I watched an episode of the CBS television detective series Elementary, titled No Lack of Void, last night. For those not familiar with the show, it’s a modern telling of the Sherlock Holmes story, set in New York City, with Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu playing the sidekick role of Joan Watson. It’s a well-crafted series, tightly and smartly written, with strong acting performances and other qualities, and I’ve yet to see an episode I didn’t enjoy. Last night’s was no exception, with one exception. The plot centered around the discovery that a large quantity of anthrax had been manufactured in the city and the effort to find and recover it. I will spoil the storyline somewhat for the purposes of this opinion piece and reveal that some of the characters involved were white anti-government types.
More than “types,” actually, they were cliched and recycled cookie cutter bad guys that I’ve seen in numerous other police and detective dramas. They spouted the expected anti-government sound bites, refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the government, and plotted violence in furtherance of their agenda. My first reaction was to sigh in disappointment at the writers’ “safe” choice of villains. No minorities, apart from an initial character who’s actually a victim, not a chance that the bad guys might be Islamic terrorists or associated with some other actual modern terror movement, just red-state, sloppily dressed country-boy white guys. This is disappointing but nothing new, and I get why network television does this.
My second reaction, and the more important one, was deep disappointment that the entertainment world too easily conflates an anti-government attitude with a propensity to violence and to doing others harm. While there are fringe wackos out there who do exhibit this conflation (there are fringe wackos of every political mind-set, no matter how peaceful or principled that mind-set might otherwise be), the large subset of small-government people known as libertarians embrace as first principle the opposition to the initiation of force. It’s even in the membership materials of the Libertarian Party. In other words, we embrace the exact opposite attitude of that assigned by the entertainment world to those who dislike big government. In fact, the more purist a libertarian one is, the more anti-aggression one’s mindset is.
I suppose that, if challenged, writers and executives would argue that they’re not seeking to denigrate liberty-minded people with their character portrayals, that they are simply looking to entertain and need bad guys to fill out their plot lines. The next part is obvious – why can’t they assert this claim if some anti-defamation group calls them to task for unflattering portrayals of some other constituency? Why, for example, isn’t this defense used to write a story that involves Islamic terrorists? Wouldn’t that be more timely than recycling the angry-white-militia-type-makes-anthrax trope? While the plot and resolution did take a (welcome) turn to the mundane, it still rankled.
We all know Hollywood plays it safe. The executives have no guts when it comes to protests and protestors of certain flavors. It’s also understandable that the very real threat of personal violence (Theo Van Gogh’s murder would scare me off too) makes writers and producers hesitant to offend certain communities. Entertainment, especially network entertainment, is a business first and foremost, and the people who create and work on these programs have lives they wish to lead and oftentimes families they wish to raise and protect. I cannot fault them for not stirring up certain hornet’s nests. That doesn’t dampen my disappointment at the prejudicial portrayals of small-government and anti-government people that I frequently encounter. Whether they truly believe violence lurks in all our hearts despite the philosophy of libertarianism, whether they’re simply ignorant, or whether they don’t care, they do the liberty movement real harm. Perhaps, if we call attention to the overuse of this tired plot device, the writers and producers might give us the deference they give others.
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