In recent years some of the creators
of the greatest TV shows in this century, such as Howard Gordon and Vince
Gilligan, have been doing as much apologizing for the series they’ve created as
they have writing new series. They believe that the works of art they created well
before the MAGA movement began may have been one of the major causes of the country
and world we live in today.
In this writer’s opinion they
give themselves too much credit. Television, like all art, is there to be both
a reflection of the world we live and show a mirror up to certain aspects of
our society. Once they’ve created their shows how the viewer chooses to
interpret it is out of their hands and the lessons they take away from it left
to the individual. And as has been the case of art well before television was
even created, audiences are notoriously bad at learning the wrong lessons from
it and interpreting it the way they see fit.
Furthermore as someone who had a
front row seat to so much of this television then and rewatches many of those
series today it is now clear with the benefit of both age and distance that
many, if not the majority, of the dramas that we’re at the center of the first
part of the Golden Age of television, were doing everything in their power to
educate the audiences in subtle ways about the America we were living in and in
their own way can illuminate so much of the country we live in now. It is
because the writers, directors and actors were so extraordinary at providing us
with some of the best entertainment of all time that we understandably didn’t
learn the lessons that so many of them were trying to tell us. That’s not their
fault, either: the major purpose of television is entertainment and escapism.
Analysis is for the critics.
And as I have the unique
experience of being both, I think I can best illustrate some of the lessons
that while they weren’t obvious in the 2000s or even in the early 2010s should
have served as warning signs from these writers of the crises we as a country
were going to face very soon. I think the best way to move forward is try and
learn what lessons they were trying to tell us but that even the critics never
made clear. That’s not their fault, either; they didn’t create social policy.
What this occasional series will
do is take a look at all of the great dramas that aired during the first decade
of the 21st century and see the lessons that so many of these great
shows tried to teach us but we basically chose not to learn. Some of them, I’ll
admit, were almost certainly unintentional on the part of the writers – they couldn’t
see the future any more than we could. But being aware of them now is almost
certainly the only way forward in what is clearly a bleak time for America.
I should also acknowledge that I
refuse to give in to the attitude of so many that we are past the point of no
return for this country. It is an understandable one but it is only when we
give in that it is truly over. Perhaps these shows, however far in the past
they are, can give us something to understand and learn from. I need to believe
that they do.
Part
1: What Two Different Storylines
On The
West Wing and The Wire
Tell
Us About The Rise of the GOP in the
2010s
One of the universal truths of the
dramas of the 2000s was that your friends can be more dangerous to you then
your enemies. It didn’t matter if you were chilling at the Bada Bing, working
at CTU, stranded on an island in the Pacific or were the crew of the Battlestar
Galactica: we learned over and over the people we should trust the most are
more dangerous than an outward threat.
And this lesson was frequently on
display on The West Wing, particularly during the years Aaron Sorkin was
at the helm. Perhaps one of the reasons that there has been so much backlash
from progressives about this series a quarter of a century after it debuted was
because everyone in the Bartlet White House was very aware of this as a
political reality. Everyone from the President done to the secretarial staff
knew this at some level. Indeed the President once mentioned ‘the criticism of
the Christian right and the Hollywood left’ with the same furor.
That is the thing that so many
people on either side of the aisle have never accepted but elected officials
have too. In a way your enemies are simpler to deal with because you know
automatically who they are. For all Sorkin’s effort to make many Republicans
rational over his tenure, he never forgot that this was a Democratic administration
and that the Republicans were the opposition, if not always the enemy. And in
politics you know what your enemy wants to do: get you out of office and they
will do anything necessary.
But the people who are supposed
to be your friends – the various interest groups and coalitions that got you
into office – represent a different kind of danger. And Sorkin was a genius
when he showed that the various parts of the Democratic coalition –
environmentalists, the Congressional black caucus, certain parts of Hollywood –
have
their own agendas that don’t change no matter what party is in power. Indeed, because
they aren’t burdened with the idea of governing they feel free to box the administration
in and then expect blanket support because they feel they are entitled to it. This
is more true with activists then politicians. The West Wing dealt with
this many times but the example for this article will focus on the episode ‘Somebody’s
Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail.”
In the course of the episode, a
group of anti-capitalist demonstrators, mostly students, have essentially taken over DC to protest the
World Trade Organization. The administration is more annoyed that they’re
blocking traffic then that they might be dangerous and they treat them with the
seriousness they deserve. (Sorkin makes it clear there is no rhyme nor reason
to where this group protests: one of the places they are blockading is the
National Geographic Society)
Toby has no use for these
modern-day protesters: “Cops know when and where they’re gonna be and what’s
gonna happen by logging in to their website.” This is an example of the often
performative nature of protest movements which even by 2001 had become the
norm. Leo has assigned Toby to meet with them, mainly out of necessity: he wants
it known that the administration took them seriously and that means meeting
with them. It’s clear that the administrators are amateurs: to get this
agreement, the head of the movement agreed not to have any cameras present. When
Toby hears this he is overjoyed, something that carries him as he gets there
and makes no pretense of hiding from either the security guard assigned or the
ostensible head of the protestors. Because he gave away the cameras, Toby can
now just sit there for three hours and then the administration can say they met
with them – and there will be nothing on CNN showing a White House official
getting taunted by students on stage, which would be a gift to the Republicans heading
into an election year.
Indeed things play out pretty
much as Toby thinks. There is no real order and people just start shouting
obscenities while Toby smokes a cigar. Later in the episode he takes a break
and has a conversation with the security guard who asks him what this is about
and Toby has no problem telling her how stupid he finds these protestors.
He tells her the World Trade Organization
is not bringing about the downfall of capitalism as these protestors are very
sure it is but is a group of 140 countries who agree to specific trade
policies. The benefits include cheaper food, clothes, car and phone services.
It lowers prices and raises incomes. And best of all, it stops wars. All of these
are things, he doesn’t say, that benefit the students who are yelling against
this at the top of their lungs. What he does say about the students is more
telling:
They claim to speak for the underprivileged
but here in the blackest city in America, I’m looking at a room with no black
faces, no Asians, no Hispanics. Where’s the hell’s the Third World they claim
to represent?
Because Sorkin Is Sorkin he has
the security guard immediately undercut Toby: “Lot of Third-Worlders in the cabinet
room today, were there?” But it speaks to a larger truth about the protest movement
which hadn’t changed much since the Vietnam War and it truth hasn’t changed
much today: so much of it is led by well-off college students, the overwhelming
majority are white. This has always undercut so much of the very legitimate
goals of so many of these movements, especially those who argue against capitalism.
The students here are amateurs, essentially playing protest on spring break.
When this is over they can go back to their campus and claim they’ve done part for
equality. They’re not really suffering.
Now for a different perspective
we’re going to a completely different show and even though it takes place just
a couple of hours away from Bartlet’s DC and 2 years after this episode, might as
well be in a different universe. I’m talking about The Wire’s second
season in which so many of the characters in the story are facing the effects
of this globalization but don’t have the time or money to go to DC and protest
it.
I’m not sure that when I first saw
the second season of The Wire at age 24 I truly understood the nuances of
the story that David Simon was trying to tell when he focused the show on the
docks of Baltimore. The first and second time I saw it I was riveting by a
thrilling investigation involving the murders of fourteen sex workers, a story
of how drugs got into Baltimore and the spiral that the writers are
extraordinary at creating. The third time I rewatched it nearly a decade later
I finally understood what Simon was trying to tell the viewers and the deeper
tragedy underneath it.
As fans of The Wire know
the second season is center primarily on Frank Sobotka, played exceptionally by
Chris Bauer. Frank is one of the most tragic and sympathetic characters in the
entire series and not just because his character ends up being killed by the
penultimate episode. Many of the criminals on The Wire are victims of
the system but whereas many of them will be bloodthirsty and monstrous (during
this season Stringer Bell orders the death of D’Angelo Barksdale because of the
threat he might be to the organization down the line) Frank is one of the rare ones
who has never hurt a soul physically in his actions. He has been taking money
and allowing a smuggling operation to go on for years on his docks but he hasn’t
spent any of it on himself, only his union and only a few select members know
it, not the rank and file.
Frank is dealing with the
consequences of globalization and industrialization. The former affects him the
most directly because with manufacturing and jobs being sent overseas his dock
and his union of stevedores have been drying up for years. His members rarely
work and those who are in the know are taking the money to survive and make
ends meet. Frank is spending every dime he gets to keep what few members he has
left in the union (its under 100 by the time the season begins) and the rest of
it to a lobbyist friend on a vain mission to get ‘the canal dredged’. Everything
he is doing is trying to win political capital. He has donated a huge amount of
money to a local church so he can get ‘face time with the Senator’ (at the time
Barbara Milkulski, like Sobotka a fellow Catholic and Polish American)
The latter is the bigger problem
as he sees in a meeting. Mechanization is taking away most of the jobs for
manual labor and in one meeting he sees very clearly that this is the real death
knell for what he’s trying to do. It is in a meeting with his lobbyist friend
that he tells a story of how one summer a container of Tang was dropped and he
and his friends drank it all summer because it was what astronauts drank and “we
all wanted to be astronauts. “You know what I became? A stevedore!”
And that’s the darker tragedy for
the series. We spent season 1 seeing how drugs had destroyed much of the African-American
community and policing. Season 2 makes it clear that the white working class is
facing a similar crisis that is even darker: the blue-collar jobs that were the
backbone of America for so long are drying up and there is nothing to replace
them for those to come. Ziggy Sobotka, Frank’s son who he has neglected in
favor of his union, spends much of the season as a loser but there’s nowhere
else in the world he’d fit. He’s a real victim of the globalization that the
students are protesting on The West Wing but those students would
dismiss him as a loser at first glance
without being bother to talk to him.
Frank has been doing this for
years and likely would have gotten away with even without the containers of
fourteen dead girls had it not been for personal issues. At the start of the
series Stan Valchek, one of the Commissioners in Baltimore, is angered because
a stained-glass window representing the dock workers, financed by Sobotka, has
a prominent place at the church instead of Valchek’s police officer one. He
wonders where his colleague got the money and says he thinks he’s corrupt,
causing the task force that leads the investigation. But there’s no reason to
believe there’s anything there: Sobotka’s the target because Valchek ‘hates his
guts…which in the Southwestern is good enough for probable cause.” Prez (his son-in-law)
makes clear.
And when the investigation turns
out to be bigger and broader than Valchek could have hoped for, he’s more upset
that the investigation has moved beyond Sobotka. There are far worse criminals
in his orbit as we’ve long seen by the time this happens but Sobotka’s real
crime was hurting Valchek’s ego. He doesn’t even care why Sobotka’s doing this
or what he’s doing; he just wants to publicly humiliate him.
Not long before he meets his
untimely end Sobotka confides in his lobbyist friend what is essentially the
central thesis of Season 2:
“You know what the trouble is,
Brucie? We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our
hand in the next guy’s pocket.”
Both of these series show the
reaction to the forces of global capitalism but they couldn’t be more opposed:
it’s impossible to see any of the student protestors knowing someone who works
on the docks in Baltimore, much less be sympathetic to them as victims. They
are upset at what the WTO is doing on a global scale and even that’s only
academic to them. None of them likely have to deal with the grinding poverty
and uncertain economic future that the workers on the dock will have to deal
with very soon, and likely couldn’t see the connection.
Similarly if Frank, or indeed any
of the characters on The Wire, saw the protestors (unlikely as the show
makes it clear how limited their scope is) they would consider them spoiled
brats unsuited to deal with the real world. (McNulty actually makes this point very
clear to a political consultant he tries to date in Season 3, showing the
difference between the world of DC and Baltimore.) Even if there was a movement
like this in Baltimore, it’s unlikely the two worlds would ever cross and
indeed we see this in the opening scene of the season where McNulty, assigned
to the harbor patrolled, has to tow a water taxi filled with the rich past those
very docks and find it all charming.
Now I wanted you to look at what
a blue collar worker, with his options increasingly becoming limited during
this period and after the recession that would make things far worse? Because
two different movements formed not long after. The former, Occupy Wall Street,
was built very much on the ideas of the protests at the WTO but rejected
political influence and was organized by amateurs at an even greater level.
(Sorkin would follow up on this idea with The Newsroom.) The latter, the
so-called Tea Party, told its audience that your jobs have been taken not by
the capitalists and billionaires, but immigrants and that only by voting for
them do you have a chance at salvation.
Based on the second season of The
Wire the movement of blue collar workers towards the GOP and eventually
being seized by MAGA, makes a certain amount of sense. Yes it is in part built
in racism but it is also offering a solution that the marchers in Sorkin’s DC
don’t have anything resembling. If you’re a coalminer in West Virginia or a
steel-worker in Ohio or a dockworker in Maryland and that’s all you and your
family have ever known, you don’t have the kinds of options that all of these
college kids protesting free trade do. Nor is likely you have the means or
methods to work your way up to survive in a service based economy as the
country seems to be moving towards.
Now consider your choices from
2016 on. You have the choice of a Democrats who on her worst day considers you
part of a ‘basket of deplorables’ and on her best goes out of her way to avoid
the states and small towns you frequent. And on the other is a man who tells
you exactly who’s to blame for your lot, goes out of his way to berate all of
the people who have done nothing to help you for years, and tells you if you
vote for him, he will bring jobs back to you and your community.
You might in your heart know that
this man is a liar but you are also desperate and you don’t see any other options.
To paraphrase The Wire, you decide to fight on that lie. And none of the
actions of so many of the left – many of whom are even more fixed in their
thinking then the protestors in Sorkin’s narrative and honestly never much
liked you to begin with – are willing to
feel sympathy for you even now.
It is hard to find hope in this
narrative but it is worth going back to The West Wing. After his
conversation with the security guard – who is very much of the working class –
she says to him: “You make good points. Wouldn’t it be great if someone from
government was here to tell these things to these kids?” Not long after Josh
shows up to pick Toby up and he tells him. “I hate these people with the heat
of a nova, but they deserve to be heard.” He turns around and goes inside to
talk with the people he’s lambasted.
There’s no sign it goes well – at
the end of the episode Josh says he was hit with a potato while he was there –
and its highly unlikely that any of those students came away with their minds
changed as a result of Toby talking to them. But that is not the point of the
story.
The point is, Toby tried. These
were people he absolutely loathed and who he thought were ridiculous but after
contemplation he decided to make the effort. That was one of the larger points
of Sorkin’s narrative that he made clear as early as The American President.
At our core we have to be pragmatic idealists and both are of equal value.
That means being pragmatic in how we try to do policy but idealistic in the
idea that it can still be realized. To the cynics who seem to grow daily that may feel like a lie. But some lies are
worth fighting on, and it is still one I would gladly do so.
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