A DIGRESSION. Have I mentioned recently that Aaron Sorkin makes my teeth itch?
In every Sorkin project, there comes a time when an argument seems to be reaching an interesting point, at which point Sorkin invariably accidentally drops coherent thought into the trash compactor and reaches for the violin. It happens in A Few Good Men, when the other lawyer points out that Lieutenant Top Gun seems to be tromping all over the Nuremburg principles, and Lieutenant Risky Business replies, basically, that he's not because his clients are really good guys, badly led, and instead of pointing out that, maybe, that's how Rusty Calleys are produced, the other lawyer goes meeping off into the next room to look for Demi Moore's talent.
And, in that godawful 9/11 episode of The West Wing, when one of the interns trapped in the White House with Rob Lowe confronts Lowe's opinion that terrorism never wins with a question about Ireland, Lowe blows him off with the argument that the Brits are still there, and the kid fails to come back by pointing out that 26 counties exist as the Republic of Ireland at least in part through acts of what even Michael Collins reckoned to be terrorism. I thought we might dodge a similar moment in Sorkin's latest but, alas, no. Last night, there was a subplot about gay marriage and Sarah Paulson, who plays the fundamentalist shiksa Gilda Radner figure, gets all huffy when Matthew Perry compares the civil rights movement of the 1960's with the movement for gay rights. "Black people," Sorkin has her say, shaving at least 100 points off her IQ, "existed openly as black people in this country for 400 years. Gay people have ... for only about 30."
As Sorkin might say, this is stupid on so many levels, the most heinous of which is the fact that, for about 300 of those 400 years, black people didn't exist openly as people at all. They existed as property.
Have I mentioned recently that arguing with fictional TV characters makes me feel like I should get out more?
--Charles P. Pierce
