Car Culture was a Mistake 7: Road Rage The End of Beef

Where's the Beef?

No this isn't another post about that stolen valor Republican liar Jason Nelson of Texass.

Or a missive on a forgotten Republican lie of 2021 when  Iowa Governor Starve the poor children Kim Reynolds and many others claimed the Biden led climate plan would mean Real Americans would not be able to eat hamburgers anymore.

But, the Netflix TV series centered around a Road Rage incident, which just garnered several Golden Globes for the actors involved...

Beef was a story which garnered a lot of praise for the fact that while the majority of characters were Asian, the story itself was not an "Asian" story.  But, instead just had Asian people in what Simu Liu and Issa Rae at the Golden Globes called "White people roles".  

Beef ended this summer so the post release coverage  of actor David Cho's confession of a "rapey" sexual encounter with his massage therapist, wasn't front and center during the Golden Globes.

The penultimate episode was quite bloody as Maria Bello's bored Billionaire character who get's chopped in two and the two main characters, Steven Yeun's "Danny" and Ali Wong's "Amy", feud leads them to a car crash off a cliff in the remote hardscrabble hills.  As the two struggled with injuries their mutual hatred and inability to work together to survive in the wild (although not actually far from civilization) I thought this series would end with these two's animosity being their mutual demise.  And I wonder if that bleak ending was planned and abandoned during production or if those scenes were shot and then changed after being screened or reviewed.

Which leads me to the so-called Chinese proverb He who sets out on revenge best dig two graves or whatever version you've heard of that saying involving Revenge and Two Graves, and how it's emblematic of our age's industry of false quotes from ancient thinkers.

Now, for a long time here in the States, Republicans and rightwingers have had a cottage industry in crafting fake quotes and attributing them to the Founding Fathers, usually around guns i.e. George Washington's "Dragon's Teeth" or Thomas Jefferson's "when governments fear the people there is liberty".  Organizations which safeguard Washington or Jefferson legacy usually have entire articles devoted to debunking these spurious quotes but, the reason rightwingers put their lies into the mouth's of the founding fathers is to use the stature and weight of the past to prop up their modern policy preferences.

It's the founding principle of "Constitutional Originalism" which is nothing more than Republicans using their interpretation of the Constitution (The Highest Law of the Land) as the final argument for why whatever it is Republicans want today is backed by the entire edifice of the History of America.

Anyway back to Beef, the series creator Lee Sung Jin said a real life road-rage incident was the inspiration of story;

The idea was loosely based on a road rage incident that actually happened to me," he said. 

"Someone went off on me and for some reason that day, I did not use sound judgment and impulsively decided to follow this person.  I didn't really have a set plan, I just wanted him to feel fear and let him know that it's not OK to do that to people." 

He continued: "But things went awry - certainly not like they do in the show - and what happened that afternoon ended up inspiring Beef.

Road Rage is such a prevalent phenomenon and such a dangerous one that the Illinois State Police have a whole webpage devoted to knowing the warning signs, things to avoid and how to react when involved in a situation.  It's another part of car culture which for years was known about, but was treated like just another price of freedom.