fastidium

The television show Jericho (CBS) tells the story of a small Kansas town after a series of terrorist attacks leave the US in a state of disaster. The pilot first aired on September 20, 2006, and the season one finale on May 9, 2007. After CBS decided to cancel the series (due to viewer drop-off after a midseries break), fans of the show were able to get the network to renew the series for another season. I remember reading somewhere that this is only the second time in television history that fans were able to save a show. According to the Jericho Wiki at CBS, Season 2 is being filmed now and set to air sometime in 2008.

For most of the first season, we didn’t know if what had befallen the USA were missiles or bombs, who did it, or what cities were actually hit (Denver, Atlanta, San Diego, and Washington DC were, however, named). Jericho is completely cut off from the outside world. The small town folks of Jericho manage to continue on as best they can. They are forced to defend themselves from neighboring towns who want their land and salt mine while dealing with food shortages and internal turmoil over property and food rights. One tidbit of news that makes its ways to Jericho is that, as food and aid was coming in from China and other places, there were six different factions of our government all claiming authority over the rest of the nation.

Even if terrorist plots or invasions are only remotely possible, Jericho highlights a significant reality about our political climate today in America. We are quite apathetic about politics and current affairs. What constitutes a winning politician is nothing more than someone who entertains the most and gets the most backing from various factions and constituencies. Meanwhile, we continue to think that things will just keep buzzing along as they always have. More than half of our eligible voting population doesn’t vote. The war in Iraq isn’t even a blip on most of our radar screens.

According to the US comptroller general (a non-partisan appointment for long-term solutions), David Walker, “with the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks” and “we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough”. Economics is just one of our most important problems. I would place apathy on the top of the list.

I think the writers of Jericho knew to put this into the story. The people on Jericho were living the life of choices, abundance, and prosperity until they were jolted into something more akin to real living, to really understanding that, in order to stay alive, there was work to do. Have we come to that place that only a nuclear attack can rip us away from our entertainment-centered existence?

David Mamet (The Verdict, Wag the Dog) has written a book about the movie business, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business. Although movie producers and studios are his main targets, Mamet has much to say about popular culture and our society. He argues that America doesn’t come from a religious tradition or have any historical link to hereditary authority so it tries to re-create that sense of authority, no matter how irrational.

Such authority may be called patriotism and, as such, may helpfully identify convenient enemies foreign and domestic; or we may create a civil version of religion and call it “family values”, liberalism, Americanism, or the American way. We may, also, uniquely in history, name this ad hoc authority “entertainment.”

Is our sense of patriotism found in supporting our troops or in protesting an illegal war? It really comes down to how either side makes us feel. To be considered entertainment, in a broad sense, it doesn’t have to give us warm fuzzies. It only needs to acknowledge or confirm an accepted belief or emotion.

Is global warming a reality? It depends on whether Al Gore entertained us sufficiently or if we have fun mocking those who were.

Are you a Democrat or a Republican (the great divide)? It depends upon which political faction (pro-family-values, environmentalist, health-care-for-all, etc.) you identify with. Its not a matter of right and wrong, it comes down to what role one wants to play. We all get to be the actors in this movie and our loyalties lie in the roles we choose.

Half way through the first season of Jericho, there is an election for a new mayor. The incumbent Johnston Green losses to Gray Anderson after being the mayor for twenty years. Anderson wins on a short-sighted platform of being tough on crime even on those who are considered “one of us”. By the end of season one, Johnston Green is shown to be the real leader of Jericho because Anderson’s quick-fix mentality of telling the people what they want to hear doesn’t alleviate long term problems. In fact, they only make things worse. The moral is that Green realizes that the world they once knew is over while Anderson seems to perpetuate a political simulation of pacification.

Jericho highlights the fact that if some foreign force decided to invade or look for some way to divide our country, they really wouldn’t have to set off bombs, they could do it with minimal effort. And I don’t think it would have to be geographical. Even though the blue and red maps of voting patterns show a bifurcated country, that’s just an easy way for the media to break us into compartments. In our mediated world, we divide over the identities we have chosen to take for ourselves and we think those are the things that matter. In Jericho, we get a glimpse into a time when it wasn’t like that and a look into a future that’s becoming more and more of a possibility.

[tags]television, CBS, Jericho, political apathy, mediated, entertainment[/tags]