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12-01-05, 8:54 am
As someone who used to write TV reviews for the People's Weekly World when it was the Peoples Daily World, I continue to have an interest in television, the most powerful mass medium in human history. As I see it, TV has gotten, all things considered, worse politically in recent years. The cable stations are all pretty rightwing, not just Fox News but also the others that specialize in news and current affairs, at least in comparison to the networks. CNN at best is center-right. The networks are center-right and PBS, condemned as a "left" stronghold, is, in its news and current affairs programming, an amalgamation of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. There are some progressive documentaries that make it on to PBS, but fewer than in the past.
News and entertainment television shows for the most part desensitize viewers. The comedies are formulaic and emphasize people putting other people down. The legion of crime, adventure and violence shows portray a world where one has to choose between coping with brutality, hiding from it, or using Arnold Schwarzenegger fantasy violence to defeat it.
Series like Law and Order and CSI create their own spin-offs and, in the original Law and Order at least, transform current events into cardboard character debates over the rights of Nazis and the murderers of abortion doctors, etc. Also, Law and Order creates a fantasy world where viewers are encouraged to think that the exclusionary rule, for good and for ill, really does exclude a great deal of evidence gotten through improper searches and seizures. This is not only not true, but really wasn't true when the series started in the early 1990s
So, I was happily surprised when I came across an episode of the Law and Order spin-off, Law and Order SVU (Special Victims Unit) that raised in a powerful way serious issues that the news media has avoided.
For those who don't know the series, it follows the activities of detectives who work for the Special Victims Unit, which deals with crimes like rape, child molestation, etc. These detectives discover that an African American child molester from New Orleans had picked up three African American children, survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and brought them to New York. After an incident in which two of the children are hit by a car, he flees with the third and the detectives eventually find him, but not the child.
At this point, the story is quite pedestrian, but then everything changes when the child molester dies of anthrax poisoning. Federal police descend on the NYPD, seize all of their files related to the case, and take the two children into "protective custody." It is made clear that they can do all of this and worse under the "Patriot Act," seize anything they want, do anything they want with the children, tell the public anything they want, and lock up the NYPD detectives if they disobey their orders.
One of the detectives risks her career and her freedom to try and save the children. In the process, she discovers that the anthrax came from an employee of a New Orleans military contractor, who had stolen the biological weapon from the lab during the hurricane (they were of course making it and other biological "weapons of mass destruction" for the military legally) and taken it to New York to sell.
He had picked up the child molester and the three children because he thought it was good cover for him. Then one of the children had mistakenly taken some of the anthrax as "fairy dust" for her doll.
The criminal, who has already sold the anthrax, has no remorse. Weapons contractors make fortunes, he tells the police, and companies make fortunes through contracts to reconstruct countries devastated by the weapons those contractors make. Why shouldn't he get a piece of the pie? He won't die from anthrax and he has no feeling for those who do. As the episode ends, the federal agents are descending upon the NYPD again to cover everything up, even though anthrax is loose in New York. The female detective then leaks the story to a reporter in order to get it out, and the reporter goes to jail for an indefinite time rather than reveal his sources.
The episode put a lot of important themes together. First there is the administration’s expensive, inept and contradictory overreaction to the September 11 attacks. This was followed by the creation of the Homeland Security Department, the sinister anti-Bill of Rights Patriot Act and its far-reaching assault on civil liberties, the vast increase in the military budget, and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has become a major center and transit point for terrorists. In contrast, there is the incredibly incompetent under-reaction to the New Orleans disaster, and the failure to provide even minimally competent FEMA aid during the crisis, which cost many lives (thousands are still unaccounted for in New Orleans and a great many are presumed dead, making the death toll in all likelihood far greater than the September 11 attacks).
The long-term effects of Katrina on the U.S. economy are also by any estimation far greater, but the administration has responded with hollow rhetoric, broken promises, and a cynical attempt by the Republican Party to use the disaster to provide a further rationale for social service budget cutting, just as Bush used the September 11 attacks to feed the military-industrial complex.
In a powerful way, the Law and Order SVU episode highlighted the disastrous course that Bush has placed the country on. A longtime colleague and friend of mine, Shanti Tangri (professor emeritus of economics at Rutgers), said sarcastically that Bush may respond to Hurricane Katrina by declaring war on nature for its "terrorist" attack on the U.S., and declare the war against nature as national policy. Frankly, I wouldn't put it past this administration.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
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