Thanks, I Hate It: The West Wing

I'll admit that this is low-hanging fruit. Lots of people despise neoliberal jerkoff Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing for a multitude of well-articulated reasons. Still, I feel that even if I have no fresh insights to bring to the conversations, the depth of my hatred for this show still justifies ranting  about it. Has anything ever been so smug, so self-assured in its goodness and importance, so soppily sentimental about the people who wield power of life and death over the powerless and the disenfranchised? Has anything ever been as punchable as Rob Lowe's face as Sam Seaborne, president daddy's putridly earnest deputy communications director?

This show has an impassioned monologue about why affirmative action is bad. It opens with a guy lecturing a sex worker. It has a very special episode where the characters explain 9/11. Simply put, it is the most sanctimonious thing ever committed to film, a dripping wet ode of adoration for the armed might of the United States and its empire abroad, a cry of yearning for the presidency of Bill Clinton and the mass incarceration he and his wife so staunchly advocated for. It has quippy, charming generals and cracks jokes in the president's Situation Room where he grapples heroically with whether or not to bomb innocent people to death. 

The West Wing did and still does material harm to the way we think about government, sentimentalizing it to such an extent that I can't help but think of the cultish worship for career politicians like O'Rourke, or Hillary Clinton. It attaches viewers emotionally to the people who destroy their lives, who legislate and enforce poverty, who send the National Guard to break up strikes and Civil Rights riots. And when it does try to tackle the moral weight of being in power, it leans solely on how hard it is to make those decisions, never once ranging outside its cloistered halls to look at what the things these upper-class twits blithely banter about do to the people of America.

The West Wing is "we have to listen to both sides" the TV show. It's "Change You Can Believe In" and "Love Trumps Hate" and "I'm With Her" and every other vapid campaign slogan we've been forced to choke down and told to say we loved. It's salt in the wounds of the people who live in the shadow of the bloodiest hill in America, of people whose power can crumple up countries like tinfoil and smash the life out of children's bodies from the far side of the globe. It makes me sick, and if I had the chance I'd beat the shit out of Sorkin's smirking boy scout ass for making it.