Life imitates TV: Trump firing FBI chief looks straight out of Homeland
Anyone felt a distinct frisson of Homeland-itis when US President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey?
The last season of Homeland may have had a woman President-elect, Elizabeth Keane, but in almost every other way it bounced off the reality of American politics right now.
A right-wing radio show host, Brett O’Keefe, spouting conspiracy theories, modelled on the real-life toxic Alex Jones, whose biggest fan is, yes, you guessed it, Donald Trump. A scheming head of black ops in CIA, Dar Adal, who may or may not be a patriot. An army of propagandists spreading bigotry on social media through bots. And paranoia about Islamic terrorists all around.
It’s a spoiler if you haven’t watched the latest season (and if you haven’t, what on earth have you been doing) but the season ends with CIA officials being rounded up to be sent to jail under the Patriot Act, and Dar Adal in jail for treason, where he quotes Graham Greene, that the intelligence agencies are “the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.”
So what does that say about America today where the president and the FBI have a broken relationship, apart from it being an assault on democracy, as The New Yorker called it? And what does it say about Homeland, a show that consistently gets its politics right, whether it is the nuclear deal with Iran or ISIS attacks in Europe?
The latest season was especially terrifying because there is even less distinction between the good and bad guys than there was in earlier seasons. Is the President-elect’s son, a war martyr, a hero or coward? Was the attack in New York masterminded by ISIS or by homegrown right wingers intent on scaring America?
Is Iran violating the nuclear agreement with USA or helping North Korea in its programme? And is the President-elect really a democrat or a dictator in disguise waiting for the right opportunity to strike at the heart of the American system? Or as Dar Adal, in prison overalls, tells Saul Berenson, his colleague: There is something distinctly un-American about her. Is it the same un-Americanism that made Comey investigate Trump’s Russian links?
Exciting, isn’t it for the next season.
But it is a wonderful comment on how the best of American TV has been elevated to political art. Whether it is the new season of Veep which may well be echoing life-after-losing-the-election vibe of Hillary Clinton’s predicament. Except that Selina Meyer is truly a figure of comedy, with none of Clinton’s hard-won public respect, if not love (certainly not love).
Or The Night Of which dramatises what racial conflicts can do to a crime — and how little Americans understand of each other’s religions and communities.
Or The Handmaid’s Tale, currently searing screens across the world, which is one of the most profound parables of contemporary politics, where women’s bodies are not their own and environmental degradation is such that everything including women’s wombs are contaminated.
And what do we have for political comment on Indian TV? And I don’t mean the nightly entertainment that is passed off as news. Nothing.
We get the government we deserve and that ensures that we get the art we deserve.