DA in the USA

One thing I've loved and been pleasantly surprised about Downton Abbey is how compassionate and simply decent the Earl of Grantham has always been with his servants, whom he actually considers family; going into the series I'm sure I assumed "The Boss" would be some sort of ogre who treated those beneath him with contempt if he couldn't simply avoid them in the first place.  The Earl's being the  opposite is refreshing, and lends an air of credibility to Fallowes' writing in an "oh, this isn't just paint-by-the-numbers" shit way.  Some of the Upstairs people are nice, some are dicks; some of the Downstairs people are nice, and some are dicks, just as I've found with people in the North and South over here.

All of this is what makes Downton Abbey so appealing, according to this guy:

The earl treats those who work for him with a compassion that goes well beyond noblesse oblige. He regards the World War I deaths of those who once worked on his estate as a family tragedy.

In "Downton Abbey," the earl hires as his valet his former orderly from the Boer War (whom he greets as "my old comrade in arms") despite the difficulty the orderly, the victim of a war wound, has in walking. He comes to his butler's rescue when the latter is being blackmailed, and when his third cousin, the heir apparent to the Crawley estate, finds the services of a personal servant redundant, the earl reminds his cousin that the servant needs work.

Why all of this is so appealing to tons of Americans right now seems to be that it's the exact opposite of how those with so much view those with not-so-much in 2012 political America:

The earl is everything so many of today's get-tough-with-the-poor politicians are not. Whether the decency of Lord Grantham and the popularity of "Downton Abbey" are signs that popular support for President Obama's version of the social contract will aid him in his re-election bid is anyone's guess. But at a time when the Pew Research Center, as well as Occupy Wall Street, shows that Americans perceive a strong conflict between rich and poor, it is not farfetched to see "Downton Abbey" delivering a history lesson suited for the present.

As the writer continues, Grantham stands alongside previous generations of Roosevelts/Kennedys/Bush (41) dynasties who "had mines!" but viewed their wealth to be coupled with the responsibility to help out those who weren't born with so much, and Downton Abbey is a useful if painful reminder that such thinking wasn't always viewed as being something Jesus would scourge as acting like a fucking pansy.  I'm too cynical to believe this will help sell people on Obama's "view of the social contract", but I thought the Cowboys were doomed when they traded Herschel Walker, so what the fuck do I know?