I was watching the first episode of Homeland – Season 5 –
and you probably know by now that the story line was virtually ripped from the
headlines. You’ll remember a while back
(seems so long ago) that Angela Merkel and her government were incensed that we
(The U.S. being “we”) were spying on them.
Somehow the surveillance got identified and, of course, this led to an
entirely embarrassing situation that occupied the media for weeks. Casablanca.
I’m shocked, shocked Rick! There’s gambling going on here.
There were some TV commentators who took issue with the
mention of the German surveillance, “hactivists”, and of “Anonymous” as if it
were somehow cheating, somehow not as good as if you made stuff up out of whole
cloth. Other commentators were okay
about the idea, having opinions lukewarm or tepid, and then there is a third
category of commentator who comprised of people like me who are good and fed up
with stuff that pretends we are in a different world than the one we’re
actually living in. Things are tough all over, the planet is a lot smaller, we
see and experience all of it, or at least more than ever before. On the extreme end of the escapist crowd are
the people who absolutely insist that their creative inputs must have no
connection to the awful, awful things that occur every day. Things like the refugee problem, also given
billing in Ep 1 of Season 5 “Homeland.”
As you know, Carrie had quit the CIA and is working at the “Foundation,”
a supposedly humanitarian aid organization which, in contrast to hardcore CIA types,
espouses liberal anti-U.S. sentiment akin to what we are now experiencing from
Doctors Without Borders. The great thing about “Homeland” is that all sides are
presented, and no sides are pretty in the way some people insist creative work absolutely,
positively and without a doubt MUST be.
Let’s face it – most television drama is decidedly liberal
and aimed at a sort of flavor-of-the-week cause like gay rights, women’s
rights, rights of the mentally ill, LGBT rights, abortion rights, persecution
of minorities (no matter that minorities here do the least amount of suffering
of any social group in the universe), and so on ad-infinitum. The only rights
that are rarely upheld or promoted in liberal TV dramas are Second Amendment
rights. The people who create this vast
onslaught of liberal dreck are elite Democratic Socialists who feel they are
enlightening us – peons, troglodytes, subhumans, and others liberals look down upon as vermin.
“Homeland” is successful because it’s the real shit. We don’t
live in a black and white world. There
are not only two sides to every issue on “Homeland,” there are maybe 3, 4, 5,
6, and 7 sides. Most of us have empathy for human suffering but beating our
breasts and cueing our outrage to show others how deeply we feel the suffering
of others doesn’t do a damn thing to alleviate suffering and in many cases
makes things worse. It should be especially obvious in the current political
environment that weakness, abdication of power, making nice with our enemies
has created a vacuum that others have filled.
(Iran Nuclear Nightmare, ISIS, Putin, Kadyrov (spelling? The Chechnyan
Warlord, I mean) – those are the result of our nation’s current weakness. The mercenary
liberal cant has given us a failed economy, a failed foreign policy, and it has
created the most massive refugee problem seen since WWII.
“Homeland” is great in depicting real events. They should
rip everything out of the foreign policy headlines. That still leaves the great
task of creating realistic dialogue, acting, and cinematography and putting it
all together in a coherent and intelligent fashion. That’s what Homeland does, and
if you think it’s easy. . . I have to
say one thing about that Claire Danes’ “Carrie” character. She is one messed up
chick with her husky voice, her perpetual panic and revulsion, her clanging
emotions, her chameleon face. Other characters, too, seem to have hard studied
the meanings of ambivalence and ambiguity. How can you not love her, them, it?
TV writers should add
to our understanding of the world, and not condescend to us or try to
re-engineer our DNA to make everyone and everything fit into infatuated liberal
notions of how the world should be. I’d much rather be engaged in what it is
instead of what it’s not.
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