Last night I was channel flipping (which I rarely do, but, hey, free cable here in the Cardboard Box Arms) and chanced upon THE WEST WING - you know, that TV show where, like, Martin Sheen is President, or something.
My memories of the show are rather vague. (But vague recollections are what will give this weblog entry a certain naive charm.)
Martin Sheen is President, and he's coping with all kinds of problems in a caring, sharing liberal guy kind of way. Some Middle Eastern type named Ragu or Abu or Sabu The Jungle Boy has committed some kind of terrorist atrocity and blown up a bunch of Americans. Martin Sheen is preparing to show that he's a caring, sharing, patriotic kind of liberal by blowing up Sabu. (This is the unspoken, unspeakable and yet universal liberal wish-fulfillment fantasy; "if only 9-11 had happened when our Bill Clinton was president! If only, if only....")
Martin Sheen looks awful. I hadn't seen him in anything since Apocalypse Now and his appearance in THE WEST WING was something of a shock. His features seem bloated, as if from internal gas pressure from inner pockets of rotting flesh - at any moment I expected his pulpy face to split open (oozing green ichor) and slide off his pale white skull. (Then our President could be a caring, sharing liberal LIVING SKULL OF HORROR! With, like, bare staring eyeballs, dude.) Icky!
Lily Tomlin was on as well. Lily Tomlin looks like a horse. But then, she always did.
But this is a liberal show, so our living-dead President isn't merely facing the menace of Sabu (or Abu). An unlikely domestic organization called the "Patriot Resistance Army" (or something like that) has apparantly been slaughtering innocent schoolchildren with pipe bombs and assault weapons. (Perhaps they may have tried to slaughter Our Undead President as well, but this isn't clear) While there is a great deal of legalistic soul-searching about going after Abu, (or Sabu), there is none at all when President Sheen is informed that the Patriot Resistance Army has been cornered and surrounded somewhere. Another liberal article of faith - the enemy, the real enemy, is always the domestic Right. The same liberals who deplored Afghanistan cheered Waco.
At some point in the proceedings, somebody tells the President (in clumsy, expository fashion) that our Patriots like to "get high" by mixing up "tractor starting fluid" and "allergy medicine" and straining the result to make methamphetamine.
Indeed.
This bit of chemical misinformation is provided by morally superior cokehead Hollywood screenwriters, and after enduring fifteen minutes of this preachy, sanctimonious, Democrat-party-campaign-poster TV show, I feel as if I would enjoy mashing up some Sudafed in a bowl of starter fluid and forcing the resultant glop up the nose of anyone remotely connected with THE WEST WING.
The superficial message is that crystal meth is the new Devil Drug - snort one line and you torture small animals, snort two lines and you pipe-bomb high schools - snort up a third line and you become a Republican. The deeper message is that anyone who isn't a caring, sharing, lawabiding, boringly middle-class liberal must be a baby-killing agent of Chaos.
The liberal ideal is no longer freedom (if it ever was) but an organized, static, unchanging hierachical society, with Eurovan-driving, sensible-shoe wearing horse-faced white liberals permanently at the top, and the ignorant, racist, violent masses permanently at the bottom, dependent upon and supervised by the State.
Presently I switched off THE WEST WING and put on my new DVD of Joseph Losey's MODESTY BLAISE (1966). I watched Rosella Falk strangle a helpless mime to death with her bare thighs and felt much cleaner.
