This Is When Life Turns Deeply Meaningful

 

The missus and I, comfortably middle aged that we are, increasingly look forward to the small, seemingly mundane, but in reality deeply meaningful things in life. A cup of coffee at a cafe in the middle of the day perhaps, a long drive in the evening, maybe, and above all, an hour or so of television in the evening.

Time, the need to earn a salary and a young child mean that binge watching television is little more than a pipe dream. About sixty minutes or so before we retire for the day is all we can afford, and we make every minute count.

And of the television shows that we’ve seen over the years, we’ve both not enjoyed any quite as much as we have The West Wing. This, for those of you who were born around or just before the turn of the century, is a show about American politics seen from the point of view of the staffers of the White House, including the big kahuna himself, played very ably indeed by Martin Sheen.

Set sometime around that very time itself (the late 1990’s, the early 2000’s), the series is an excellent way to educate yourself about American politics, the way America viewed itself, and America’s relations with the rest of the world.

Kargil makes an appearance,for example, and in my opinion, Aaron Sorkin got it completely wrong. But I’m a large hearted, magnanimous man, Mr. Sorkin, as are most of my countrymen, and I’ll forgive you that slip-up.

We’re halfway into the second season, and there’s a lot to like. Strong character development, nuanced interactions, a very strong plot line that arcs across seasons, and excellent acting. Personally though, what makes the series so very eminently watchable is the fact that it is so easy to contrast that make-believe, but so very likeable world of the White House, with the current menagerie that inhabits 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Well, when they inhabit it, at any rate – more than half their time seems to be spent down in Florida.

We’re halfway into the second season, as I mentioned, and nobody has been fired yet. THe President is shown as being a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and the only woman he seems to have the slightest, um, romantic interest in is his own wife. Best of all, Twitter is about nine years away from being invited.

Every now and then, purely for the sake of perspective if nothing else, I like to think about the days that are long gone. The past, when viewed from rose-tinted glasses that have been steeped in nostalgia, always seems better than the present, but in this particular case, it really does seem as if those were better, kindlier, more gentle days.

To give you some idea of how far we’ve come today down this slippery road to hell, consider this little nugget: would you not prefer George Bush in the USA and Al Qaeda in the Middle East, rather than their current successors?

And on that depressing note, allow me to push off. Josiah Bartlett just screwed the environmental lobby over, and I really want to know what happens next.

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Ashish Kulkarni