I kind of like Anthony LaPaglia. I happened to see an episode of his new show recently. It was hysterical. First of all, his voice is over the top silly. I kept thinking I was watching Mighty Mouse; his gruff, whispery kind of gangster talk is clearly an attempt to make a cop figure sympathetic by making him seem like, well, a Godfather. How fucking sick is that? What was most hilarious (and disturbing) about the show, however, was that there is no 'detection' to speak of (making it closer to reality than most shows). But this one is positioned, not in the Twilight Zone, but in the 1984 zone: the whole process of busting people revolved around marshalling the tremendous surveillance assets. At every turn, as they are getting more suspicious, a new piece of information turns up, but it's not something the police had to figure out. It's an ATM charge or a surveillance camera. Which makes the tough guy nonsense at the center of the show all the more laughable. Used to be the cops would just stay at the station and wait for someone to solve the crime for them (and if that doesn't pan out, pick a weak second and force a confession). Now, they can just poke into every aspect of the person's life until they find something. Why don't the writers do an episode where the cops turn people's lives upside down and then it turns out they had the wrong guy? While they are still following the Arthurian model, that would spoil the show. Leave that to the reality shows (which are much better anyway).
Now all that said, the other side of this situation is equally absurd. The current missing persons case where the husband was out buying a mattress 20m before calling 911 is laughably stupid and insane. Having access to information that can bust a case is not a bad thing. Mixing it with the old detective archetypes is totally silly. The new detectives are researchers. Of course, the other reality of this is that in the past, there were plenty of ways to dig up more evidence, and good cops did that, but lazy ones made up their minds right away and went into the mode of just beating on their chosen target until they could get a confession. In one piece I saw earlier this year, a kid was totally railroaded and went to jail for 17 years, only to be exonerated later. He had confessed. On the show, they said in cases where someone is exonerated, one third of the people had confessed!!
Sunday, August 01, 2004
More Than Happy
Preposterous exchange this morning between George Will and Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria is a likeable sort for a lot of predictable reasons, the main one being that he seems to be the type of critic that achieves acceptance, namely a member of the tribe that espouses revolutions that improve, don't alter, the status quo. Zakaria claimed that Americans are casualty averse, and in a stunningly silly retort, Will invoked the Civil War and then referred, nebulously, to much other brutality that we had endured.
In a survey class called 'War and American Culture 1870-1920," in college, we were talking about World War I and the professor made reference to the many catastrophes and blood baths, and made it sound as though the US bore an equal share. I raised my hand and said 'at the Somme, a million men died in three days, the total US battle deaths for the whole war were 115,000.' He looked at me stunned and then just said 'no way.' After class, I went to the library, copied the page from the world atlas and slipped it under his office door. Germans and Russians lost 40M in WWII!! US lost 292K on both fronts! Of course, the other reason Will's comments were absurd is because the Civil War was attended by repeated draft riots. Furthermore, the commission of the war was very crude on the Union side, many attending bloodbaths were totally unnecessary.
Zakaria jumped back in and said 'what I was saying is that if the public feels that the war is not worth fighting (and 57% of the population feels that way about Iraq), then they tend to be casualty averse. If the war is one that has to be fought, like the Civil War, they are more than happy to take casualties.'
Does that phrase even make any sense? This is a case of obiter dicta, where the speaker has lost the reasonable point of reference and is speaking only from his rhetorical position, not realizing how offensive the statement is. One of the most interesting things about this statement is the implied frames of reference: the idea that there are people somewhere that are more than happy to see others die, beckons to the oft noted notion of the silent majority, the huge mass of Americans who supported Vietnam from beginning to end (another numbers thing that most people fail to recognize: support for that war never dropped below 50%!). The other frame of reference that is equally absurd is that of the journalist is simply, humbly reporting the will of the majority. This is how democracy works, the loser of the vote, even if attended a tremendous injustice, is asked to just refer to the established count. This is one of the reasons the justice system is so screwed up: the jury can be a crop of complete idiots who totally disregard the evidence, and we call that justice. Voting is not, by itself, the road to anything just and open, but we are such simpletonian reductionists, we fail to be able to see past that. We have regressed. The founders had a far more sophisticated view of voting than we do (even though their means of dealing with scope was discriminatory, it was a case of wrong discrimination: we need to institute a system of discrimination against the real enemy: stupidity (and its first cousin, ignorance)).
In a survey class called 'War and American Culture 1870-1920," in college, we were talking about World War I and the professor made reference to the many catastrophes and blood baths, and made it sound as though the US bore an equal share. I raised my hand and said 'at the Somme, a million men died in three days, the total US battle deaths for the whole war were 115,000.' He looked at me stunned and then just said 'no way.' After class, I went to the library, copied the page from the world atlas and slipped it under his office door. Germans and Russians lost 40M in WWII!! US lost 292K on both fronts! Of course, the other reason Will's comments were absurd is because the Civil War was attended by repeated draft riots. Furthermore, the commission of the war was very crude on the Union side, many attending bloodbaths were totally unnecessary.
Zakaria jumped back in and said 'what I was saying is that if the public feels that the war is not worth fighting (and 57% of the population feels that way about Iraq), then they tend to be casualty averse. If the war is one that has to be fought, like the Civil War, they are more than happy to take casualties.'
Does that phrase even make any sense? This is a case of obiter dicta, where the speaker has lost the reasonable point of reference and is speaking only from his rhetorical position, not realizing how offensive the statement is. One of the most interesting things about this statement is the implied frames of reference: the idea that there are people somewhere that are more than happy to see others die, beckons to the oft noted notion of the silent majority, the huge mass of Americans who supported Vietnam from beginning to end (another numbers thing that most people fail to recognize: support for that war never dropped below 50%!). The other frame of reference that is equally absurd is that of the journalist is simply, humbly reporting the will of the majority. This is how democracy works, the loser of the vote, even if attended a tremendous injustice, is asked to just refer to the established count. This is one of the reasons the justice system is so screwed up: the jury can be a crop of complete idiots who totally disregard the evidence, and we call that justice. Voting is not, by itself, the road to anything just and open, but we are such simpletonian reductionists, we fail to be able to see past that. We have regressed. The founders had a far more sophisticated view of voting than we do (even though their means of dealing with scope was discriminatory, it was a case of wrong discrimination: we need to institute a system of discrimination against the real enemy: stupidity (and its first cousin, ignorance)).
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