T.V. Eye: prez in the fun house

Network television. Just what we’d expect the President to have a relish for. The commander in chief watching Neilson rated drama. This president with elite status I.Q. A stinging critique, but nothing here that is not known; America is a violent, racist and excessive culture. That’s a given.But it can be dealt with.Corporate broadcasting is obviously a reflection of disturbing those values into a commodity, of controlling and manipulating the aesthetic into a narrative where the misogyny and other negatives are teased out into sellable product. It sucks, but it is the common denominator of the industry.

The review excerpts from Homeland from Al-Jazeera are standard Edward Said meat loaf and hash browns sprinkled with Chomsky seasoning. What is always unstated and avoided in this style of attack, or rather obvious, is a non-acceptance of the legitimacy and claims of American culture. The grandest culture in the history of civilization  despite all its faults. By and large, the different Arab movements simply do not care about American history, and give the impression of viewing events as if they unfold in a vacuum. They all seem to deny the connection between Americans and their land, their own vernacular language; the American narrative is totally foreign to them. The goal seems to be a stamping out of the American national project, first picking at the weak points like Zionism as a prelude before baiting the big American fish…

(see link at end)….Just as Israeli racist representations of Arabs are a reflection of an overall Israeli Jewish structural racism that pervades every aspect of Israeli Jewish society, American media racism is also just a branch of a larger American racism and racialism on which much of American culture, history, and national identity is based. Still, this need not sway the casual observer from analyzing the dynamism of white American nationalist fantasies about their internal and external racial others as represented in the news media or in televised fiction. …

Frans Francken.—”They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” – James Baldwin, A Letter to My Nephew 1962—Image:http://meda202.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/lecture04-cabinets-and-collections/

…The show is so popular that President Barack Obama himself is a big fan. Obama told People Magazine in December 2011 that “Homeland” was one of his favourite shows. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Obama “requested and received” four sets of “Homeland” Season 1 DVDs from Showtime (the Clintons, unsurprisingly, are also reportedly big fans). Indeed in March 2012, the show’s British star Damian Lewis was invited to the White House for a dinner honouring British Prime Minister David Cameron and had an intimate tête-a-tête with Obama about the show’s plans for its second season, which began to air in the US four weeks ago. A major advertising campaign for the show has been in full swing. New Yorkers can spot large billboards and posters on New York city buses, in addition to other advertising venues, a strategy that is paying off handsomely….

Read More:http://takebackhalloween.org/#1


“Homeland” tells the story of Nick Brody, a white American marine (played by Damian Lewis), captured and held prisoner by the Taliban and Al-Qaida until American forces freed him after eight years of captivity. The CIA team monitoring Al-Qaida from Langley, Virginia, is represented by three top figures: the African-American David Estes, the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the American Jew Saul Berenson who is unsurprisingly the CIA’s Middle-East Division Chief, and the white Christian American Carrie Mathison, the female star of the show, who is a CIA intelligence officer assigned to the Counterterrorism Center.

The racialist structure of the show is reflective of American and Israeli fantasies of anti-Muslim American multiculturalism. The African American Estes is divorced and his former wife married an American Jew. She and their children converted to Judaism. He has also had a dalliance with his colleague Carrie that went awry. The Jewish Berenson is married to an Indian Hindu “brown” woman (perhaps cementing the Indian Hindu-Israeli Jewish rightwing alliance against Arabs and Muslims in the minds of the scriptwriters). On the first season of the show, cross racial romance seems to have also infected the character of a white rich American woman who fell in love with a “brown” mild-mannered Saudi professor at a US university and conscripted him in the service of Al-Qaida, which leads to his ultimate death and her imprisonment, though not before the Jewish Berenson tells her how much he identifies with her as two white people who fell in love with brown people. …

…The gender representation is also remarkable for its commitment to 1970s white American feminism by featuring a leading strong white female character as the star of the show (which Hollywood began to champion since the film Alien in the late 1970s) and its equal commitment to sexist representations of white women as hysterics, or at least in Carrie’s case, for suffering from America’s most fashionable commercialised psychiatric ailment of the decade: bipolar disorder (an “ailment” that succeeded clinical depression as the most fashionable American psychiatric disorder in the preceding decade)….

…The gender representation is also remarkable for its commitment to 1970s white American feminism by featuring a leading strong white female character as the star of the show (which Hollywood began to champion since the film Alien in the late 1970s) and its equal commitment to sexist representations of white women as hysterics, or at least in Carrie’s case, for suffering from America’s most fashionable commercialis


sychiatric ailment of the decade: bipolar disorder (an “ailment” that succeeded clinical depression as the most fashionable American psychiatric disorder in the preceding decade)….Read More:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/2012102591525809725.html

…Concern about what Arab and Muslim men do to “their” women is paramount on the show’s scriptwriters’ minds. When Brody’s wife finds out he had converted to Islam, she throws the English translation of the Quran on the floor (very astutely done by the show’s producers who seem to think that only the Arabic Qur’an should not be desecrated) and asks in horror how he could have converted to a religion whose adherents would “stone” his daughter “to death in a soccer stadium” if they found out she was having sex with her boyfriend. ( ibid.)

P.S. …In the American education system,for the most part, there is not a conscious and explicit demonization of the Arab. Its luke warm,  not  described warmly, but the Arab male is not a satanic figure. In the Arab world, Americans are comprehensively demonized. There is an underlying train of thought, that with some help from above, the American people can be  extinguished, something that Americans do not think of in relation to the Arabs. There is an absence of the revenge motive, an absence of total faith in the morality and justness of their side  and cause which arises inevitably from religious doctrine and belief. Maybe many Arabs are right in believing that time is indeed in their favor since there are over 400 million of them with a total of 1.4 billion according to Harold Bloom. Why the heck should they take Maimonides “the middle way” and  pursue the golden mean? …

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