A few years ago I started watching “The West Wing” because it was so praised. Then I stopped, distracted. Recently I went back to see if it shed any light on our current chaos. I discovered it is really about Laurence O’Donnell, Jr’s subconscious, which is intensely explanatory if you can absorb it, which is not easy.
Episodes can be watched on the computer individually. There is one that was obviously meant to be a relief from rational issues and rather tongue in cheek. It was only a subplot, but for someone who knows Montana it was much distorted. Based on geography in a state that obsesses over what’s where, the place names ignored reality. The idea was that a politician came to Chinook to hunt black bears (?? There are black bears in Chinook??) but was distracted by the possibility of shooting snow geese in Canada, and crossed the border which was not militarized or nationalized. Only lately has the border been more than a howdy. In fact, the idea was a bit of a warning. It was resolved by finagling, as is usual on this show.
Snow geese sound very romantic since they are white like swans, those powerful Nordic fairy tale elements, birds normally noted by the media when they take a rest in Choteau, which is on the major flyway along the Rockies. Canada north of Chinook is continuous grain country, which is Wallace Stegner bio material, where one normally notes migrating cranes. The Russians, who are numerous around there, love migrating cranes and I love their movie called “The Cranes Are Flying” about a young soldier. Blackfeet have stories about cranes but I don’t know any about snow geese.
In this series plot story there is no footage of snow geese or black bears. It’s assumed that “C.J.” will need to be told about them so that the watching audience will get it, but just as flat facts. It’s political talk about violating borders, not mythic talk about young men. After watching the episode, I had to talk myself down.
Laurence O’Donnell has been on Indian reservations where I’m sure he met older tribal men in beaded white buckskin and Sioux eagle feather headdresses, and he chooses to quote Chief Joseph. He likes to use known major figures. I’m not sure he ever met any of those wild AIM characters who kept trying to call on the U.S.A. to account for the Rule of Law and the obligation of a government to be compassionate. As O’D notes, he is a “European socialist.”
This book publicity vid link is very helpful, but first one must realize that a group like this is a fossil. People cannot sit in a room together like this today without risking death, not least because there are so many white heads in the audience for whom Covid-19 might be lethal. But also, for something like the same reason, it seems impossible now to have an orderly, intelligent meeting like this (though it was dominated by O’D’s determination to explain further). The most recent batch of young people could-not/would-not get past slogans and yelling.
Trying to understand O’Donnell was much helped by this video. His audience members were a kind of people like the Portland, OR, Unitarian people I knew. Educated, conscientious, pacifist and so on. They ask the kind of questions I would ask. People en masse in small towns are not educated to understand highfalutin' thought. Even in cities today’s book promotions must be based on taking sides, much more aptly about playing with narcissistic emotional fire than with combat based on real lives dependent on the decisions of people who are not there risking their lives.
Somehow, when we ended the draft, we not only ended a way of handling vast majorities of young males, sending them all over the world, teaching them disciplines like order and cleanliness, and drilling into them the basics of violence; but we also stopped pressing all people to value young men’s lives in terms of their possible deaths.
When the assassination of JFK was announced at Browning High School, I was talking to a boy named Ed Kennedy, enrolled Blackfeet, who was struggling with his future in terms of enlistment. In 1989 I sat on the floor against the wall in the Heart Butte gym alongside his grandson, while he explained to me how I had ruined his life with my ideas. Now he was all confused.
Most boys do not have to face their own death anymore, with the exception of those stigmatized, abused, endangered by disease and militarized police. If a boy has HIV, TB, hepatitis, or a dozen other major diseases, and has neither food nor shelter he can count on, it is a different kind of combat. It’s a stiff challenge, not supported by the larger culture. Those who survive are often exceptional. They have been winnowed out of their cohort.
O’Donnell is from the demographic that often listens to me now that they are retired: men about ten or fifteen years younger than me, . That is, men the age of the high school kids I taught in English classes just before the draft ended. These men like O’Donnell decided to figure it all out. O’Donnell was inside the machine and has kept at the task even now. That’s the reason “The West Wing” keeps getting wonkier as I watch the reruns close to the end, always vividly brought alive by the personalities in the plot, bringing us face-to-face with self-righteousness.
The Sixties I saw from own my age was an entirely different point of view, unusually split. Aged 21 in Browning, I was reliving the 19th century from an indigenous point of view from the people around me, as well as WWII from combatants’ point of view (my husband) and from a WWI more distant and rather Canadian point of view (my father-in-law’s). I was in the context of patriarchal, white-privileged business people (a few female) running a small town. I looked like them, but I was not like them.
Earlier I had learned a deeply humanitarian philosophy based on understanding individuals. It came from acting and theatre training — not psych. To me, a person was a dynamic individual confronting a specific cultural situation. This is specifically political — the polis. It has made me a bit lonely, but unusually sensitive to O'Donnell's narrative approach.
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