Tag: West Wing

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West Wing: Sorkin’s Soft Spot For Militarists

I love “West Wing”. It is one of a handful of television dramas (“The Bold Ones”, “Hill Street Blues”, the first seasons of “St. Elsewhere” and “Mad Men” ) that was worth watching for it’s artistic value alone. It is, at times, brilliant; it’s always at least very good (at least up to the fifth season). It is occasionally — very occasionally– annoying. We’re hardest on the ones we love, aren’t we?

Bartlet is allegedly a liberal, and he generally holds liberal positions on most social and some fiscal issues. In fact, the show makes a point of Bartlet– unlike Clinton and Obama in real life– actually standing firm for certain enlightened, tolerant, liberal positions, instead of compromising in order to cut deals with red state Democrats or Republicans.

Real liberals, however, don’t have a lot of reverence for the military. They might or might not believe that the military and the police are necessary, but it’s a regrettable necessity, and real liberals can’t not be conscious of the fact that the culture of the military is decidedly anti-liberal. Real liberals want to make the world safe for wimps. Real liberals recognize that the culture of authoritarian militarism is a self-sustaining model for violence and repression.

But Sorkin’s projection, President Bartlet, is a post-Reagan Democrat. Post-Reagan Democrats like Clinton and Obama realized that to get elected, you had to outflank the republicans on law and order and guns and the death penalty. So Bartlet sucks up to the military.

I think it is a desperate attempt by a thin-skinned liberal to prove to the world that he is not a pussy.

Why it matters to Sorkin, that Bartlet is not perceived as a pussy, is beyond me. It’s obviously a touchy issue, for it is handled on “West Wing” with this awkward, prissy bravado, as if Sorkin wants to make sure that no one suspects for even one moment that he isn’t willing to kill lots of people if it’s helpful to American interests, because, God bless us, we’re Americans. Behind that bravado can only be the absolutely godless and anti-liberal assumption that an American life is inherently more valuable than an Arab or French or African life.

In the episode entitled “What Kind of Day has it Been”, an American fighter pilot patrolling the no-fly zone over Iraq (part of the peace conditions after the first U.S. – Iraq War under Bush I) is shot down. Bartlett goes all mushy with concern about the pilot, his family, his pet hamster and goldfish, and at one point announces that if anything happens to this pilot he will invade Baghdad. He says this with great sterninity and gravitas. I am not a pussy.

No real person like this — Bartlet, at this moment– exists. A real liberal would have already been considering whether it would be wise to start an entire war requiring the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to get back at a man for causing the death of one American pilot. But Bartlet is, at that moment, utterly a projection of Sorkin’s insecurities about his liberalism: they might not think I’m manly!

Sorkin’s fussy compensatory projections emerge quite regularly, often expressed as awestruck respect for Secret Service Agents and Generals. The awful part of this is that some liberals, knowing that Sorkin is an enlightened liberal himself, might conclude that most military men really are quite sane and rational and, well, just so damn manly.

The most evil moment of this Sorkinese perspective came in Episode 72 (“Election Night”) when Donna fell hard for Christian Slater as an uber-manly military aide. Oh my gawwdd– he’s just so hot! At least, compared to the thoughtful and compassionate Josh Lyman. But then, Donna spent much of the first season complaining about having to pay taxes. West Wing’s incipient Tea Party leader.

At a meeting in the situation room to discuss the downed pilot, a member of the “individuals in suits who sit in the situation room to make it look like an important situation has developed group” lamely suggests they pursue diplomatic channels instead of considering a military rescue. Leo, oozing with manly testosterone, castrates the man with rusty nail-clippers. We are not prissy little pinafore-waving dilettantes! Not we! And, after all, this is an AMERICAN life at stake. But Sorkin betrays his double-standard: this straw man arguing for negotiation is a preposterous caricature of a liberal’s projection of what a conservative thinks a liberal sounds like. Follow me? And he is provided to us precisely so Leo and Bartlet can look manly by contrast, even though they are in favor of health care.

I admire Sorkin’s ability to present both sides of most hot political issues with credibility and conviction. There is a case to be made for a strong military response to certain events, to lower taxes, and to strong security. But why is he so afraid to show us the Donald Rumsvelds, the Richard Perles, the Westmorelands, the Gulf of Tonkins, the faked intelligence, the paranoid crypto-fascists, the torturers (who all came out of the woodwork– you think from nowhere?– during the Bush Administration)? It’s a glaring omission, especially since Sorkin is so careful to show us the faults in the liberal true-believers. I am convinced he doesn’t want to be accused of being a being what used to be called a “bleeding heart” liberal.

It’s all a grand tribute to how TV and Hollywood works– we all love to look rational and enlightened and compassionate but when the rubber hits the road, we are brutes and killers and always will be.

Sorkin’s other soft spot…

Is Sorkin, like so many other Hollywood celebrities, in therapy? In episode “Noel” (Season 2), Josh Lyman has a episode Sorkin must have snatched right from the dime-store psychology section. Lyman is anxious, easily angered, tense, nervous, and he can’t relax. Instead of going to a Talking Heads Concert,  he yells at the President. He cuts his hand. Leo orders him to see a psychologist, Dr. Stanley Keyworth. Keyworth can only be described as godlike, in his infinite wisdom and patience. He is the ultimate projection of every psychotherapist’s wettest dreams. He is also, in his absolute conviction that he is fit to judge the sanity of other people, the most arrogant character ever to appear on West Wing.

We are asked to believe that Josh didn’t notice that it was a window, not a glass that he broke with this fist– repression!– and that whenever music plays he actually hears sirens, or at least his subconscious interprets the music as sirens, or thinks that it sounds like sirens which subconsciously reminds him of real sirens— whatever. The smugness with which Dr. Stanley asserts these things, and the creepy way Josh goes Bedford in response (after the cliché-ridden resistance phase has passed), practically crawling on his hands and knees and licking Dr. Keyworth’s boots, was a low point of season 2. I mean, really, really low.

Even more creepily, Sorkin glibly presents Stanley with the power to label Josh as PTSD and, if he wanted to remove him from the White House staff, and even have him institutionalized, all on the basis of and with the only authority of his so-called “expertise”.

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How to Attend to an Emergency, Mr. President

In the tenth episode of Season 1, “In Excelsis Deo”, of West Wing, President Bartlet is entertaining a group of school children in the White House at a Christmas Celebration when urgent news arrives concerning the health of a gay youth who had been beaten nearly to death (obviously based on the Matthew Shepherd murder).

An aide approaches Bartlet as he is speaking to the children and whispers in his ear. Bartlet, cool as could be, tells the children that one of the parts of his job is to attend to emergencies from time to time. He leaves them for a moment and goes off with the aide who fills him in. He makes a few comments and then returns to the children.

This episode was filmed in 1999, two years before 9/11.

I have heard people defend President Bush’s performance on 9/11 by saying it was quite reasonable for him to continue sitting there, looking painfully at a loss, for seven minutes after an aide had informed him about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. It’s odd that Aaron Sorkin, merely creating a fictional situation for his tv series, thought the President would do what Bartlet did, so smoothly and confidently, in that episode. At the time I saw it, of course, I barely noticed it. It was only after viewing Season 1 again, years later, that I was struck by the uncanny resemblance of the fictional scene to what happened in real two years later, and the contrast between what Aaron Sorkin thought the President would do and what Bush actually did. I believe that had Bartlet been a conservative Republican, Sorkin would have had him do the same thing: it’s so simple, so logical, so becoming of the President of the United States.

Just noted.

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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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The West Wing

Just about the only television show I watch semi-regularly nowadays is “West Wing”. And The Simpsons. But let’s stay with “West Wing” for a minute.

I have to note here though that the only reason I don’t watch very much television is not because most television is crap, though it is. The fact is that there is a lot of good shows on television too. The trouble is that there are way too many commercials. Did you know that the Dick Van Dyke Show, in the early 1960’s, was about 28 minutes long? The average sitcom today is about 20 minutes. Where did the other 8 minutes go? You need to ask?

In tonight’s episode of West Wing, the President had to make some fateful decisions about possible military action to rescue hostages in Columbia. The story, which parallels reality rather closely, develops after the government gives Columbia $15 billion to fight the drug trade. After a remarkable speech about the utter futility of the drug war, the waste of money, the 80% of the U.S. prison population that consists of drug users, and so on, the dialogue takes a turn on Viet Nam. One of the President’s top advisors warns that he should not repeat the mistake of Viet Nam, which was… what? What was the mistake? The advisor said the mistake was that the U.S. entered the war on the side of a corrupt and unpopular government, and that it did not have clear objectives, and did not have a clear exit strategy. That was the mistake of the Viet Nam War.

The West Wing is one of the few television shows that really is unabashedly liberal. Don’t believe for one minute all that nonsense from Conservative commentators on the so-called “liberal” media– it simply aint true. West Wing is the exception, not the rule.

But the advisor’s explanation about why the U.S. lost the war in Viet Nam buys into a conservative revisionist position that is itself a desperate attempt to rehabilitate the idea of U.S. subterfuge of foreign governments for its own self-interest.

The Viet Nam War began because the U.S. and France refused to accept the results of an election in 1956 which produced a socialist government of a united Viet Nam. With both French and American encouragement, a group of rebels seized power in the South and created a pro-capitalist regime. When the new regime proved unpopular– after all, the people elected the socialists– the U.S. was forced to step in to support the government, and fight a proxy war against the North Viet Namese government, which, reasonably, was determined to reunite the country.

Where did France go? Those silly Frenchmen! They decided that backing a self-seeking, corrupt, illegitimate government against the popular wishes of its own people was a losing proposition! The fools!

The North did not remain democratic, really, but we don’t know what would have happened if the South had not seceded and the U.S. had not involved itself. It doesn’t really matter– the fact is that the U.S. interfered in the domestic policies of a sovereign state and paid the price for it. That’s why they lost Viet Nam. It had nothing to do with unclear objectives. The objective was, in fact very clear: the maintenance of a pro-American proxy state in the region at whatever cost to civil rights and democracy. The problem was not that the Americans did not have an exit strategy: given the objectives, there was no need for an exit at all. And the problem was not that the government of South Viet Nam was unpopular and corrupt: that was at least partly a consequence of U.S. policy, not an impediment to it. Had the U.S. stayed out, chances are quite good that that corrupt government could never have sustained it’s position.

The writers and producers of “West Wing” should know better.

But it’s a great show. It’s subtle, sophisticated, topical, and relevant. That’s rare in television. What’s even more rare is the overt political nature of the program: it is quite frankly Democrat in perspective. The Democrats should be proud.

The Republicans, if they were really smart, would be working on their own television drama by now. On the other hand, they already have a dozen: Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and just about every other cop show on television. They almost all show that respect for civil rights and the assumption of innocence is an impediment to justice and fairness. They almost all propagandize for unlimited police powers. They almost all feed into the right wing paranoia that has led to the creation of America’s idiotic drug and gun laws.