Farms: Stephen Fry In America - Episode 02 (Deep South)

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1. Northernlion sent me
2. He's 100% correct about Florida. It's a dreary fucking place that has no soul.
3. Even over video that balloon ride was beautiful
4. He didn't even see Nashville or try some of our moonshine from the Smokey Mountains, you missed a good time friend!
5. In this entertainment, Mr. Fry reveals himself as just an entertainment figure rather than the social critic he pretends to be.
   First, by letting old segregationist explain that America is healed of race its problem because white people no longer hold any animus toward the black people they still systematically marginalize. . Those old bags would have opened up and erupted into a flood of awful with only the slightest of prodding. I know, my family is full of them. Yet, this complacent Englishman let them sit there content and seemingly quaint in their personal denial of race as an issue in America. Then he finds the one black person in the south—a tourism promoter, who doesn't seem to know or care about that the Confederate Battle Flag was flown by those who sought to preserve and extend slavery and was in recent decades picked up as a white supremacists symbol, still waved today at white nationalist rallies.
   That was offensive enough to most Americans, who actually would like to address our race problem and move past the comforting lies that everything is OK today and that race in America is solved, but let's forgive this Englishman for his complacent failure to understand American reality. Maybe, he isn’t educated and doesn’t read the papers. What is unforgivable is his dismissal of Miami as “rotting” and a "hole." He not only indicts himself but convicts him out of his own mouth of being a shallow, pretentious nationalistic chauvinist who himself wallows in irrational animus.
   
   The beautiful beaches and weather in Miami have attracted millions there, including a great many British visitors each year. Yet, Mr. Fry reduces them to just a site for beautiful people who are actually "just staggeringly ugly." I want to say that again, this gawky, pasty-assed, clumsy and physically awkward Englishmen claims the beautiful people he saw on Miami’s beaches were “just staggeringly ugly.” I’m guessing he is his own classical standard for beauty and in that light is perfectly acceptable for him to dismiss the beautiful as “just staggeringly ugly.” Is this a hangover from British Imperialism, where everybody else was assumed to be inferior? Even the beautiful abroad are judged as “staggeringly ugly;” how very traditionally British of him.
   What a profoundly blind and arrogant pontificator. Should the architecture that well serves a wet and cold island at the other end of the Gulf Stream be deemed inherently superior to that in a location where climate and building resources are different? Is it a sin to commercially pander to middle and working class tourist by offering low cost eateries and shops near the beaches? Mr. Fry reveals to us how little he has contact with such people who exist in Britain as well as here.
   
   There is a picture emerging here: dismissal of the common, beautiful (?) and marginalized as tacky, unworthy of interest, by an elitist who has very little contact with them. Elsewhere in this series, more than once, Mr. Fry brags about his personal affability. There is something far worse than not being affable. It is being so complacent and so elitistly self-absorbed that you could visit a place like America for an extended period and not even notice it; come and return without scratching your personal elitist complacency.
   
   
   I warn foreign viewers, approach this as an entertainment, but know you won’t just know no more about America, but be taught how it might be seen by a British elitist. He needn’t have even come to share that with us.
   
   I hereby announce that after decades of enjoying Mr. Fry's light amusements, I can no longer abide by his shallow pretentiousness. I don’t have time for preening shallowness.
6. "y'all talk funny over thar don't yiz" lel
7. I was always disappointed that the follow up series "More Fry in America" never came to fruition, so many places he missed out Ohio for example, and he should've gone to Philly
8. i love stephen fry, hes a national treasure of ours...... i can watch him for hours on end... if any Americans havent watched the long running series QI, watch it please on here.. its awesome... and can i say..how many beautiful women there is in the video, i love American women , there beauty, there accents, there welcoming warmth... god bless American women.. :-)
9. You look pretty darn good on a horse - keep trying!!!!
   (They forgot to tell you that the "walk" is a RUNNING
   walk. It's fast, but smooth.
10. did you realize we have the world chicken festival? - I don't know how I came not to have heard of it ... LOL
11. No mention of Latin culture of South Florida Mr Fry. Just white people. Sad, you missed a lot. Miami was not the best of this series for you.
12. And now the whole country's screwed.
13. This isn't really the kind of thing I would normally watch but Steven is just so brilliant 
14. That was great
15. US nation are great people, its the establishment and the government that i have a problem with.
16. I like the different musical accompanyment.
17. America has the nicest people on earth but the crappiest politicians. These series taught me about the good side of America, that is, its people and its beautiful nature!
18. Oh Stephen you have done a lot of good on this earth, don't put yourself down. I would watch anything you were in, I find you "Quite Intersting" lol.
19. Ahh, the asscrack of America. Just kidding, of course. Though, I do really dislike southern accents.
20. 5.53 you aint getting me in there