Category: Television

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Janet Jackson at the Superbowl

Did you see it? You probably missed it. You were probably in the bathroom.

At the end of Janet Jackson’s rather sorry spectacle of a circus of a fireworks extravaganza of incredibly self-indulgent excessive spatter-fest of over-wrought writhing orgiastic dancers and musicians– her boob popped out. In fact, it appeared as though Justin Timberlake pulled off one of her leatherette little shields and there it was. CBS remarkably cut the camera within a second or two. Maybe there was a slight delay available to them– you know, whatever they call it, when they reserve to themselves a slight cushion of time just in case someone like Janet Jackson, on nationwide tv, does something inappropriate.

So you are mom. You’re watching the half-time show because, Lord knows, you can’t stand to watch football. Your kids are watching too. They are Janet Jackson fans. The dancers wear costumes inspired by S & M fantasies. They gyrate and move in motions meant to suggest intercourse. You smile and continue your knitting. They are singing something about being naked for you or whatever. Doesn’t matter. You nod and shake your head– modern music. Then it happens. You leap up and cover your children’s eyes. If you were fast enough, you may have spared them a life-time of deviance and sexual perversion. They might not have realized that they had seen Janet Jackson’s breast.

The opening act for this bizarre annual ritual– the Superbowl– was Aerosmith. Hoo hah. There are tail-gate parties, which they also have at state prisons on the nights they are going to execute people.

Steve Tyler himself. Most young football fans yearned for his daughter, Liv. Liv, ridiculously, played a psychiatrist in one of Jim Carrey’s most earnest and preposterous movies, “Reign Over Me”.

Then Beyonce sang the national anthem, with all the heartfelt authority and sincerity Hollywood can muster. Then 40 grown men pumped to preposterous proportions by steroids (professional football does not test anybody for anything except marijuana) chase each other over a 100 yard field trying to retrieve an oblong object made of pigskin. This crowd cheers wildly.

There are 100 commercials. They watch the commercials (that’s why they cost an average of $2.5 million– they do watch.) They think, I will be happy if I have some Pepsi. I will download legally. I will have an erection. Most of these people would say they are Christians. In God’s name, I have no clue what they think they are talking about.

There is approximately 10 seconds of action for 20 minutes of commercials, inane chatter, Janet Jackson’s breast, Steve Tyler’s tongue, and American flags.

The audience, apparently, has what they want– the ratings for Superbowl games are great. These people are American voters. Not only are they choosing the type of costume they want Janet Jackson to wear, but they are also choosing the next government of Iraq and the future of the Israel-Palestinian peace plan. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake apologized about the breast.

Both of their careers, however, have been enhanced. There is no such thing as bad publicity.

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The 10 Biggest Scandals Today

1. That we permit corporations to advertise to children during children’s television programming. Someone is going to burn in hell for a long, long time, while trying to explain why he thought there was nothing wrong with trying to trick an eight-year-old into giving his money to General Foods or Nabisco or Hasbro. Then a host of other people will have to explain why they had a fit over Janet Jackson’s breast but didn’t mind at all that their children saw 25,000 commercials before they spent an hour in school.

2. Government subsidies (often in the form of tax breaks, which is nothing more than a disguised subsidy) to big business corporations while claiming that programs that benefit the poor create dependencies and constitute a “hand-out”. Some Republicans actually argue that an increase in the minimum wage will hurt the poor because it will force those strapped employers to lay off staff.

3. Free Trade. Free Trade is good. It absolutely astounds me that the press report, at face value, the government’s protestations that it is in favor of free trade when, in fact, it is wildly enmeshed in a host of protectionist measures, and the subsidization of agricultural and other industries.

4. Capital Punishment: there is no way to do it right because it always involves hatred and it always involves a conscious act by a government to take away life. How barbarian, really, are we?

5. The quality of television programming. I don’t think anybody even pretends, any more, that broadcasters will ever do any better than the load of crap they deliver to us every day. And it isn’t even enough that they deliberately produce utterly contemptible smut and call it “entertainment”: they also have to interrupt it every ten minutes to run ads which, unimaginably, are even more mind-numbing. Even worse, none of the major networks show any serious documentaries on anything.

6. Psychotropic drugs. Look around the room at any party. If you could ask all of the people on prescription medicines for depression or anxiety to put up their hands, you might be surprised. Surprised because you can’t remember when our society decided that instead of pursuing happiness and peace of mind we would just drug everyone. But that, in fact, is what we do. We never announced it. We never formally commenced a “program”. We did it quietly, circumspectly, discretely. The result is the same. All of us are on happy pills. We’re all on soma.

7. Third World Debt. You can argue as much as you want about teaching those people a little bit of responsibility– that’s like a 300 pound adult man beating up an eight-year-old kid in order to teach him some “responsibility”. The truth is, we are picking the pockets of the poor. The poor pay us. We wring our hands and send piddly little donations to make ourselves feel better, but the bottom line is that the poor send us more money than we send them because we are stronger and we can make them, and that’s the ugly truth.

8. The contracts the Recording Industry Association of America has been allowed to foist upon young talent.

9. Absurd awards for “pain and suffering” given out by American juries for victims of corporate malfeasance. The juries seem to be under the quaint illusion that stockholders of the recalcitrant corporations will reach into their own pockets to pay these awards. The big sub-scandal here: lawyers taking 30% or more of these awards even when they are in the millions or tens of millions.

10. Media concentration of ownership.

11. Government subsidy of professional sports stadiums.

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Wedding Videos

Have you looked at a “cutting-edge” wedding video lately? It looks a bit like Tarantino crossed with Fellini. “My Wedding Day 1/2”.

What might be going on is the same process that happened to “art” at the end of the 19th century. For about 2000 years, the goal of painting seemed to be to replicate, as accurately as possible, the image of something. A lot of technical break-throughs, like the use of perspective, the development of different paints and mediums, were the result of artists struggling to unlock the secrets of making a painting look real. Popularly, art functioned like early photography, as record-keeping, information transmittal: here’s a portrait of the pope– in other words, this is what he looks like.

Once photography began to replace that function, artists began to change their styles, and the meaning of art changed. Van Gogh’s sunflowers don’t tell you about what sunflowers look like, but what he felt like looking at them. Monet’s famous pond got more and more abstract as he immersed himself more and more deeply into his backyard.

Professional artists had to find something new to distinguish themselves from hacks and photographers. The hacks continued to try to paint representational images, or, worse, narrative. They were regarded as uncool (like Norman Rockwell). Same with photography: now that anyone can take decent, well-lit, and auto-focused pictures, what’s cool? Out of focus, blurry, badly coloured prints. I can’t wait ’til they start selling instamatic cameras again– to professionals.

In the same way, now that almost anybody can buy a video camera and can master the basics of using a tripod, the “professionals” have to find something new to distinguish themselves from amateurs and hacks. So they imitate film journalists from war zones, and documentarists and Dogma95.

I’m not saying it can’t be used well. I would say, though, that when it is used “for effect”, when a tripod is perfectly available and appropriate, that it has gotten silly.

When a style gets carried too far, as in, arguably, modern art, it becomes ridiculous and irrelevant. The most absurd thing I saw in the last year was a wedding video that featured a wobbly camera, sepia-toned segments, dust and scratches, fast-cutting action sequences, out-of-focus zooms—– it was hilarious. All of these shots taken not in the heat of action, but in the bride’s backyard, and all the scenes were posed. They were phony. But the guy who made it thought he was a genius, and, if I remember correctly, so did the Association of Wedding Videographers which gave him a prize. Probably, so did the bride, whose friends probably took one look at it and — this is America, folks– promptly demanded that their wedding videos be out-of-focus, black and white, dirty, hairy, and wobbly. Why not just hire a drunk?

Anyone remember the sequence in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” where that is exactly what happens? A film-maker is hired to do a bar mitzvah. He is an alcoholic, and seriously demented. He produces a bizarre montage of scenes from the holocaust, an actual circumcision, and various other weird shots– avant garde film-making at it’s “finest”– intercut with scenes of the actual bar mitzvah. At the end, the crowd of family members sit in stunned silence. Painful seconds tick by…. until a rabbi perks up: “I thought it was edifying”. Then they all leap up and applaud, and Duddy gets all the new customers he can handle.

I happen to think that most– not all, but most– current hand-held camera work is ridiculous and annoying. It’s a bad imitation of artists who might have had a good reason for using that style at the time, but those reasons don’t exist in someone’s backyard on their wedding day. Why not just go handheld, without deliberately shaking all over? In ten years, I think it will look damn silly.

By the way, Stanley Kubrick used it for action sequences in one of the greatest films ever made “Dr. Strangelove” (1963), and rarely used it again. That puts it well ahead of “Hill St. Blues” and “MTV”.

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The V-Chip Fraud

The fraud of the v-chip is that it only blocks violence or sex. It doesn’t block the most insidious type of television programming of all: advertising.

Joseph Lieberman voted in favor of the V-chip, because he likes to think of himself as a “family values” type of guy. But this is the essence of “family values” politicians. They can claim to be standing up to those insidious mythical enemies of the family out there because they don’t really threaten the status quo. They can be pro-life and pro-family and pro-prayer and pro-morality, because these all cost them nothing. They can criticize rap music and violent Hollywood movies because rap musicians and movie directors don’t give them big fat checks for their re-election campaigns.

…Think about it. Is there anybody out there– other than the weirdos way, way out on the fringe– who are not in favor of something like “family values”?

Now let’s consider a position that might reduce corporate profits somewhere. How do you feel about prescription drug prices, Mr. Lieberman? How about closing some of those unnecessary military bases the channel so much cash into congressmen’s home districts?

And, Mr. Lieberman really had any guts, he’d also be in favor of what I call the “c” chip, which would give parents an option of filtering out all the ads that are designed to turn their children into credit-crunching, heartless, mindless consumer zombies.

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Lies and Damn Lies

I had always thought that the reason advertisers target mostly young adult viewers is because they have the most disposable income. I don’t think that’s really true. I think people in their 40’s actually have more money to spend. The real reason is because young adults still have a sliver of a smidgeon of a tiny little particle of belief that what advertisers are telling them is true. I know the feeling, just as sometimes I can remember what it was like to be an adolescent boy and to have fantasies of power or great suffering or genius. After a while you grow up, but not everybody grows up, and not everybody thinks the same thing makes you grown up.

You know that most ads lie or exaggerate but it just might be possible, you think, that this one product or service or whatever will gratify some desire or another. Sometimes you even ignore advice that you know is good. You just need it. You just need to try it. You buy it and, inevitably, it disappoints. You store up that information. By the time you are about 40, you are inured. You are immune to the scam. And advertising no longer works.

We’re the only culture in the world that has grown up bombarded incessantly by millions and millions of lies. We allow it. We are shameless. And I am pretty sure that most people, as with most things, tend to think it could never be otherwise. This is our system, our culture, our economy. There are a lot of things we like about our lifestyles– we wouldn’t want to throw it all away by trying something radical. So we abide the lies.

So I sat there one day and tried to imagine a world in which most advertisers had some kind of moral feeling about truth and decided that they would try to make their ads as reasonably accurate as possible. In a world like this, really lousy products would not survive because no one would agree to advertise them. But most of the products we see around us would probably still be around us. We just wouldn’t be under great illusions about what they can do for us.

So, again, imagine a world in which most of what you hear and see is generally true.

It will blow you mind. It’s a freaking wild concept. The biggest difference is that it would matter. You would care about stuff you hear. You might react. You might take it to heart. You might be moved occasionally.

When something really important came along, it would sound really important, and you would believe it was really important.

We might find out that there are a lot of things we’d like to change about our lives, because we know the truth about our chances of eventually winning the lottery or looking like Katie Holmes or Brad Pitt. We would know that this is what we are and we have to live with.

Truth

A TV production company approaches your airline company. Imagine you are the president of this company. The TV Production company wants to tape your staff in action, your pilots, your stewardesses, your customer service representatives. Nothing is out of bounds. They want to record what it is like to travel on your airplanes.

Your first question is, can we control what you show on TV? We can cut whatever we don’t like, right?

The answer is no.

You say no way, right?

That’s what most U.S. airlines did. They probably thought to themselves, are you crazy? They could show anything! They should customers complaining and saying that they will never fly your airline again!

But Southwest Airlines in the U.S. said yes. And they really had no control over the content. They were not pleased, for example, when the program showed that they charge fat passengers for two seats. They would have preferred that that little episode stayed on the cutting room floor.

But some smart people in the pr department of Southwest Airlines prevailed and the program was made. They gambled on the idea that people are not children, that they can understand reality, and that they will have more respect for an airline that is “transparent” than for one that tries to hide all of their faults.

I think they’re right. I hope they’re right. The jury is still out, but I’m betting that their sales increase and pretty soon all the big airlines will want a piece of the action.

Note: the program was based on a similar program that has been airing in Britain for 6 years.

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Television: “24”

Okay, this show is supposed to take place in real-time, over a 24-hour period. Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack something, some kind of anti-terrorist squad leader. A black presidential candidate in Los Angeles on the eve of the primary is allegedly the target of an assassination plot. Off we go.

Is the black senator Republican or Democrat? Unlike “West Wing”, “24” doesn’t have the guts to risk alienating the other 50%, so we have the ludicrous scenario of politicians who never once talk about any politics. Even more ludicrous is the idea of a black Senator. That is science fiction.

We find out that Jack turned in some of his own people for bribery. That’s why some of his own staff don’t like him. This firmly establishes one of the most prevalent and ludicrous precepts of American public mythology: only an annoying and self-righteous individual can ever effect any good in society. Teams suck. Cooperation is bad. Collaboration doesn’t work.

He is called in by his boss because one of their agents in some foreign country found out about the assassination plot.

First problem. This is real time, right? So Jack’s daughter, Kimberly, says good night at about 1 minute into the first hour. About four minutes later, Jack and his wife Teri discover that Kimberly is missing. (She snuck out with friend Janet York to see some guys.) They logically assume that she ran out, but less than five minutes later Jack is already calling her former boyfriend to ask if she is there.

She travels fast, this girl.

Kimberly tells the guy, Rick, that her father is dead. (He’s not, yet.)

Hand-held camera. This is an affectation, not a style. It’s like mannerism, and exaggeration of technique for it’s own sake. It’s stupid. Do they hire incompetent camera men for this effect? Or do they train their camera men to wobble and wiggle with the camera?

At 12 minutes in, Jack is phoning a friend at the police department to ask if he could do Jack a favor and keep an eye out for his daughter. And the reasonable cop says, what, are you nuts? She’s been missing for 10 minutes! Of course not. He says, I’ll get right on it. Your daughter has been missing for ten minutes and I’ll drop what I’m doing and start prowling Los Angeles to see if I can find her.  Because I have nothing else to do at the moment.

Coincidentally, Jack’s commanding officer, ___ discovers that someone inside “the agency” may be involved in the plot. Rather, he discovers that he’d like to have Jack investigate the question at that particular moment.

District Director Mason is supposed to brief Jack about something. Jack finds out he’s lying, so he shoots him with a tranquilizer dart. I’m not kidding. Nina helps Jack because obviously she’s sexy and is in love with him. Jack relates that when some evil person named Phillip D’Arcee’ or something was “taken down”, $200,000 disappeared. He suspects Mason took it. Convention number 2: evil people never come from Indiana or Iowa or Kansas. They come from France.

Nina approaches Tony to hack into a bank account in Spain for Jack. Tony doesn’t like Jack, especially because he likes Nina and she is perversely in love with Jack.

Jack approaches Jamie and asks her if she can hack into all the passwords associated with a telephone number. She says, “if you have a warrant”. Jack doesn’t but in American television mythology all the heroic men break the rules all the time and, unlike the FBI or CIA, never for bad reasons and they never inadvertently invade the privacy of innocent people or cause sure-convictions to be thrown out because they violated the suspects’ rights.

In television land, these men are never wrong. We nod approvingly. Can’t let the law and civil rights get in the way of stopping crime, by golly. Here, “24” embraces the lamest, most boring television cliché.

Jamie is a genius because she has invented a way of jumping a signal through the phone lines onto a computer hard drive and then de-encrypting a user’s password. She doesn’t say, “maybe I can”, or “sometimes I can”, or “it depends on what kind of security they have and what kind of operating system and how they stored their passwords”. No, she can just do it. She does brain surgery as a hobby, on the side.

As it turns out, Jack wants the passwords because they belong to his daughter. She is out of the house for 27 minutes and her parents are already, successfully, breaking into her private e-mail.

The Presidential candidate, Palmer, takes a call from “Maureen”, a television reporter, after midnight. Do you think Presidential candidates– senators– take calls directly from someone identified as a reporter after midnight? It turns out the reporter has a juicy allegation to report– but Senator Palmer is not told this before he agrees to answer the phone. This is another example of how 24 doesn’t really achieve the look and feel of reality.

Kimberly checks her cell phone and sees that her mother has left five messages. She tells her friends, having not had sex yet with Rick, that she intends to go home. I can guess what’s coming. She is now being established as a “good” girl. She didn’t have sex. She is sensitive to her mother’s feelings. She is suddenly more prudent than she has been all evening, and even shows reluctance to accept a ride with the guys home. I smell victimization coming up, big time. We would be less sympathetic to her if she had sex with the boy, like her friend Janet did.  That would prepare the viewer for a dire fate: she deserved it.

The French photographer, Martin, and Andy try to join the mile-high club. Andy says why don’t we get together in LA. He says he’s going to be very busy. Upon leaving the bathroom, Andy says, “see ya” even though they sit beside each other and are likely to get reacquainted fairly soon.

Jack confronts Mason over the missing $200,000. Tony has traced the money to Mason’s account. Jack uses this information to blackmail Mason into telling him the source of the information about the hit on Senator Palmer. Unfortunately, since Jack has no way of verifying this information, it’s a little ridiculous for him to assume that Mason has given him accurate information.

Insanely, Jack asks Nina to “cover” for him. We are given to understand that an anti-terrorism squad, responding to a threat on a presidential candidate’s life, can spare a leading member for a while? And he can be “covered” for by a sympathetic co-worker? Well, after all, he hasn’t seen his daughter for 35 minutes now.

Meanwhile– everything in this show is “meanwhile”– Andy has planted a bomb, blown an escape hatch, and exited the 747. Now we know why she said “see yah”. A bomb she leaves behind blows it up. Tony alerts Jack: a 747 just exploded. In real life, I suspect that initial reports would be “a 747 disappeared”, and then, “a 747 crashed”, and then, after a few hours at least, “police suspect an explosion of some kind” or “some witnesses reported seeing a fireball” or something. A few days later: “police now suspect that a bomb may have exploded on board the 747”. But 24 is economical with it’s time: in just minutes, Tony is reporting to Jack that a 747 has crashed and we already know the cause.

I’m griping, sure. 24 is fairly compelling as drama because the principal characters are somewhat interesting and the story has laid out a large number of hooks: the lost daughter gone astray, the possibly corrupt senator, the senator’s suspicious wife, the honest cop, the crooked cop. Geez, now that I list them all– how many cliché’s exactly does it take to do “ground-breaking” drama?

All the makers of the show have to do is get you to care enough about these people to sit through 20 minutes of obscene commercials and tune in next week.

The most fun part of shows like this, and movies like “Gran Torino”, is the fantasy of having it both ways. You can be as stupid and rude and violent as you want, and within the fantasy of the show, you will still be loved.

[Update 2022-07-28]   I was way too generous here — I was afraid of hurting the feelings of some people I knew who were enamored of the show.  “24” really was pure dreck, and fascist to boot (by which I mean that it glorified violent, illegal police tactics, including torture).

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The Televisionization of the Internet

You probably don’t think of our society as Totalitarian. A Totalitarian society is a society that is rule by a pernicious doctrine to which all societal functions must be subordinated to one exclusive purpose.

By golly, we’re free to live as we choose, in our society. Aren’t we?

Suppose I wanted to come up with a new type of communication network that combined the functionality of the telephone, television, and radio, into one powerful medium, with one small proviso. The proviso is this: no commercial use of the medium is allowed. None whatsoever. No advertising, no selling, no profiteering. The system would be created and run by volunteers only.

There’s a lot of technical obstacles, of course. But probably not as many as you think. But there is one overwhelming obstacle: our society is totalitarian and will not stand for a non-commercial communications network.

Think that analysis is a little extreme? No television network will allow Adbusters to run their advertisements criticizing advertisers and the consumerist lifestyle. They won’t accept the money, they won’t run the ads. You can sell gas-guzzling cars, unproven pharmaceutical products, and booze, and even scantily-clad women, but you can’t challenge the fundamental religion of our society: consumerism.

And now the internet. When it started, it was beautiful, free, clean, and amazing. Have you browsed around the net lately? All you see is advertising, on every single damn site. And if you aren’t seeing advertising on the site itself, you are getting whacked via e-mail, or in the browser frames, or with pop-up windows.

You might think it’s merely a case of a lot of internet users deciding to try to make a few bucks. But that’s not all it is. Why on earth should your browser permit a pop-up ad? Why should it enable such a function? Why should it be difficult or impossible to turn off that function? Microsoft and Netscape design the browsers. They have incorporated features into the browser to guarantee that you will be whacked every time you go on the internet.

And Microsoft has designed the operating system to encourage the user to become a passive drooling idiot, gushing over the little animations and sound effects playing on his computer, while relinquishing control over his eyeballs and ears to the corporate politburos of America.

The internet is the largest single source of pollution. It is so bad, that for the first time since I first went “on-line” way back in the early 1990’s, I am seriously considering getting off.

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Aaron Sorkin’s “West Wing”

“The West Wing” may well be one of the best shows on television right now. I don’t know for sure. I’m not qualified to judge. I can’t stand to watch more than fifteen minutes of most television anyway. Except on Wednesday nights, at 9:00 p.m. I am willing to put up with 20 minutes of ads to watch the latest episode of “The West Wing”. I am even more willing to download commercial-free versions from the internet. God bless piracy.

I do scan tv now and then. I don’t pay rapt attention, but I have watched a few episodes of ER and I’ve sat in on “Friends” a few times, and I actually enjoyed “Seinfeld” regularly. The only shows I’ve liked over the past few years have been “The Simpsons”, “The West Wing”, and “Malcolm in the Middle”, which, bless their hearts, runs without a laugh track. “The Sopranos” looks really good but I can never remember when it is on. As for “Friends”, please, please, please get rid of the laugh track. It’s an insult to your intelligence when such lame comedy is lavished with so much audience hilarity. It is the producers of the show laughing at their own bad jokes.

The West Wing is a good show. It is shamelessly political and topical and intelligent. It shamelessly worships intelligence, which is astonishing for a culture that more typically worships anti-intellectualism. The girl always falls for the sincere dolt and rejects the prissy genius.

It is shockingly liberal in outlook, to a degree. Actually, it would be more accurate to label the show “Democrat”–in the sense of being sympathetic to the Democrat political platform–than truly liberal. It’s Blair and Clinton, not Eugene McCarthy or Trudeau. It’s that phony liberalism that feels shameful about the idealist tendencies in some progressives. Sorkin doesn’t want to be accused of muddle-headed bleeding heart pacifism. Nor does he really want to believe that America is not fundamentally the greatest nation on earth.

After watching a lot of episodes, you begin to realize that Sorkin doesn’t really know very much about the world outside of America. Every foreign crisis dramatized in West Wing has the feel of a CNN report filtered through Oprah Winfrey with Barbra Streisand as guest commentator. A long discussion of health care issues failed even once to refer to the most obvious model of socialized health care in Canada.

It’s well-written, well-acted, and well-filmed. Some of the “ground-breaking” techniques (well, “ground-breaking” only if you never saw “Hill Street Blues” in your life) have grown a bit tiresome, and most of the characters do tend to sound a lot alike. The Steadicam shots should be retired– it’s been parodied brilliantly and accurately by MAD TV and a parody that deadly should be heeded.

West Wing won an Emmy in 2000 but Sorkin was criticized by writer Rick Cleveland for hogging all the credit. Sorkin refused to allow Cleveland to come to the podium with him to accept the award even though the story that won the Emmy for Sorkin was based on Cleveland’s father, who was a homeless Korean war vet. Sorkin went on-line in a chat room to trash Cleveland and claimed that he didn’t deserve the Emmy for the episode, though the Writer’s Guild, which sets the rules in these kinds of disputes, certified that he did. The episode– a good one– concerned a Korean War Vet who died homeless, wearing a coat Toby had donated to Goodwill. Toby made Herculean efforts to see that the man was given a proper military funeral to honor his selfless sacrifice. Sorkin’s curiously muddled but rapt devotion to the military was front and centre in this episode.

The good “liberal” President Bartlett displays conspicuous reverence for his generals– and he ought to– on “West Wing”, they are efficient, rational, prudent, and wise. Gosh. Not at all like the real life Curtis Lemay or Westmoreland.

The generals in “West Wing” treat a liberal Democratic president with respect because he’s tough enough to order assassinations and preparations for armed intervention at the slightest provocation. This is old nonsense– this defensive phony liberalism sees it’s shining emblems in tolerance for gays and feminists, good funding for schools, and preservation of wilderness areas, but, by golly we’re not pussies: if there’s killing that needs doing, we’ll do it.

Nobody on the White House staff, in “West Wing”, seems aware of anything America has ever done wrong in the Middle East or Asia or Latin America. They are stunningly unaware of earlier American involvements in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Pathetically, Donna flushes with excitement at meeting a military aide played by Christian Slater. Something about that uniform, I guess. Wow. That may well have been the lowest moment for a good show.  I happen to believe there really are a lot of Donna’s in the world– but their love of men in uniform is ridiculous, not noble.

The best? The unusual character of Ainsley Hayes, a Republican lawyer, hired by Bartlett to work in the office of the White House Counsel. Bartlett wanted her after seeing the diminutive cute blonde humiliate Sam in a debate on network television. Emily Proctor, who played Haynes, was a find. It’s too bad they didn’t find more to do for this character– creating the unfortunate impression that she was a token character, intended only to deceive viewers into thinking the writers were more broad-minded than they really were.

That brings me to the worst episode of West Wing, the premiere episode of 2001, which supposedly came to grips with the terrorist attack on the WTC. Sorkin’s characters, in most episodes, have amazing command of even the most obscure facts and figures on the most diverse topic. But in trying to explain why terrorists hate America to a group of talented high school students touring the White House, not a single one of them, not Toby, or Sam, or CJ, or Josh, could remember an insignificant detail like the coups in Iran or Guatemala or Chile, or the embargo against Cuba, or the bombing of Cambodia, or the installation of pro-American dictators in Iran and Iraq, or the way we used Afghanistan to help bring down the Soviet Union, and then abandoned them to the fangs of the Taliban, or the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank, or the Viet Nam War.

No, if you were to believe Sorkin, those terrorists hate us because we are free, and because we are prosperous and successful, and they’re really just envious.

Even worse, the high school students themselves– one craved for even a single rebellious mind in the lot of them– asked simpering embarrassing softball questions. Could not Sorkin at least have put one independent, incisive mind among these supposed honor students? For the all the world, they sounded like unduly reverent acolytes, groveling at the feet of their karmic masters. Haven’t any of them ever read Noam Chomsky? Could there not have been one student whose parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Egypt or Syria or something, who had a different perspective? It was shameful.

Sorkin didn’t have to argue that America deserved to be attacked– but it was astonishing that he tried (and succeeded) to get away with suggesting that there was no reason at all for the attacks.

That’s not the issue. The issue is why do so many Arabs and others around the world think that America is a bully? The point is that their reasons for hating the U.S. are founded in real historical actions that resulted from very real, sometimes mistaken or bad, U.S. policy.

The episode was an unmitigated disaster, artistically and thematically. It was an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.

This weird blind spot in Sorkin’s liberalism– he’s obviously liberal on many social issues, like homosexuality and women’s rights– also shows up in Toby and CJ’s tirades against middle eastern Islamic regimes that abuse women. They’re right about the moral issue but they seem blissfully unaware of the fact that the U.S. itself is partly responsible for these regimes. They talk as if the U.S. has been consistently preaching liberal democracy to Syria and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and to Iran under our protégé, the Shah, and that wicked Islamists suddenly came along one day and drove our kindly diplomats out the country and instituted Sharia. It’s a cheap attempt to say, we can be just as militaristic and confrontational as the Republicans because we are liberals– not in spite of the fact that we are liberals.

There might or might not be a political case to be made for the Shah of Iran and American support for a regime that repressed and tortured their own citizens so we could have cheap oil for our oversized cars, but it could not and should not have been ignored, and the apparent sudden and complete ignorance of Toby et. al. of the history of U.S. involvement with Arab regimes was inexcusable.

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JAGged Little Pill

According to the New York Times (March 31, 2002), the television program “JAG” (I’ve never watched it) has become a mouthpiece for the Pentagon, lovingly rendering noble soldiers and officers wisely and bravely enacting foreign policy on behalf of an adoring citizenry.

Star David Elliot says, “we send our scripts to our liaison and they weigh in on it,” he said, referring to Paul Strub, the Pentagon’s liaison with the entertainment industry. Mr. Elliott said the show hesitated to anger its Pentagon contacts, “because they certainly lend a great deal of production value that we couldn’t buy.” That “production value” is government funded military installations and equipment that are used in the series.

“JAG” reflects the pro-military sensibility of Mr. Bellisario, 66, a former staff sergeant in the Marines. He said that he believed military tribunals, not an international court, were the best way to mete out justice to terrorists, and that he wanted to show that such tribunals would not be kangaroo courts.

“I want to show people that the tribunals are not what many people feared they would be, which is that they would be nothing more than a necktie party, that they would have no foundation in law, that this was a way of taking these people and killing them,” Mr. Bellisario said. “I wanted to show that we still have a system of justice.” Personally, though, he said he believed “they should all be taken out and blown up.”

The JAG episode thrills viewers with a tribunal lynching party of a real Qaeda implicated in the WTC bombing. In real life, we haven’t caught a single suspect yet. Not one. Most of them, apparently, escaped into Pakistan where General Musharraf (98% approval rating in the latest “poll”) pretends to be trying to round them up, while testing nuclear missiles to use on India.

At $62 billion, the most expensive fruitless prosecution in history.

But what really concerns me is this. Bush is the Republican President, a member of the party that believes that welfare is a corrosive handout that increases lassitude and dependency, and that the government should stay out of business let the free enterprise system work it’s magic unencumbered.

So why are they subsidizing Hollywood movies and television programs like JAG? It’s a bailout. It’s propaganda. It’s a government handout. It’s created dependencies and laziness and lassitude. Make those entertainment moguls get off their fat butts and build their own sets and special effects! Stop these massive government hand-outs and subsidies immediately, so that the taxpayer’s money can be used for legitimate purposes. Like building more prisons.

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Robert Reed

In 1954, the actor, Robert Reed, married Marilyn Rosenberg. They were divorced, after a daughter, years later. Reed went on to have a rather undistinguished but durable career in the entertainment industry. If you think that means he had talent, you should try getting a first novel published. You never know.

Robert Reed, of course, was Dad Brady, the head of the most wholesome reconstituted family on television.

He was also gay, and he died of AIDS.

You know why it is so ironic that “The Brady Bunch” is one of the favorite shows of the Christian Right, don’t you?

Because it displays wholesome values?

Because none of the characters ever swear or have premarital sex?

Because it subtly but directly supports capitalism, in it’s wholesome evocation of all-American values like thrift and employment?

No. Actually, none of those values are particularly ironic, in this context.

No, it’s because Mike Brady and his wife never, ever spanked their kids. Never. Not once. Never ever ever.

Think about it. Isn’t it really strange that the most wholesome family show in the history of television sitcoms never shows the parents spanking their children? Yet, a lot of conservative Christians go absolutely ballistic at the idea that they should not beat their kids. And they adore “Brady Bunch”.

Would it bother them to see Reed flip little Cindy over his knee, drop her britches, and give her a good whopping? How do fundamentalists feel about spanking on the bare bum? Is that going too far? But if we decide that spanking on a bare bottom is going too far– well, isn’t that just the thin edge of the wedge, the start of the slippery slope, leading to tolerance and relativism and feminism and then…. gasp!

Homosexuality!

It’s too late!