The fall television season is a good place to start to explain subtle shifts in the political and cultural themes in our society that suddenly appear without discussion or consensus. Yet there they are, imposing a point of view held by the very few to lord over the rest of us.
Take the CBS program, The Unit, starring Dennis Haysbert – who played President Palmer in the show 24 (until he was assassinated; as one wag put it sadly: “He was the best president we ever had.”) Haysbert heads a team of rough and ready counter-intelligence commandoes under the direct and secret command of the president. Each episode juxtaposes Unit missions across the globe with domestic scenes back home on base where the wives, children and girlfriends are under strict orders never to divulge what their husbands, fathers and significant others are up to. In most cases they don’t want to know. The Unit does not mess around in its zeal to protect American interests by any method they choose.
After four installments into the second season this year, all was well with the plot. Then, BAM!, suddenly the show goes politically correct on the home front when one team member and his wife (a lusty wench who last season was conducting a hot affair with the commanding colonel) participate with their daughter in a school play. The daughter’s role is undefined except as narrator – but she is wearing a mustache and dressed as a man – like, who cares what sex I am?
The hot wife plays George Washington as a woman, set off with her commando husband playing Betsy Ross in drag. The narrator/cross-dresser/daughter’s lines went something like: “If George Washington had been a woman, this would be a different country today without warfare.”
Betsy Ross in drag completed the gender transition to emphasize to the kids that sex makes no difference when sewing flags. The idea was to demonstrate that changing roles is a healthy pursuit that will cleanse society of male dominance and raise the feminine principle in status so there will be peace on earth and no pesky sex-crazed males running the show anymore. Then the commando husband in drag and the hot wife dressed as the Father of our Country dive into a storage closet in the school and commence to have passionate sex. Another commando wife, walking down the hall with our mustachioed unisex narrator/daughter, opens the closet and everyone has a good laugh.
Then there is Shark, starring the aggressive and confident James Woods, one of the few men actors who acts like a man. Woods, in a convoluted plot twist, is a high-flying wealthy Los Angeles defense attorney who is blackmailed into joining the District Attorney’s office where he experiences the “other side” of criminal court room drama. The show started off with Woods glowing in anti-politically correct raiment, offering a refreshing turn on the predictable pabulum thrown up in television today.
Sure enough, four shows into the season, you could sense in the first scenes that Shark had been sentenced to sensitivity training between episodes. Obviously keying off the Duke University lacrosse team case – which is not going well for the culture warriors, especially after 60 Minutes tore the prosecution case apart recently – the same sort of producer who ruined The Unit decided to fight back against the trend in the Duke case to present a story featuring rich white boy athletes raping a confused coed.
And Shark turned into a tuna. Rather than exploring the subtleties, or giving the accused the benefit of the doubt, he and his female pursed-lipped ninja assistant wanted the white boys executed on the spot for, well, just being white males – just like the culture warriors in Durham, who want the lacrosse players ruined for being who they are.
Over on NBC, the program Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is presented by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame, known for his rather leftish tendencies. But the show is well-written (if a little fey) and the actors are competent, making it bearable television fare. But right on schedule with the other popular programs, the political message seeped into the screenplay in episode four – this time that tired old chestnut: The Hollywood Ten.
This need to propagandize for socialism in the face of facts finds fertile ground with student viewers whose teachers are in the grip of the Teachers College at Columbia University, the incubator for education theory in America that issues mission statements such as: “We see teaching as an ethical and political act. We see teachers as participants in a larger struggle for social justice … social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated through systematic discrimination and justified by societal ideology of merit, social mobility and individual responsibility.”
And the Hollywood Ten are always trotted out to make the point that the oppressive Amerika that created this injustice, persecuted actors and screenwriters by asking them if they were, or had been members of the Communist Party. They refused to answer – as instructed by their bosses in Moscow – for no logical reason except to gain attention. So they were all sent to prison. To the Hollywood Left, the Ten are the disciples of the socialist religion they hold so dear – even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mother of all socialist experiments, when the horrible reality of murder and mayhem in the name of social justice and equality was indisputably revealed. Today, even China has gone over to capitalism, ridding the world of communism except for the demented, dark recesses of North Korea and the steamy failure of Castro’s Cuba.
But not on television (and the movies – even sweet little films like You’ve Got Mail offer up a tired bit of pro-Soviet propaganda, in this case the innocence of the Rosenbergs) where unrepentant pro-Soviet cadres continue to insert propaganda into screenplays, just as Communist Party members were instructed to do in the palmy days of state socialism from the 1930s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Call it what you want, and call me what you want for bringing it up, but it is striking that the politically correct, multicultural agenda today smells just like the massive anti-American Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. I know it because I saw it on television.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
The terrific new energy in downtown Raleigh (a tip of the hat to Mayor Charles Meeker) was thrown a punch when a young female was abducted from a center city parking lot and later found murdered. The constant specter of security raised its ugly head again, with politicos and business leaders seeking a solution. I’ve got one, and it’s right in front of our eyes: mounted police. I was involved in bringing the current horse patrol to downtown, but the city has limited it to only two officers, not nearly enough to do the job properly.
Mounted police work: Officers have a long line of sight to spot crime; potential perpetrators also see the mounted officers high in their saddles and back off; horse patrols add a sense of occasion to downtown; and the horses serve as a liaison with young people who otherwise distrust the police.