Roseanne Barr vs. The World

Roseanne Barr is a legendary lady. She was behind one of the most notable (and storied) sitcoms of all time, and she'll go down in history as one of the 20th Century's most notable comics. She's also a comedian with, let's say, a complicated relationship with the powers that be in Hollywood. Actually, let's not say complicated, let's say heated and overwhelmingly hostile. She's frequently open about it, but it came to a head this weekend with Barr's twitter tirade against the Hollywood establishment.

Barr definitely had a lot to say — she called Hollywood sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, saying that it "is full of lying dirty thieving toxic bastards at every level," and that "Hollywood's always trying to kill their own stars — whether creatively or physically — burying them under psychic stress, greed and gas lighting."

This was in response to what she called the censorship of one of her newest projects, and it's gaining a whole lot of traction around the Internet because, well, she said it all pretty loudly.

I hesitate to label things like this "rants" because it feels like a backhanded way of discrediting the person doing the talking. This is especially true when, like The Huffington Post did, you couple it with mention of Barr's "mental health issues."

Roseanne Barr is a legend. Whether you agree with her or not — in what she's saying or how she's saying it — is one thing. But we grew to respect her for a reason. We may not want to keep her on that same pedestal we had her on in the '90s (pedestals are passe anyway), but we should at least admit she's probably speaking from a place of more authority than most of us.Barr said what she did so forcefully that it would be easy to dismiss it as ravings — and a whole lot of people are. It's interesting to watch the spread of this story (or "story"), because what Barr said isn't entirely untrue. Sure, she said it in such strong words that there's an instinct to push it aside for its almost overwhelming hyperbole — but dismissing her attack on Hollywood kind of misses the point of it while also falling directly into what she was calling out in the first place.