The Horror, The Horror

National Review Online, May 17 2001

You don't need to have seen Scream to know that horror movies have conventions that must be followed. For example, from almost the first few minutes it is generally possible to guess who will survive, and who is going to die. Typically, a nice, likable character will be one of the first to perish. Such a death sets a suitably downbeat tone, and previews the implacability of the torment to come. So it was on last night's season finale of West Wing. It was a weirdly lurid episode, which made little or no sense until one understood it for what it was, a tribute to the cinema of fear. The story begins, therefore, with a good person in a coffin. President Bartlet's big-hearted secretary, loyal Mrs. Landingham, is dead. In fact, the scriptwriters were in such a hurry to get moving with the plot that they had killed the poor dear off in the previous episode. Bartlet, meanwhile is wrestling with an emerging crisis in Haiti. Haiti? That's no coincidence, RKO's land of voodoo can always be relied upon to add menace to any tragedy.

Next, of course, there has to be rain, wind, and lightning. Last night's West Wing was no exception. As the show progressed we learn that Washington is to be hit by a strange unseasonable storm, the worst, Bartlet is assured, for more than a century. Naturally, when such a storm is raging, one of the characters has to run through the tempest looking crazed. Shakespeare famously used such an opportunity to tear out Gloucester's eyes in King Lear. Bartlet merely turned down the offer of a raincoat, and went for a stroll in the deluge.

Add in some terrible childhood trauma to the mix. Flashbacks give us the young Bartlet as a pupil in one of those 1950s prep schools where everyone wears a tweed jacket and sensitive students feel guilty about their privilege. Unfortunately for the future President, Bartlet Senior is the headmaster and he is not played by Robin Williams (but by MSNBC pundit and West Wing writer Lawrence O'Donnell). In the space of a few minutes we watch this ogre hit his son, sneer at Catholicism, support censorship, and underpay his female staff. Well, what else can you expect from a WASP in prime time?

Not, probably, shouting at God in Latin in the National Cathedral, which is what we find President Bartlet doing at the end of Mrs. Landingham's funeral. What a display! He hurls abuse at the deity for allowing bad things to happen, particularly to a man such as himself, who has, he whines, been a good president (there then followed a laundry list of achievements that sounded suspiciously like those once claimed by Bill Clinton). It was Martin Sheen's most spectacular hissy fit since that Saigon hotel room in Apocalypse Now and about as convincing, a piece of ripe ham to add to the West Wing's usual baloney, and an ominous warning that this show was about to turn very dark indeed. For incantations in Latin are never good news. The last time one was tried in a Washington drama was for The Exorcist, and that succeeded in riling up the Devil.

Bartlet gets off lightly. The only apparition he raises is that of the late Mrs. Landingham. She returns to the Oval Office, the first dead left-wing lady to show up there since the days when Mrs. Roosevelt would drop in to chat with Hillary. Mrs. L., of course, is on a mission. In the horror genre, the dead always are. Bartlet, you see, is in crisis. Tantalizingly, at least for viewers on the Right, there is a chance that scandal (but only of the noblest sort: he concealed his Multiple Sclerosis) might cause the president to drop any bid for reelection. Mrs. Landingham will have none of it. She reminds him of the poor, the sick, and the dispossessed (of whom there seem to be a quite a lot, despite all those presidential successes that Bartlet had so recently been recently been discussing with God). The implication is clear: These are problems that need the intervention of big government and a liberal president. There is work to be done, but no one called "W." could do it. Bartlet is the man for the job.

The show ends with a reinvigorated Bartlet at a press conference. The journalists all want to know. Will he run again? Officially, we won't be told until the series returns, but take it from me, this is no cliffhanger. Bartlet will be back. That's the rule. Just ask Freddy Krueger.

In horror, there's always room for a sequel.

The Earth Is Round!

National Review Online, March 1, 2001

He was a liberal hero once, a brilliant policy wonk at the pinnacle of government. He was their martyr too, a victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy, the target of a vicious congressional witch hunt. In the end, he had to admit to perjury, but that was a petty matter, a trumped-up technicality designed only to save a vindictive prosecutor's face. Now, at long last, liberal opinion is changing. There is new evidence that their hero was flawed after all, that he may indeed have been the crook that the Right always said he was. One by one, former defenders are beginning to change sides and admit the truth: Alger Hiss was guilty. Yes, Alger Hiss. Did you think that I meant anyone else?

The latest condemnation of the treacherous Mr. Hiss came, rather surprisingly, in the usually predictably liberal TV show, The West Wing. Last night's episode featured a sub-plot in which Donna, one of West Wing's more irritating staffers (we have been waiting for her to start an affair with her boss, the sanctimonious Josh Lyman, for far too long) is approached by an old friend, Stephanie. Stephanie wants a presidential pardon for her grandfather. Her grandfather, a billionaire commodities trader, has been on the run from justice for the best part of two decades, and is accused of having traded with enemies of the United States. Actually, I made that up, no one would ever believe that that sort of person would ever be eligible for a pardon.

No, Stephanie's grandfather, Daniel, was something else. He had been a high government official in the 1940s accused of spying for the Soviets. The espionage was never proven, but Daniel Galt was convicted of perjury. He served six months, and died some years later, still proclaiming his innocence. He is, of course, the show's proxy for Alger Hiss. The reason that Stephanie wants the pardon is that her father (Daniel Galt's son) is now near his deathbed. A pardon would be a farewell gift to the dying man.

Donna puts Stephanie in touch with Sam Seaborn (played by Rob Lowe), the White House's deputy communications director, an always entertaining figure who is part George Stephanopoulos, part Melrose Place. Sam is having an emotional crisis, but agrees to help. Some work he had done while at Princeton supported the case for Galt's innocence.

To move the pardon forward, Sam calls the First Lady's brothers, followed by the president's half-brother and a number of Democratic fundraisers. No, I made that up too. This West Wing has some sense of propriety. Sam goes through more normal channels. He shows up at the FBI to give them a heads up about a possible pardon. The meeting goes badly, the FBI man is not enthusiastic, and it concludes with a rant from Sam making the case for Galt. Anyone who has followed the Alger Hiss saga in the pages of the New York Times will be familiar with the arguments (never proven, unreliable witnesses, post-Soviet exoneration, anti-Communist hysteria, madman prosecutor and so on).

So far, so predictable, but then there is a surprise. Sam is summoned in by the national-security adviser. She hands him what is, in effect, the fictional equivalent of the Venona intercepts. As everyone should know, (but too many still do not) these intercepted (and now declassified) Soviet signals prove conclusively that Hiss was, indeed, in Stalin's pay. Their fictional equivalents do the same for Daniel Galt. The liberal martyr, Sam discovers, was guilty after all. Galt was a Communist spy. Sam decides to proceed no further with the pardon. Unfortunately, after a tense discussion with Donna, it is decided not to explain the truth to the traitor's dying son. They blame the lack of a pardon on bureaucratic delays. Daniel Galt will be allowed to get away with one last deception.

But this is to quibble. In showbiz terms, the unmasking of the treacherous Galt/Hiss was real progress. A prime-time liberal TV show was essentially admitting that Whittaker Chambers was right. Hiss was a spy, a liar, and a friend of the Gulag. This guest of honor at so many liberal soirees was revealed as nothing more than an accomplice of mass murder, a glorified Jeffrey Dahmer with a tweed jacket, clean hands, and a dirty ideology. Of course, this truth was obvious years ago, but even if the moment was long overdue, it was good to hear it in a ratings-topping Hollywood show.

And this trend is set to continue. Next week, apparently, Sam Seaborn will discover that the Earth is not flat.

Wing Nuts

The  West  Wing

National Review Online, December 10, 2000

Aaron Sorkin, the creator of NBC's The West Wing, wants it known that, despite voting twice for Bill Clinton, he has no liberal agenda. Sure, he concedes, his hero, President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet is to the Left, but the show itself is not. Swallow that, and you must also be a believer in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and fair hand recounts. The West Wing is classic liberal propaganda: insidious, dishonest, and effective. The New York Times seems to approve, noting, for example, that high-minded President Jed (played by a relentlessly folksy Martin Sheen) has, apparently, much to teach us poor peasants about campaign-finance "reform." Time magazine, meanwhile, adopts its high-minded eat-your-greens, count-every-chad persona, grandly describing the show as a "national civics lesson." Naturally, The West Wing plays like ER in D.C. (over 300,000 viewers every week). Bartlet and his crew are civil-service catnip. They make the busybodies of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seem sexy and, even more implausibly, useful. Liberal? Of course it is. We should not be surprised that the cast were the stars of this year's Democratic convention. Mr. Sorkin, after all, was previously best known as the writer of The American President, a nauseating movie from the mid-1990s in which a Democrat president rediscovers his soul by returning to the Left. In The West Wing, Mr. Sorkin shows his full range. He gives us a Democratic president, who keeps his soul--by never leaving the Left.

As Dee Dee Myers has said, Bartlet is "the Clinton we wish could have been". Yes that's right, Dee Dee Myers, that Dee Dee Myers. She is one of the show's original political consultants. The other two were Pat Caddell, a former strategist for the, um, Democrats, and Lawrence O'Donnell, who used to work in the Senate for, well, I think you know which party. To be fair, after about, oh, 20 episodes or so it was decided to add Republicans to the roster. Marlin Fitzwater and Peggy Noonan are now on board, the William Cohens of the Sorkin administration.

In one sense, however, the premise of the show is unexceptional. If prime-time TV can feature alien abductions and honest lawyers there is no reason why it cannot have a series dedicated to a successful president who is a liberal Democrat from, er, New Hampshire. As Bartlet is a liberal, there is no point in conservative viewers waiting for him to come out with a speech calling for school vouchers, missile defense, and tax cuts. That would be like expecting Gilligan to get off the island. Of course, it is true that Bartlet is portrayed as a blend of JFK, Will Rogers, and Mahatma Gandhi, but this is showbiz convention, not bias. President Jed is the hero of the show, and heroes have a right to expect their script-writers to be supportive.

The problem, and the real political slant, comes from the context within which Bartlet is presented. Being supportive is one thing, but there is not a button that Sorkin will not press to generate some sympathy for his man. The West Wing's emotional bases are so loaded that any rational discussion of the issues raised in the show becomes quite impossible. It is not enough for Bartlet to be a straight-arrow Nobel laureate with a sense of humor but, no, he also has to have multiple sclerosis (although not too badly). And he is not the only martyr in his team. Leo McGarry, the chief of staff, is a recovering alcoholic/prescription-drug abuser whose dedication to the White House has just cost him his marriage. His deputy, Josh Lyman, has just lost a much-loved father, not unlike Bartlet's assistant, Charlie Young, who has just lost a much-loved mother. We do not know the fate of her, presumably doomed, parents, but the president's secretary, Mrs. Landingham, has managed to lose not one, but two much-loved sons. In Vietnam, of course. On the same day, naturally. Christmas Eve, actually.

We are taught to sympathize with these people, and thus to like them (they are all interesting and quirky in that LA Law, Ally McBeal way) and, from that, to agree with their views. The team are hard-working, patriotic, and the work they do, is, apparently, essential. These folks do not have mere jobs, they are in public service. Their boss is a president who (to stirring music) removes the phrase "the era of big government is over" from his State of the Union speech. This, we are clearly meant to think, is a good thing. D.C. is OK, and poor helpless Americans could not survive without it. In one episode a staffer looks set to outperform the Landingham boys and survive December 24. His plans to go home early, however, are thwarted by an indignant Leo. "What," asks the chief of staff, "the country isn't open on Christmas Eve?" Clinton's real world White House may combine Post Office efficiency with the ethics of Caligula, but you would not know that from Sorkin's version. The corridors of his 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are filled with the busy, the purposeful, and the good, always walking, it seems, at a tremendous pace as they try to take care of us.

Only dolts and scoundrels would oppose fine people like this. Step forward the G.O.P! One of the boasts of the The West Wing is that all points of view are given a fair shake (Except on the Second Amendment: John Wells, one of the executive producers and clearly something of a constitutional scholar, has explained, that "the only issue we don't do that on is gun control. Frankly no-one involved in the program feels there is a logical reason for streets to be flooded with Saturday night specials and automatic weapons."). We do hear from the Right, but they never quite seem to get the best of the argument. Their debating points are suspiciously muted and their representatives are sadly flawed. So the gay Republican congressman is a hypocrite, the military man wears a medal to which he is not entitled, and as for the Christian activists, well, they are linked with the anti-abortion zealots who mail the president's granddaughter a mutilated Raggedy Ann. The last word is invariably reserved for a member of the Bartlet team, frequently with the help of a sappy soundtrack that kicks in with some sentimental strains to remind us just who is on the side of the angels. Clue: It is not the party of George W. Bush.

Which brings us to Ainsley Hayes, the show's "good Republican." You knowthat role. It is a bit like being the "Good German" in a war movie. We first meet Miss Hayes, a leggy blonde Republican commentator with a striking resemblance to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on one of those cable channel talkfests. She out-debates White House staffer Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe as a thinking man's George Stephanopoulos). As a reward the oh so broad-minded President Jed asks Ainsley to join his team. Naturally, she agrees. This is a Republican that West Wing can relate to. She is, to use NPR's favorite word, "bipartisan," prepared to give up her principles in favor of the supposedly greater interests of the country. I seem to recall that the Vichy French used a similar excuse in 1940.

It's all nonsense, of course, but it was enough to bring West Wing nine Emmys earlier this year, the highest number ever won by a series in a single year. There was a problem, however. Viewers were, apparently, "upscale" (that's Network for "too few"). Really bringing in the masses took a familiar, if desperate, device--a cliff-hanging season finale with the lead characters brought down in a hail of bullets. Who shot J.B.? It worked. Ratings nearly doubled. Bartlet, you guessed it, survived. The motive for the attack turned out to be racist outrage at the romance between Bartlet's daughter Zoey and Charlie Young, the president's assistant, who is African-American. Two would-be assassins are quickly gunned down, but we do manage to see that their surviving accomplice is straight out of central casting, an Aryan Nation branch. He's a white male skinhead with a swastika tattoo. Worse than that he is a smoker (we see him stubbing out a cigarette into a fried egg) and a lover of southern cuisine (the wretch is finally apprehended in the Dixie Pig Bar-B-Q).

He is also an extremely useful myth, rare in real life, but ever-present in contemporary liberal demonology (Arlington Road, American History X, and so on), a useful tool that Democrats are increasingly using to browbeat their opposition. Guilt by association is a cheap trick, but it works. Sorkin's decision to add murderous skinheads to the ranks of Bartlet's antagonists is an attempt to make any viewer feel bad about disagreeing with Saint Jed. Worse, such an approach is used to discredit the intellectual legitimacy of any such disagreement. Argue for tax cuts one day, goes the not-so subliminal message, and you are in the same camp as gun-toting skinheads.

Sadly, such propaganda is not confined to the make-believe world of The West Wing. It goes hand-in-hand with the more general Democrat onslaught on the good faith of those who dare to oppose them. It helps create a political climate in which Clinton flack Paul Begala can, in a recent post-election tantrum, attempt to link GOP voting with a number of "hate" crimes that had taken place in Republican-leaning states. As has already been discussed in NRO, such a line of argument only serves to reinforce that liberal sense of moral superiority over the rest of us, a sense of moral superiority that led inevitably to Broward County, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade.

Oh dear, we had better hope that President Bartlet loses his reelection bid by a really big majority. Especially in Florida.