Thursday, November 01, 2007
The Shield: Send Vic Mackey to Iraq
Reeling from the news that dark matter doesn't exist, that Elvis, fiscally, lives, that my cold sores will destroy my mind, that the Iraq war is God's judgment on gay-tolerating America and that we played the Darth Vader march for King Abdullah, I find myself unable to compete with the real world this morning. But, anyway ... CaptainB comments below that The Shield is the best cop show on TV. He said this to me a while ago and, as a result, I found myself with the complete seasons three and four on DVD. It is an extraordinary piece of work. Everybody in The Shield is ugly and nobody is a hero. The main characters are permanently engaged in corruption and torture and in elaborate deals with the gangs they are supposed to be fighting. Best on TV? Probably, though I don't see many cop shows. But, while watching, I suddenly realised why CaptainB likes it so much. He is a great believer in dividing one's enemies - precisely what, he argues, we should have done in Iraq and Afghanistan. We could, for example, have made a deal with Iran in return for destroying Saddam and the Taleban. This is, in fact, precisely what the cops in The Shield do. It isn't pretty and it can never achieve total victory. But it is the best that, under the circumstances, can be done. It is a view of life as a series of compromises intended to move a little closer to good and a little further away from evil. In strategic terms, Vic Mackey is a dirty realist; as such, he'd probably be a better Middle East envoy than Tony Blair - remember him?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Ah, the JC and the Gallic tribes method. Might they not see this one when on the way.
ReplyDeleteWhile even you have now to admit that Tony was an amazing political operator. One of the longest PMs ever, who seems to have left no mark. Except the abiding feeling that the Tories were his party.
It is strange, Vince, how completely Blair seems to have gone, as if he never happened.
ReplyDeleteI had a dream last night that Gordon Brown fell so low in the polls that the Labour party sacked him. And who do you think they turned to in their hour of need?
ReplyDeleteJohn Major? I remember him.
ReplyDeleteI blush to be called a 'dirty realist'. Like neo-conism, realism is not an ideal (sic) stance, but dirty realism may allow some slack. Yes, if Vic was on the current US team, he'd be busy corrupting Hizbollah and the Syrians to deny the Iranians their likely response to an attack. Vic would also contemplate admitting Algeria, Egypt, Israel and Jordan to a re-named NATO- or a Mediterranean analogue-thereby isolating both Iran and the despicable Gulf Arabs. Various other musings came to me on our three policemen per tourist hols in Cairo, where the chill of the Islamists is as perceptible as a draught in a room, although there were a lot of nice shiny prisons dotted along the road to Alexandria. You can't get a beer by the way in the hotel used in 'Ice Cold in Alex'.
ReplyDeleteBastards.
ReplyDelete"Our enemies"? Such total identity with what your politicians tell one to believe is admirable. Does one arise in the morning with a quickly mounting sense of dread. and ask oneself who are my enemies? Better turn on the telly and see. One might tell oneself, "But I thought we were selling weapons to Saddam back in the 80s, or comfy with the Taleban in the 90s. But as Orwell showed, history can be effortlessly be re-made in the minds of the willing.
ReplyDeleteThe same thing tends to happen here with regard to recently departed Presidents - they disappear without a trace, but only for a couple of years, and then return with a much lower profile. The last one is the exception to that proves the rule: he never really went away and the odds are pretty good that he will finally get elected to that third term that he would have won easily were not Al Gore such a pitiful excuse for a candidate.
ReplyDelete