I kind of hate The West Wing

A podcast I was listening to this morning ended -- as so many conversations do these days -- with the millenial-ish presenters all talking about how much they miss The West Wing, and how much they love The West Wing, and how painful it is to watch The West Wing, because it is so beautiful and crystalline an image of what responsible, functional government might once have been, and maybe even what it was, when the Clintons were in power.

But let's not go nuts.

I do understand the feeling -- we all have it now and then -- that various terrible people and things from the past seem less bad now by comparison to Trump. This feeling, however, all too readily bleeds into the belief that maybe we could or should accept those things, if they rode in to save us from Trump. And this, in turn, bleeds into wanting them to do so, and missing them, and thinking that actually they were great!

In short, we are in the bargaining stage of the national grief process.

The truth behind these mental contortions remains unchanged. The West Wing was an annoying show. And the Clintons are kind of bad people.

I don't think I've ever seen an episode of The West Wing that I could stand at all. Granted, I realized this after not that many episodes, so I haven't seen a great deal. But every single one I have seen has something in it that drives me up the wall. 

There's the episode where the Allison Janney character, as I remember it, somehow catches wind of the U.S.'s alliance with a despotic Arab regime that denies women's rights (read: Saudi Arabia). She is upset about this, and the good-hearted president cancels the alliance on this basis.

There is so much that is terrible about this.

First, how would a person working in the presidential administration not know until they became whatever the Allison Janney character's position is that the U.S. supports the despotic Saudi regime and always has done?

Second, when has the U.S. ever chucked over an economically and militarily cozy alliance just because someone in the administration realized they had an appalling human rights record. Hello?? The show would plainly have us believe that U.S. support for hideous regimes is something that happens once in a blue moon, a bizarre aberration, an anomaly that can be quashed as soon as one person in power spots it and brings it to an end, rather than a cornerstone of our whole approach to geopolitics over the last century.

Third, it suggests that human rights abuses happen primarily because of nefarious and grotesque foreigners, and can be stopped as soon as one of the white people in charge realizes how nefarious and grotesque they are, and not because of the nefariousness and grotesqueness of which the human race as a whole is capable, as evidenced notably by the United States' own nefarious and grotesque policies, including its policy of supporting nefarious and grotesque regimes like the Saudis.

Then there's the episode where there's some anti-WTO, alter-globalization protest happening outside the White House. It's presented as extremely silly and puerile and asinine and know-nothing. Fortunately, we have a smart speechwriter character, who shows them what's what. He writes a great speech at the end, where he says that trade is great for some reason, then that it's great for some other reason, and "third, the one that's not like the others -- trade is great because it means no more wars! No more wars!" Or something like that.

I'm sure in Aaron Sorkin's brain it really is that simple. 

Every single Aaron Sorkin film or television show has essentially one character: Aaron Sorkin. Among the superficially different people who walk around on screen representing aspects of this collective mind, there are two kinds: the good ones, who speak with the voice of Aaron Sorkin to tell you how great their (meaning his) ideas are. And the bad ones, who speak with the voice of Aaron Sorkin to tell you how terrible their (meaning other people's) ideas are.

His entire oeuvre gives the impression of someone genuinely convinced that if he could just get five minutes to hector uninterruptedly anyone in the world with whom he disagrees, they would all be overcome and brought to their knees by the sheer force and brilliance of his ideas.

And what are those ideas?

They are all the most obvious and conventional ideas that a centrist Democratic supporter of the Clintons in the '90s and '00s who reads the New York Times op-ed page would have. Globalization is both inevitable and good. The only thing the Right is clearly wrong on is abortion and religion, everything else in their agenda is mostly a good idea, they just take things a bit far. American foreign policy is both wise and benevolent, so long as a handful of baddies don't get their mitts on the controls. 

You may seek high and low in an Aaron Sorkin creation for any probing of what "globalization" means, and whether or not its inevitable and good manifestations absolutely have to include eliminating tariffs in the Third World that previously kept millions of subsistence farmers from the brink of starvation, throwing them onto global food markets where they will become economic refugees to fill the dark satanic mills of American textile producers.

You will not hear anything from him to prepare you for the fact that here we are, in  2019, and our president not only still loves the Saudi royal family, despite their murder of a Washington Post journalist and the imprisonment and torture of however many other people, he is also wedded to his predecessor's foreign policy of supporting the Saudis in a devastating war that has produced the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world, and in which one of their closest allies (now a de facto U.S. ally as well) is none other than Omar Bashir -- the perpetrator of genocide in Darfur. 

Do we still believe all this is happening just because the Allison Janney characters of the world haven't noticed and put a stop to it yet?

The West Wing pioneered '90s Clinton nostalgia before the '90s were even over, and before Bill was out of office. It was perfectly chronologically deployed to scoop up the members of my age and educational cohort, as we entered adolescence in a suddenly Bush-poisoned, Christian Right-ridden world. 

"Oh, look how good things used to be!"

And we believe it was like that, back then, in the Clinton world, because that's when we were children. We assume what had been our actual childhood must have been the childhood of the whole human race.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's incomplete Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, he describes his hero Monroe Stahr as having "the parvenu's passionate loyalty to an imaginary past." 

He had in mind the way in which a social arriviste might idealize a closed social world to which he had only just been granted access, but it applies equally well to those of us who are newcomers to the stage of the great world by reason of age as much as class. 

It's easy to idealize something for which we weren't present, in short, or to which we weren't paying attention when it actually happened, and from which we now fear we might be permanently barred as a result. It's always quite possible to attribute imaginary virtues to something we never saw, and to which we can never return due to the merciless unidirectionality of time's arrow.

I completely wanted Hillary Clinton to win the last election, of course. I wish every day and night she had. But that really doesn't mean she's particularly great -- it just indicates the merits of the competition.

The truth is that Hillary Clinton has given very few signs of having a conscience, throughout her long career in public life. You've heard all the evidence before. She is friends with Henry Kissinger, one of history's great sociopaths and war criminals. She seems to have been among the forces in the Obama administration angling to condone the 2009 Honduras coup, whose consequences in generating a refugee crisis and destabilizing the whole region are still being felt today. And so on.

And most other things from the 90s stand up just as well to scrutiny. 

Every movie about politics from the '90s is almost unwatchable today. The main thrust of Primary Colors seems to be that Clinton's exploitative macho philandering (or worse) was funny and charming -- at most creating awkward, wacky situations for his staff. 

At one point the John Travolta/Clinton character in the movie stands before an audience of steel workers -- or some other such manufacturing class soon to lose their jobs to overseas competition. He says they need to bow to the inevitable -- the death of their industries.

It's presented as a deeply inspiring, touching moment of political truth-telling -- the New Democrat telling those stubborn unions to give one for the team. "You'll all be given job training to help you adjust!" he says, or words to that effect. 

How did that one pan out? 

Wag the Dog has a memorable "funny" scene with a "funny" convict. We know he's a convict because he's in an orange jumpsuit, he is mentally deficient, he is a crazed serial murderer/rapist who lunges for the first woman he sees as soon as he is loosed from his bonds. This all happens because it's the '90s, and this is what we assume all people in prison do/are like.

Also -- the attempted rape is played for laughs.

It's because of "funny" scenes in movies like this that most people in our country believe that virtually any cruelty against prisoners is justified, and that it's "funny" when they experience sexual violence themselves.

Maybe these films hold up better at the level of human conscience than the next generation of movies and TV -- the one that gave us 24, with its celebration of torture. But that's a damn low bar. 

Ah, you say, but those are just the terrible products of terrible Hollywood (albeit written in part by acknowledged luminaries -- Elaine May and David Mamet respectively). Surely the Left was creating good things during that era.

Not really. This morning I just finished Demetria Martinez's short novel Mother Tongue, about the sanctuary movement of the 1980s and '90s. Here, surely, will be moral sanity!

And yes... mostly. But the main character still sleeps with the refugee she's harboring (with no apparent qualms about whether or not that's okay); then the refugee beats her up and this is presented as okay because of all the horrible things he's been through; then she has a personal revelation through a recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse, because it's the '90s and people still believed recovered memories were a thing.

So yeah, let's not go mushy. We were not, as the poet put it, "born too late." We have learned a few things since the '90s. And some things may even have gotten better.

But what about Trump! Surely nothing can compare!

Well, which was the decade that gave us Trump's new attorney general pick, I ask you? William Barr, in nomination hearings the last few days, is likely to carry on the current administration's policies on asylum. But where did he learn to do so? While serving the George H.W. Bush's administration's push to intercept and detain Haitian refugees in Guantanamo Bay, in knowing violation of international law. 

Bush Senior being, of course, another subject of recent "age of chivalry is dead"-style '90s nostalgia. 

So, away with you, Nineties nostalgia! Fly from me, West Wing! We don't need you as an emotional crutch. We have the future, and time, and fate, and each other.