TV TV!

Lately Sally and I have been watching this show called The Glades using Netflix’s streaming service, and I gotta say that I’ve been digging it.  If you’ve never seen it, it’s another Sherlock Holmes knock-off, this time done as a police procedural set somewhere in the Everglades, with our resident “Holmes” played as a former Chicago homicide detective exiled to rural Florida following an affair with his boss’s wife.  In typically Holmes fashion, the lead—here named Jim Longworth—is a borderline anti-social misfit, though The Glades’s producers have altered the formula somewhat by making him a decided ladies’ man rather than playing him as asexual the way that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the producers of the TV Show House tend to do. 

In any event, I’ve been loving the show’s first season despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it so closely follows in Conan Doyle’s footprints, footprints that’ve lately become a well-blazed TV trail.  I mean, how many misfit TV detectives are out there right now?  Gregory House is the most famous, but I think Castle, Lie to Me, and at least a couple of CSI franchise shows also follow the format, and it’s a good bet that a number of shows from the new season will, too.  But who cares, right?  I mean, I love the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I’m happy enough that for once a sizable number of folks seem to agree with me.

Anyway, after The Glades ended, Sally and I wound up tuning into the GOP primary debate for a while.  I know I said I wasn’t going to, but in the end, we decided that we wanted to see the spectacle first hand.  So we watched as some of the minor candidates walked through a bit on school reform and then watched all of them tackle the question of immigration and border control.  To my mind, what we saw went something like this:

Questioner: Immigration reform is a big issue.  How would you tackle it?

Rick Perry (going Macho): I’d deploy the U.S. Army to screen the border with Mexico, and I’d throw all those illegal dirtbags out of the country, pronto!  They’re takin’ U.S. jobs.

Mitt Romney (vainly trying to sound tougher than Perry): We don’t need the Army.  We can do it with technology!  We can build a fence—

Questioner (in disbelief): You want to put up a 2,600-mile fence?

Romney:  Absolutely!  With TV cameras and satellite coverage over every square foot.  And guard dogs!  And… and… and… sharks with frickin’ laser beams!  We have the technology!  We CAN control the border!

Newt Gingrich (slaps forehead): If you build a fence, Mitt, the illegals will just bring a ladder.  Why, when I was in Congress back in 1986…  and Ronald Reagan… 20 million illegals already in this country, and many of them already have families…

Questioner: Okay, Ms. Bachman… Let’s say the fence is up.  What do you do with the 20 million who’re already here?  Do you break up their families and deport them?

Michelle Bachman:  A fence!

Rick Santorum:  Yeah!  A fence!

Questioner: But what about the families, Ms. Bachman?  What do you do with them?

Bachman (slams table with clenched fist): I said a fence!  With guard dogs!!!

Questioner: *sigh*  Back to the original question, Mr. Cain.

Herman Cain:  We don’t need no damn fence!  We got laws in this country.  We just need to ENFORCE those laws!

Jon Huntsman:  No.  What Newt said was right.  And Ronald Reagan!  And don’t break up those families… 

Rand Paul:  Fuck that fence!  Employers should be free to hire whoever the fuck they want, and if Americans are too stupid to get the jobs, then fuck them, too.  I mean, a fence?!  You wanna know why they want a fence?  I’ll tell ya.  They don’ wanna keep illegals out.  They want to keep Americans and THEIR MONEY in!  Mexico’s growin’ twice as fast as America right now.  Pretty soon, all our jobs and all our money’ll be headin’ down there.  And THAT is why they want to build a fence!  It ain’t to protect jobs.  It’s to protect them so’s they can keep gettin’ at YOU and your MONEY!

So.  I’ve read a few summaries of the debates, and most of them said that Romney came off pretty well.  I didn’t see that myself.  For my money, Rick Perry was the only Alpha Male up there.  I mean, his idea of deploying the Army to screen the border with Mexico is ludicrous on its face—and yes, he did really say that—because it would take the entire army deployed 100% full time to successfully screen a border that large, and even then it’s an extremely iffy proposition.  But the way he said it, well, the man delivers his lines with conviction.  Watching him debate, I find that I can believe that he really does go jogging with his pistol on. 

On the other hand, I thought Romney came off stiff and awkward, Huntsman seemed the non-entity that he is in the polls, and New Gingrich looked like he was—easily—the smartest man in the room.  To put it another way, Gingrich was Gandalf to Perry’s Aragon and Romney’s Boromir.  Rand Paul at least came off as Samwise Gamgee—wise and tough in his own way—but poor Jon Huntsman was Pipin, Gandalf’s “fool of a Took!” while the rest were such complete non-entities that they didn’t even make it out of the Shire.

Gingrich won’t get elected, and I don’t want him to, but with the possible exception of Rand Paul, he’s easily the most well-informed on the issues, and he has something interesting to say about each and every one of them.  His defense of school choice via vouchers was well thought-out and concise (full disclosure: I loathe the idea of school vouchers), and his story about Ronald Reagan’s attempt at comprehensive immigration reform back in the 1980’s not only managed to name check the party’s patron saint, it also brought up a pair of excellent points about illegal immigration.  First, you can’t tackle the issue of immigration solely by securing the border, and second, there are a lot of long-term illegals in the U.S. who’re established members of our society.  Breaking up their families to throw them out of the country would be both inhumane and economically stupid.  Meanwhile, Newt’s finer points seemed to escape everyone but Huntsman and Rand Paul, and even Huntsman could only add that he thought that Newt was basically right.  I mean, Newt was obviously right, but no one else besides Paul and Huntsman even try to answer intelligently.  They all just stood there rattling their swords and trying to act tough.  In that, Bachman was actively ludicrous and Romney came off like Doctor Evil-light.  Paul’s answer, the strict Libertarian answer, was interesting theoretically, but as with a lot of what he says, for me it’s not realistic in the real world.  I just don’t know how much I believe that government is really trying to hold people in!  That’s a little too Orwellian for me.

In any event, I read a few debate summaries this morning to get a feel for the rest of the action and came away disappointed by the lack of depth to the coverage.  Still, my favorites came out of Slate and The Guardian.  Check them out if you’re interested. 

Or you can just wait for the next debate.  They’ve got something like six more scheduled for later in the fall.  And maybe that’s why the coverage of this particular debate was a little light.  The newspapers didn’t want to burn all their matches in one shot.  Something to that, I think.