to regain his wealth--a colossal "recycling" plant using giant nets woven together from disused six-pack holders to, via the most destructive fishing technique imaginable, collect vast amounts of biomass that the plant then turns into canned "slurry." Accelerating the destruction of the oceans rather than saving them--all, again, with the best of intentions, as Burns shows when he presents the operation to Lisa and, in his present state of fair-mindedness presents her a check for her share of the proceeds--Lisa can do nothing but reject the project and the money in horror, all as, in contrast with many an episode of the series, the usually much more gently treated Lisa is not given the slightest cause to dry her tears by episode's end.

Of course, the episode doesn't seem to have been taken that way when it aired. Different people explain this in different ways, but it seems to me that the reason for that is that when this episode came out in the '90s, environmentalism (like "political correctness") seemed so secure as societal conventional wisdom that it appeared harmless to mock at it, the more in as there was that "'90s irony" that had people of limited intelligence dealing with anything dissonant by taking it as meaning the opposite of what the speaker actually said, or even nothing at all, the more easily for the tendency of many who ought to know better to "convert narrative gaucherie" into such, as Ian Watt had it. So did it go with that contemporaneous piece of narrative gaucherie par excellence, South Park. However, while South Park has since undergone a measure of (long overdue) reevaluation that has had many accepting that many of the nihilistic or reactionary stances the show took were not meant at all ironically, no such reevaluation has happened with The Simpsons, or even just the episodes of the now famously right-wing (and anti-environmentalist) Swartzwelder, so that they assume there is a "liberal" sensibility is at work even when what they have in front of them is very obviously a right-winger giving them the middle finger.