What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Walter Berglund, the protagonist of Jonathan Franzen's sometimes infuriating, often excellent 2010 novel Freedom is something of a liberal hypocrite. A one time apostle of Paul Ehrlich and population control activists, Berglund settled down in gentrifying St. Paul with his wife Patty and did the unthinkable: reproduced. . . twice! Berglund is burdened by this guilt his entire life, despite his love for his kids, and tries to recompense his misdeeds through a lifetime of service to the planet he sees himself as complicit in destroying. A bumbling sort of hero, Walter gets into some tangles even in that endeavor, but that is not really the point here.

Population control was once en vogue and is still rather blithely accepted by a significant portion of our nation's intellectuals as well as the average person who through trickle-down idiocy has come to accept overpopulation as fact. Pundit blowhard chieftain Thomas Friedman wrote Hot, Flat, and Crowded in 2008, and though he doesn't prescribe one child policies or anything as likely to elicit negative reaction the underlying assumption for the final descriptor is that our planet is perilously crowded with creatures possessing opposable thumbs and we need to ramp down productivity (so to speak) until our planet can heal itself. 

In other words, the danger to humanity rests for most on the side of overpopulation. Rarely do we see the opposite argument made: that the waning birthrate in this country and throughout the industrialized (and mostly entire) world is actually a dangerous, potentially unreversible reality that will have far-reaching consequences for pretty much everyone alive today. Which is why Jonathan Last wrote the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One's Expecting, a small book with big implications.

Last begins by recounting the time early in his marriage when he and his wife lived in a yuppie district of D.C., one of those neighborhoods where the dog boutiques outnumber the baby stores. An overwhelming majority of the inhabitants did not have kids and once you decided to take the plunge, the astronomical pricing of the neighborhood made it unrealistic for most to afford to live there with kids. To the suburbs, breeders! 

This little anecdote underscores that while children are increasingly valued in our culture (the $700 strollers, baby yoga sessions, preschool Mandarin classes, etc.) they are at the same time decreasingly present (shades of supply-side economics at work here). In other words, children are not required for help on the farm and most all of them live to adulthood these days so we don't have nearly as many. Perhaps even more importantly for our culture, the purpose of life is now self-fulfillment and raising kids is generally acknowledged to suck. Times they have a changed, and now children are more  of a personal accessory, something validating adulthood and accomplishment and to boast about at parties, than they are, say, a blessing from the Lord or, to take a different tack, necessary propagations in a Darwinian world. Or, going to neither extreme, something intrinsically worthwhile, even if they make life hard.

There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility around the globe, and Last aims a sawed-off shotgun at our culture to try and hit them all. Some are admirable: the increasing freedom and equality of women in the past 50 years. Some are pernicious: the hookup culture and abortion. Some are the fruits of unforeseen consequences: Social Security and the welfare state for the elderly. And, as Last readily concedes, it is impossible to pinpoint a single cause or even the biggest cause. What we have in Western culture (though this is far from a Western problem; Japan is the reigning king of the dire consequences of decreased fertility) is a cocktail of elements all contributing to making babies less ubiquitous, desired, and necessary (in the short run, of course). And the long run effects of this trend are not potentially, but inevitably disastrous. 

Consider economics, for a moment. When Social Security was put in place by FDR in the 30s, the average life expectancy was 58.1 for men and 61.6 for women. So the number of people qualifying for Social Security payouts was exceedingly small. Over 40 workers contributed to the system for every beneficiary. Social Security, for those who followed the work of Bernie Madoff, is a Ponzi scheme, and as Madoff's dissatisfied clients found out, Ponzi schemes only work if you keep getting more suckers workers to buy in at the bottom level. When you combine low fertility with increased life expectancy, and refuse to touch the sacred cow of Social Security, you end up in a disturbing place. Where there used to be 40 workers for every beneficiary, today that number is at 2.5. By 2050 it will be under 2.0. Accordingly, Social Security taxes have been on the rise and can only be expected to continue to rise until the system implodes, we are annexed by China, or the Lord returns.  The low birthrate, coupled with an increasing lifespan makes for an unsustainable imbalance between the young and the old. Our population will soon look like an inverted pyramid, with ever increasing numbers at the top and decreasing numbers at the bottom. Which is good for a population. . . never. That is never a good thing and has never proved reversible.

Now consider the sociology of Social Security. Kids used to be a requirement if for no other reason than you needed someone to take care of you when you got older. It may not be the most romantic reason to have kids, but it is practical. Today, in a socialist dream, you have the state to take care of you. And here is the kicker, the state will even help you if you failed to contribute any suckers workers to the bottom of the Ponzi scheme. In other words, there is almost no practical reason in our culture to have children. You can refuse to have kids, put in your Social Security throughout your working life, and then overdraw based on what you put in from the paychecks of your friends' kids. 

I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush here. There are people unable to have kids and people who should not have kids (look at me sounding like a eugenicist), but that is not most people. Most people in our country who don't have kids make this decision as part of the proliferating "lifestyle choices" that must be ever-validated in our culture. (Unless, of course, that lifestyle choice involves having numerous children. Then, sadly, you are a nutjob.) And I don't think it does injustice to the word, or the sentiment behind most people not having kids, to call this selfish. People don't like that word, because it invokes judgment, which is again only proper when directed toward poor white people and the religious in our culture, but no one I ever met who has told me they never want kids has ever given me anything other than a selfish reason (i.e. travel, free time, don't want a real job). But in reality the only thing that allows people to make this "lifestyle choice" is that other people still keep having kids so the non-breeders can live off of the Social Security those kids keep pumping into the system. Again, not feelings, like "I feel bad that you called me selfish," but reality.

I am not here saying that we should only allow procreators to draw Social Security--that would be incredibly creepy legislation--, but that when the entire structure of a culture incentivizes people to refrain from having kids then that is a very dangerous place for a culture to go. As well as irrevocable.  Last runs through a catalogue of the social policies of Western Europe designed to reinvigorate the anemic fertility rates of our cosmopolitan models, and as a group they have failed. No matter how much time you give a mother (or father) off of work, no matter how great the government-sponsored daycare is, no matter what the cash payout tax refund is for bringing baby into the world, the birthrate refuses to budge. Which leads to a conclusion about government intervention in fertility: it is far easier to social engineer decreases in total fertility than it is to reverse engineer the previous efforts and inspire more robust fertility.

Some people will point to immigrant populations as a way to solve the problem. Latin American immigrants have a higher total fertility than a native U.S. of A'er, just as the majority Muslim immigrant population in Western Europe has a higher fertility rate than the native population. But this is an extremely short-term solution. Leaving off issues of immigrant integration, Last shows that within a generation of residency in the United States, Latin American fertility drops to levels just as low as natives. It makes no sense to keep allowing more and more immigration as a way to grab up the one immigrant generation of higher fertility. Talk about creepy policy, as well as a weird case of robbing Peter to pay Paul: this might help arrest the demographic plunge of the United States, but it would almost certainly hurt the country whose people we were pilfering. 

The really only other significant reason to have children, other than the practical reasons that used to exist, is because you believe them to be a blessing, despite the cost. Put another way, no one is going to all of a sudden start having kids because they believe it is their civic duty. We are no longer communally-minded. We are each of us, if not rugged, then pacified and entertained individualists. Freedom, to borrow a turn of phrase from John Milton, exists in license not true liberty in twenty-first century America. Put yet another way, in our current cultural climate you would only expect to find people committed to community and with ambitions beyond self-fulfillment having kids. People most often found in religious communities. Which is, in fact, what we are seeing. 

The total fertility rate for the American woman is at 2.01, or right about replacement rate, and dropping. However, if you break this down for women who attend church regularly, the total fertility rate jumps to 2.54. I know, I know, the stereotypes abound here, but it appears as if committed religious believers are the only people actively staving off massive population decline and the disastrous future that entails. As religion continues to wane in our country, it is difficult to see a secular source of such devoted childbearing arising from the ashes of religion.

Last's book struggles, as all such books struggle, when it comes to making recommendations. Prophets of doom are great at diagnosing and poor at prescribing. He suggests more family friendly tax policy and work situations, but he spent a good chunk of his book talking about how such policies are impotent elsewhere. If you take away both the economic/social incentives for having kids as well as breed an intense narcissism directed toward self-fulfillment and the search for the ever elusive self, it is difficult seeing how another month of maternity leave is going to make it seem worthwhile to invest 18 years plus (30 is the new 18) in raising multiple children.

So I throw my hands up in despair as I close, not knowing what to do. My despair isn't merely about the harsh economic future of a culture that is top heavy with old people, though that is certainly a daunting prospect (Japan recently became the first country wherein adult diapers outsold baby diapers, which I find to be extremely sad). My despair is that we have lost the language to call people to repentance. We have lost any notion that you can rebuke in kindness. More than that, we have lost almost any notion that we exist in community with one another, and are inextricably bound to one another. The most proffered defense for previously illicit activities is "I'm not hurting anyone else, so why do you care?" But we are not islands, and hell is Sartre's existentialism, not other people. Individual choices invariably effect the group, and my generation's great individual reticence to be parents is going to yield unimaginable long-term consequences for our culture. 

The Virtue in Boredom

Jordan Bloom of The American Conservative writes about a San Antonio megachurch that has recently spent $5 million dollars on an animatronic ark for their children's ministry. Given Bloom's high church leanings, he does the standard guffawing over such ostentatious expenditures (it's a good thing none of the older denominations of Christianity ever spend money frivolously). And he's right, of course, in a broad sense. It is pretty ridiculous to spend $5 million bucks on fake giraffes for children's church. Back in my day (the early 90s), we cut Bible characters out of coloring books, colored them with crayons, and then glued them to a Popsicle stick. Boom. Sunday School.

Look, its easy to make fun of excesses like this. The stories write themselves. But the pastor of the megachurch who defends the expenditure is absolutely correct when he points out that the church is competing against a lot of fancy enterprises more than willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money to get people to come by. We are a nation absolutely addicted to entertainment, and it is easy for people like me to talk about how church isn't the place for entertainment but I'm already a believer. When your goal is to bring new people into the fold, and you're competing against Disney World and Las Vegas, it is petty to impute bad motives to people who are trying to attract nonbelievers to their places of worship.

So the substance of Bloom's critique, and others who make similar critiques, ought to be directed more broadly against our culture itself. A culture that, above all, is absolutely terrified of being bored. I'm only being slightly tongue in cheek when I say that it is probably our greatest fear. Our entire cultural apparatus is constructed so that we will be protected from creeping boredom. Three year olds can operate smart phones so they can play Angry Birds while mom shops and they don't have to, even for a second, think of how to entertain themselves. Or just be bored and deal with it. A recent Sprint commercial informed its audience that we have a right (ah, the language of rights) to unlimited data. We are entitled to never having to be bored.

It is fair to hold the Church to a higher standard and worth arguing that we ought not be complicit in the dumbing down of our culture, but I don't know that we can point at San Antonio and say that is what they are doing. The church I went to in Manhattan met in a small, old-style church building with a steeple, a small meeting room and a basement with an open space and a kitchen. A hip Christian ideal. There was no room for any sort of children's church, and, in a classic case of chicken and egg, there were hardly any families with small children that attended. That was reality. And it wasn't going to suddenly change unless we bought a new place. We may bemoan it, bewail it, decry it, and gnash our teeth as we wish for the good old days of bewigged preachers and two hour sermons, but it is a fundamental reality of the culture the church is trying to reach.

Any change must start on the individual level, by encouraging Christian parents to unplug their kids. No smart phones (EVER!), allotted time for video games, allotted (and monitored) internet usage, mandatory reading time, mandatory backyard time. Make them sit in church with you and stay awake and take notes. (In junior high I went to a church with a Baptist preacher of the windbaggery persuasion and can tell you that kids can sit through 80 minutes of very boring sermoning maintaining good posture and a respectful demeanor.) Part of my goal in parenting Owen and the ones to come is to force them to be bored for at least part of every day. There is no virtue in boredom, but there is virtue in the fruits of boredom, properly channeled. And, yes, I have heard the old phrase "idle hands are the devil's playground." Two things: first, boredom is not the same thing as idleness; second, if idle hands are the devil's playground then what are young hands on an unbound technological device?

Implicit in my tiredness with these critiques of megachurch excess--critiques, remember, that I agree with--is that most of us making them are still complicit in the entertainment-saturated nature of our culture. For example, after writing a paragraph on the virtues of boredom I switched over to the Amazon tab on my browser and watched an episode of Justified on my prime account, afraid that this book on the Trinity I am reading would be less engaging than watching Timothy Olyphant strut around and shoot bad guys. In other words, we inundate our average lives with entertainment, hopping from blog to blog or video to video and then expect our churches to silence all of the noise for an hour and fifteen minutes on Sunday morning so we can contemplate in peace before we rush off into the next thing.

If we want the church to be different we need to be different. If we want the church to stand out from the constant noise of our culture we need to stand out from it as well. We can keep making fun of the megachurches which is a good enough time, but unless we are cultivating different habits in our daily life, habits which would make the church feel as if it weren't part of its mandate to entertain, then all we are really going to be doing is making fun of other Christians for being just like us every other time but Sunday morning.

Out With a Whimper: The Death Knell of Community

It seems as if I have been writing about television a lot lately. Perhaps I need to work on my reading/television balance. Anyway. . . 

Community, like Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks before it, is going the way of Janice Joplin and James Dean--untimely, youthful deaths that lead to beatific devotion by a committed group of fans who will forever wonder, what if? Granted, they are still making episodes of Community, but the show will never be the same without show creator and showrunner Dan Harmon and that has been fully evident in the first several episodes of the new season.

When news of Harmon's release from the show came out last year I let out an audible gasp, not unlike when I found out Bill Snyder retired for the first time as Kansas State's football coach or that Rage Against the Machine was breaking up (in retrospect I am a bit ashamed of being so moved by the latter). Why do the perfect things always end? (I am not talking about Rage Against the Machine anymore.)

Community is/was, as far as it goes for me, the most fascinating show on television. It was witty, parodic, meta. It basically took every convention of the sitcom and inverted it. There was a claymation Christmas episode, a clip show with clips never featured in an prior episode, two Glee sendups, a mockumentary of Ken Burns's Civil War series, an entire episode about Dungeons and Dragons, a bottle episode about a lost pen, two paintball wars, a zombie episode, John Goodman in a ponytail, and the dean (oh, the dean!). The Sam and Diane couple, Jeff and Britta, are revealed to having been sleeping with each other without the group's knowledge for an entire year. This was not a typical sitcom by any standard.

And now it is dying. Not because Season Three wasn't awesome. It was. It was totally awesome. But because America would rather watch eight incarnations of CSI and Two and a Half Men. And everything on television is subject to the tastes of a culture for whom Honey Boo Boo is an icon. It is hard for works of art, on network television at least, to survive in that environment. 

But part of me also thinks that Community will in the long run benefit enormously from its short run. Harmon will almost certainly benefit from this long term. He gets to be the genius who was kicked off his brainchild only to watch it founder without his guiding hand, only adding to the aura of his genius. Maybe it is because I am so naturally uncreative, but it is hard for me to imagine a show as different as Community sustaining itself for seven or eight seasons without descending into an unfunny caricature of itself. This is, in fact, what we have seen this season as the show is helmed by different talent. Perhaps Harmon could have kept up the brilliance for another season, but there are only so many other places a show like that can go.

I think of how terrible The Office has been without Steve Carrell, and let's be honest here, it was headed downhill before he left, and I can't help but be grateful that Community has been (likely) spared the same fate. It will die after this season and its first three seasons will sit on my shelf as artifacts of untarnished brilliance. And I will remembers its death kindly. It is not Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and the eternal "what if?", but Mickey Mantle retiring, not because he wasn't still good, but because he wasn't Mickey Mantle anymore. In that sense, and in those situations, you are glad that people called it quits, even if their death is somewhat forced. We remember Barry Sanders with more affection than Brett Favre for a reason. Quitting with grace is better than not knowing when to stop. So for your own sake, Community, just quit and die already and let us eulogize you properly. "Goodnight, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

Why the Church Loses Its Kids

I am linking hereto an article that has been making the rounds in the Christian corner of the interwebs. I recommend that you read it or at least browse it in order to have my comments make sense.

Articles like this have really started to bother me. I don't want to impute bad motives to the author or anything like that. At one time in my life I would have really enjoyed an article like this. I enjoy many things I get to nod along knowingly to, as if I am the bearer of some profound insight somehow shared by the author. But now they feel too out of touch and too simple, much like the arguments of many Republicans in the wake of the last election: it is not our policies that are turning people away, but our packaging! Maybe if Marco Rubio says the same old stuff Latinos will vote for us in droves. Christians fall into this same trap. We can think: maybe it is not that Christian doctrine is really, really hard to swallow and follow in our instant gratification, intensely individualistic, insanely privileged world, but that we are doing some easily correctable thing wrong that once we correct will lead to massive revival. But Christian doctrine is divisive and unsettling. It requires us to believe things absolutely unpalatable to our culture. And once kids raised in the church get out and fully immersed in that culture, this reality can become too much to bear.

Articles like this are indicative of what Kenneth Stewart of Covenant Seminary recently called evangelicalism's "liturgical inferiority complex." We don't have all of the fancy ritual of other, older denominations and now that we are in a brief zeitgeist where older and liturgical is hipper than newer and free-flowing we are scrambling to keep up and reconsidering traditions jettisoned recently by the seeker sensitive movement.

Stewart's example was the recent move by many lower church evangelicals to embrace Lent. I like the tradition of Lent, and generally practice some form of mild observance, but it is not the ancient practice its advocates make it out to be and uneducated laity believe it to be. Neither is it based on anything strictly Biblical. This doesn't mean it is wrong to celebrate Lent, merely wrong to act as if the majority of evangelicals who do not observe the season are somehow deficient for refraining from an extrabiblical tradition. We may wish for the return of liturgy to the church, but there is nothing inherently Biblical about liturgy. One can appreciate Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer or the Westminster Catechism, but if one actually takes seriously the prayers and claims in the liturgical works, the last thing it ought to make one is proud. 

Furthermore, this author sort of blithely accepts that Christian youth who leave the church when they march off into the gaping maw of the university do so because they were unprepared by their parents and their church. "Train a child in the way that he shall go and when he is old he will not depart from it," is a proverb, not doctrine. Want proof? How did the kids of the guy who wrote this proverb turn out? Some kids will fall away. Most will not fall away because they read Nietzsche and now harbor deep theological reservations about Biblical Christianity, but because they want to have sex and get drunk without feeling guilty. There are exceptions, but that is the rule.

Also, #10 and #9 on this list are directly the result of a previous movement to make church more attractive to kids, by the previous generation of evangelical parents that were freaked out when their kids started leaving the church. In other words, stuff gets complicated when your goal becomes not to lose the kids. One generation tends toward severer discipline, the other towards entertainment, both with the same goal in mind. Raising kids on a diet of grace, as this author recommends, is great as long as you understand (and teach them) that grace binds as well as frees. God does care how we act, even though we are saved through his favor alone. I hate how carelessly character and good works are dismissed by these purveyors of grace as if conduct no longer matters. Of course a tally sheet shouldn't be kept at youth group to keep track of how good each individual is doing in arbitrary categories, but there ought to be accountability, especially with high schoolers. I am not yet far enough removed from high school to forget that high school aged people are very stupid. Even the smart ones.

I think it is hard to know why people leave or why they have dark times of doubt. I was beset by a severe dark night of the soul my senior year of college. I still don't know what caused it or why it happened when it did. I have theorized multiple things, all possible, but even eight years later I can't say fully why it happened. It just did. My guess is these kids who gave these answers about why they left the church actually have little idea why they left. Or they know, but it is better to complain about Noah's ark themed playrooms and the ignorance of their former leaders. Anything but turning the gaze inward. In any event, the severely anecdotal observations related in this article probably should not be made too much of. The reason for most church loss is in many senses far easier than all of this handwringing leads us to believe. Our grandparent's generation had a word for it. It was sin.

Reading for Reading's Sake

I found this quote on Alan Jacobs' tumblr and found it prescient for me:

“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper,” – W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967)

I know that I often fall prey to this tendency Auden astutely points out. On the top of this page is a list of books that I have read during the current year. Frequently I consider deleting this page. Why is it there? I started it as a way to keep track and for people to have a link to things they might find interesting, but I wonder if it doesn't subtly influence both what I read and they way I read it. There is always a pressure to read a book more quickly than I ought to merely in order to mark it off the list. Now with the page up there that pressure is amplified.

I know most people could not care less how many books I read per year or what books I read, but everything in our culture points us toward a crafting of our identities. For a reader, part of how we craft that identity is by what we read. We keep lists, lists which are constantly updated and amended, of things we want to read. We sometimes feel bad if an unworthy book from off the list is suddenly read.

The solution, I think, is twofold. First, don't worry about any lists. This doesn't mean necessarily to not keep them, but to not be bound by them. As Mr. Jacobs recommended in his excellent book on the art of reading, don't so structure your reading to not be open to serendipity and whim, both excellent guiding principles in their own right. Second, slow down. St Augustine, a quite good reader himself, once wrote "I write as I learn and I learn as a write." Simply put, if you take the time to slow down and write as you read--take notes, ask questions--you gain far more than by simply plowing through tome after tome.

It might mean reading less, fewer notches on the bedpost, but the reading will almost certainly be better and what is learned in the books will last.

House of Cards and the Narrow Imagination of Dramatic Television

Over the course of the past few months, since whenever it showed up in Netflix on instant watch, I have been slogging my way through Aaron Sorkin's early aughts drama The West Wing. I really have enjoyed the show. It is a liberal fantasy land, in many ways, (one scene where my smug meter nearly exploded was when the president dressed down a conservative radio host in a room full of radio hosts for her use of Leviticus to object to homosexuality) but an entertaining one. There is something thrilling about getting a look behind the scenes--however skewed that look might be--in the halls of power for our country. I am only a couple of seasons in so far, so I really don't know where it goes from here. I can safely assume, given its seven season run, that President Bartlet is reelected. I don't imagine they spend the final four seasons following the gang as they fan out to various lobbying agencies and sit on the boards for big campaign contributors to finally cash in on their years of overwork on Pennsylvania Avenue. But one thing about the show, something that strikes me as nearly entirely different from the great shows currently on television, is that it is positive. There is an occasional shady deal and sometimes bad stuff happens, but in the end it is hopeful. The people who staff the west wing believe in this country and believe in the policies they will spend their time in office fighting for. 

By contrast, during my recovery from surgery a couple of weeks ago I used part of my time to watch David Fincher and Beau Willimon's very different Washington drama, the freshly released House of Cards. Cards is the first full-fledged production sponsored, owned, and produced by Netflix. It stars Kevin Spacey as a completely immoral Machiavellian politician. The majority whip for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, the series begins by Spacey's character, Frank Underwood, being denied the cabinet post in the new administration he was promised. His pride hurt, he kicks in to revenge mode, seeking to run over everyone who has spited him, anyone else who might hinder him, and one unfortunate junior member of Congress with a substance abuse problem.

I don't really want to delve too deeply into Cards. I finished it Sunday night and am still forming thoughts--at this point it seems like another extremely well done show with a main character who I hope dies sometime soon. But I think the prominence of shows like Cards, and here I would lump in Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, says quite a lot about how we think of heroes today. In short, we don't really think they exist anymore. We are no longer believers. Our heroes are antiheroes. 

It has been instructive to watch these shows side by side. I don't know what Washington is really like, but I imagine it is neither The West Wing nor House of Cards. But it seems to me as if people these days take the more negative interpretation of something as the truth of the situation. I have had people tell me, for instance, that Mad Men is an accurate reflection of the early 60s. But this is ridiculous. Mad Men is just as much of a caricature of that period as Leave it to Beaver. We just like the darker spin these days. It is somehow gratifying to think that all of those family men we at one point in collective history were encouraged to admire were really just cheating assholes. Sorry, well-dressed cheating assholes.

I don't know what to make of all of this, if anything. The only reason I bring it up is because I imagine that the audience that would have watched The West Wing in the early 2000s is roughly the same crowd who is watching the much different brand of TV today. The West Wing functioned as a sort of liberal escapism from the Bush years, though I don't imagine Jed Bartlet has anything in common with Al Gore. As easy as that is to mock, at least the escapism was tied to what people viewed as noble causes. What are these new shows helping us escape from? The boring world where most people are nice and nondescript? Does Walter White or Don Draper or Rick Grimes or Frank Underwood have any nobility, any quality which is worthy of emulation?

Maybe that is not the point, but to me Draper and Underwood especially are so bad they are no longer even interesting. The best character on Cards is/was (spoiler alert) the now deceased congressman Peter Russo. Russo wasn't a great man, but a good one undone by demons and played upon by a disgusting mastermind. There is nothing interesting about Underwood, he is one-dimensionally bad. And, as Grantland's TV writer Andy Greenwald pointedout, his wife Claire, a thinly-veiled Lady Macbeth, is the result of a character emerging fully formed from a "fire in a metaphor plant."

These bad male leads are all intended to shock, but shock can only be sustained for so long. How surprising is it to see Don Draper womanizing? It might have been somewhat shocking in Season One (I think of that great carousel scene in the final episode of the season), but by now it is beyond tired. Cards started with Underwood choking a dog to death: how can we be shocked by anything else he would do? Walter White went from mild-mannered chemistry teacher to murderer in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. While it was horrifying to see him complicit in the death of a child in the first half season of Season Five, it was not shocking or outside of his character. He has no character left. His descent from pushover teacher to criminal mastermind to sociopath wasn't the slow burn fans of the show, including me, liked to believe. It all happened rather quickly. The past few seasons have just been the aftershocks. Walter hasn't changed. He has been presented with new, sometimes increasingly harrowing situations, but his response has always been the same: calculated self-preservation. That the stakes are higher doesn't reflect a change in character; Walter is simply all-in at this point and will do what needs to be done to try and avoid the ignominious death he deserves.

Reading back through what I have written, it strikes me how disparate the comments are. I think my larger point, and what bothers me most about the current state of TV (and, really, there is a ton of great television out there; I hardly ever watch a movie anymore), of which these bad boy lead men are only an indicator, is that the two main traction points for drama on the avant garde television shows are infidelity and murder. Both are dramatic, yes, but only in a limited way. There are things in life that are dramatic that don't involve cheating or killing. I think this is why I loved the small screen version of Friday Night Lights so much, despite its myriad flaws. The most absurd moment of FNL was when they tried to interject a bit of good old-fashioned killing into the show. It is also why, at the end of a long day when Owen is in bed and Clara and I are tired, we fire up an episode of Parenthood, perhaps my favorite show these days, on Netflix and trust that, money problems aside, Adam Braverman will never resort to manufacturing drugs to make ends meet. Crosby, on the other hand. . . 

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is a cable television phenomenon, in many ways the king of cable (though last night's episode was dethroned by The History Channel's miniseries The Bible; to show where my twisted loyalties lie, I recorded The Bible and watched The Walking Dead). People can put whatever spin they want to on the brilliance of the show, or this or that, but really most people watch to see zombies get splattered and an occasional unlucky human get bit in a grotesque manner. I like to believe I am one of the former, watching for the psychology of seeing a group of people live through the end of the world, but I must admit that seeing a katana go through a zombie skull can be gratifying in its own way. 

I am writing about the show because last night's episode, Clear, was perhaps the most disturbing I have seen. This is a claim that cannot be taken lightly by watchers of the show--there are many, many disturbing moments--but there was something about last night that gave me the willies. It kept me awake in bed. I couldn't get over one image: that of an orange backpack laying on the side of the road.

(There will be spoilers beyond this point, though none that will have any long-term implications for the show.)

The premise of the show was a road trip episode. Rick, his creepy son Carl, and the enigmatic Michonne wisely leave the rednecks and the infirm at the prison to fight it out in case the Governor and his people show up while they are out looking for more guns. Why not just leave the prison? you ask. I have no freaking idea. 

The episode opens with a sign erected on the side of the road telling a girl named Erin that whoever left the sign was trying to make it to Stone Mountain (isn't that where Kenneth from 30 Rock is from?). It is a haunting image. Parents (?), extended family (?), friends (?), leaving this hopeless/hopeful message that Erin would see this sign and somehow be able to find them. It helps to remind us that there are people out there other than Rick's fascist prison gang and the Governor's fascist hamlet dwellers. 

Moments later we see our heroes in their sponsored automobile burning down the highway in search of heat. Up ahead in the road is a backpacker, a real live human backpacker, who is pleading for them to stop and help. He is alone and desperate.  Michonne doesn't slow down as she drives. They hardly look back. Frantic he starts running after them. Moments later they find themselves stuck in the mud and are attacked by a cohort of nearby zombies. This is one of the more interesting zombie scenes in the show. There are several zombies pounding on the windows of the car, but the group seems entirely nonplussed. Rick casually cracks the window, tells the other passengers to plug their ears, sticks his revolver into the head of the first zombie and the brains get splattered. That is the only kill we see. The next shot is of a neat pile of zombies stacked on the side of the road. In many ways this season isn't really about the threat from the undead. They are all such experienced zombie killers that they hardly constitute a threat anymore. They are more of an inconvenience than anything. A side note in the battle between the survivors.

Rick and Carl help get the car free and as they are getting in the backpacker comes running down the road, again pleading for help. Once again, the group hardly casts him a second look and they take off. You knew what was going to happen at this point. You knew this guy was dead and they were going to find him on their way back. And this is what happened, though it happens offscreen. 

I am leaving out the bulk of the episode: the gang encounters Morgan, the man who helped Rick in the pilot episode of the show, saving his life and explaining the nature of the devastation to him. The conversation between the two was fascinating stuff, and to me further damns Rick for his refusal to help the unnamed backpacker. Here is a guy, Morgan, who had no reason to take a chance on Rick, yet did and saved his life and allowed him to find his family again. But Rick seems to resolutely refuse the same kindness towards others. And who, really, has Rick been burned by? Shane was apologetic in the moments before Rick stabbed him in the heart. The only other traitors were prisoners who had been trapped in a supply room for a year. 

After leaving Morgan to his grim future of living by himself in a Home Alone style booby-trapped attic, the gang takes off back to the prison (what is with the geography of this show? Somehow the prison is a hop and a jump away from Rick's hometown. Why, then, was it difficult for them to find? They spent the winter going SWAT-style through South Georgia. Wouldn't you know about the prison right down the road from your house?). They pass the familiar mess of wrecked cars where they encountered the zombies in the first scene. Shortly up the road is a mutilated corpse and on the side of the road an orange backpack.

I had hoped that there would be a moment of great regret on the faces of the characters at this point. A realization that they had abandoned a man to a cruel death. Instead, after passing the backpack they back up and the 12 year-old boy reached down silently to put the pack in the car. There might after all be something useful in the pack. The wearer of the pack would only have been a nuisance. I about cried. Seriously. I teared up. It was awful to watch. 

This was one of those rare moments where the show slows down enough to let you contemplate the terror that has befallen the world since the advent of the apocalypse. And when you do that it makes for great TV, but it also allows the human tragedy to soak in and confronts you with just how awful this new world really is. With people like this as survivors, maybe it is better for the world to go ahead and just end. Honestly, at this point I have a hard time rooting for Rick. What makes him better than the Governor? How different is it to actively kill someone or to abandon them to fate in this zombified world? I can see those who argue that he made a pragmatic decision, a cold calculation. I can see that point, but whatever he did it certainly wasn't human.