[A-List] SSA: the Law and Order candidate

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

We have discussed this show before, as part of our occasional foray into
the world of entertainment and its role as a ideological conditioner.
Certainly, L&O as a franchise has evolved from a fairly routine policier
into an increasingly in-your-face propagandising on behalf of the
national security state. In this process important population segments
have been catered to, such as republican moderates and Democrats
concerned that due process be observed, feminists, and libertarians.
Thus we have L&O: Trial by Jury, featuring two female ADAs supervised by
the same good ol' boy who holds court on the original show, except that
here there is no effort at humour of any kind, never mind the laconic
one-liners with which Jerry Orbach used to lighten each episode of the
original. Instead, we get the grim determination of these clever ladies,
guided as ever by their wise and uncompromising paternalistic DA, to
overcome the dastardly criminals facing them. Prior to his death
Orbach's character was transferred to the show for a couple of episodes,
but even in these there was no trademark gallows humour - the
seriousness of the enterprise was first, foremost, exclusive. Thus,
despite the show's title and its apparent endorsement of the system of
trial by jury, all defendants are guilty and either they or their
lawyers are employing wicked strategems to block the course of justice.
In the first episode Annabella Sciorra plays an unscrupulous defence
attorney who, upon establishing the guilt of her client, proceeds to
construct the most fantastic defence in the most reprehensibly immoral
way. In the second episode Peter Coyote plays a sleazeball defence
attorney whose problem is less one of legal ethics than sexual, as he
preys on female colleagues and counterparts, a point that the ostensibly
liberal female judge played by Candice Bergen relates to her female
colleagues over lunch just in case we audience dummies missed the point.
And so on. Even more preposterous is L&O: Criminal Intent, in which
Vincent D'Onofrio plays someone so incredibly gifted that it is an act
of supreme sacrifice that this polyglot, well-read, psychoanalysing
genius agrees to accept a detective's salary in the NYPD rather than
coin it in somewhere in the private sector. The ridiculous nature of the
plotlines leaves even the main actors often visibly stunned by the
stupidity that passes for drama and intrigue, although they play it
straighter when points intended to equate terrorism with anti-US and
anti-Israel action are rehearsed so that viewers are left in no doubt as
to the gravity of the crimes that our Nobel prize winner and bemused
sidekick are tackling.

A happy consequence of all this is that a candidate-bereft Republican
Party can call upon someone who is already in the public mind as just
the kind of person capable of meeting the challenges that his series has
helped continually to foreground and therefore entrench in the public
mind. -MK

****

America?s imaginary Law and Order candidate
The new Ronald Reagan in the presidential race
Gerard Baker
The Times, April 27 2007

Last week in these pages I noted the unusually large number of New
Yorkers in the running for the US presidency. Hillary Clinton, Rudolph
Giuliani and the current mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, all have
high hopes of representing Democrats, Republicans and independents
respectively in next year?s election. But in my customary haste, I
omitted to mention perhaps the best-known face of all in the race.

Arthur Branch is the District Attorney for New York County, the
official, legal name for Manhattan. He is that unusual but highly
attractive political figure ? a successful, elected conservative
Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. How successful? No
Republican has held the Manhattan DA position since Thomas Dewey in the
1930s, who later became governor and was famous for momentarily beating
Harry S. Truman in the 1948 presidential election ? at least in a
newspaper headline ? before the real results said otherwise.

Mr Branch combines a gruff, laconic manner with a suitably tough
approach to crime in the big city. As DA he rarely prosecutes cases
himself these days but exhorts his team of subordinates to visit the
full majesty of the law on his criminal targets. He supports capital
punishment and has a robustly conservative approach to the law, deriding
those who take a creative view of the US Constitution.

Even so, when occasion demands, this Draco of the American judicial
system can be pragmatic and occasionally crosses his zealous underlings
by agreeing to messy plea bargains with the ugly procession of
murderers, rapists, terrorists and child molesters that wanders through
his offices.

As a presidential contender his experience makes him a compelling law
and order candidate. Then again, that may be because he is the Law and
Order candidate.

If you are an aficionado of television detective series you will know
that Mr Branch?s other name is Fred Thompson, the actor who plays this
entirely fictional character in Law and Order.

Though as yet formally unannounced, Mr Thompson?s candidacy is probably
right now the most talked about in American politics. Just the merest
hint a few weeks ago that he was pondering a run energised the
Republican race, and the momentum is building. An opinion poll of
Republican voters published in yesterday?s Wall Street Journal put Mr
Thompson third among the party?s candidates, narrowly behind Senator
John McCain and Mr Giuliani, the current fragile front-runner.

To be fair, Mr Thompson is not just an actor with a great Hollywood
repertoire of leadership roles (in films and TV he has been a White
House chief of staff, a submarine commander and the head of the Central
Intelligence Agency). He was a senator from 1994 to 2002 for his home
state of Tennessee, where he was wildly popular as a man of the local
soil. Back in the 1970s he earned his first political stripes as a young
lawyer on the Watergate Committee conducting impeachment proceedings
against President Richard Nixon, where he sat alongside an idealistic
liberal named Hillary Rodham, later Clinton. If his hagiographers are
correct, he was the man who coined the damning question that formed on
the lips of the nation: ?What did the President know and when did he
know it??

What is more, Mr Thompson, unlike the other contenders in the Republican
race, seems like a genuine conservative (who would have thought
Republicans had to turn to Hollywood to find one of those?). He has a
consistent record of being ant-iabortion, pro-tax cuts and a stolid
defender of US military action.

And yet for all his real-world government service and his good
conservative credentials, it is hard to escape the feeling that Mr
Thompson is lighting up the contest at the moment because he is the
Imaginary Candidate. Republican voters, demoralised by their present
political condition and unenthused by their current field of candidates,
are projecting their hopes and ideals on to a man that most still know
best only as an entertainer. Much in his background remains unexamined ?
it is not widely known, for example, that before he commanded fictional
submarines and prosecuted make-believe criminals, he was a real-life
Washington lobbyist, stained, it can be safely presumed, by some of the
grime you have to wade through to do that job effectively.

Comparisons with Ronald Reagan are seductive but a bit of a stretch.
Though Mr Reagan, the middling B-movie actor, was never taken seriously
by the Left (to their great cost), by the time he ran for the presidency
he had built an extraordinary curriculum vitae, not only as governor of
the nation?s largest state but as a leading figure in the battle of
ideas that conservatives came to dominate in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The excitement around Mr Thompson reveals not just a dissatisfaction
with the available Republican contenders, but a much larger escapism on
the part of voters, anxious to flee the present-day horrors of real-life
Washington. Barack Obama, suddenly now becoming the leading Democratic
contender, may not have acted in any movies but his message of hope and
change offers the same idealised blank slate for Democrats disillusioned
by their own tired and uninspiring leaders.

President George Bush?s ineptitude and increasingly bunkered immobilism
makes Americans yearn for something new, even if it may not be wholly
believable. But so too does Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the
Senate, who this week matched the Bush Administration?s tin-eared,
ham-fisted flailing with a profoundly stupid declaration that in effect,
the US has already lost the war in Iraq but should go on fighting it for
another six months in any case.

No wonder, given what?s on offer, that Americans are in a mood to
embrace the Imaginary Candidates. But unlike Hollywood, where the
audience?s willing suspension of disbelief is a necessary part of the
bargain, in politics hard reality always prevails, and disappointment is
almost guaranteed. 


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