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Friday, September 30, 2016

Designated Survivor



You have probably seen headlines similar to this: 'World To End Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit."

It seems that after every terrorist attack by a Muslim intent on killing as many unbelievers as possible before collecting his 72 virgins the story is how the people most affected by the bombing, shooting, beheading or knifing are Muslims. 

Now we have a TV show that uses that them to tell us how having every government official in Washington killed in a bombing of the Capital, the victims are really those nice Muslims.


A new TV drama, "Designated Survivor" begins by showing, without an ounce of nuance, how  racist, bigoted, hate filled white Americans really are.  We are no more than 10 minutes into the first episode and we immediately know that Muslims as the biggest victims of a bomb attack during a State of the Union speech that kills every major government official except the Secretary of HEW, the “designated survivor”  who is now the new president. 

 The bad guys are cops, the military, the governor of Michigan who orders the arrest of every Muslim in his state and the surviving Republican in congress.

It’s Obama and Hillary’s view of America.

Without seeing any more than the first few minutes I know that the real bombers are supporters of Donald Trump, or perhaps The Donald himself.  

3 comments:

UK Houston said...

Overall, the show is as bad as you suggest. At the same time it does not help your critical credibility for you to get plot points wrong. The character who plays the president was Secretary of HUD as the story reemphasizes in episode 2 where he goes into the cabinet room and sits in his old chair instead of the one marked "The President." The governor of Michigan does not want to arrest all Muslims, just beat up a few for effect. (There are hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Michigan. Arresting them would be absurd.)
All the potential heroes in the story are non-white and all the white people play stereotypes and argue like women. You could turn the sound off and watch Maggie Q (wise Asian character) and Natascha McElhone (selfish first lady) pose with serious looks on their faces. Then there is Kal Penn, the president's boyfriend, who plays the same role on the show, it seems.

Moneyrunner said...

@ UK Houston, I agree with part of your comment and disagree with part. I accept your correction that the new president was the HUD secretary rather than the HEW secretary. It really doesn't matter. The writers chose the non-entity Secretary rather than the Secretary of State or Defense because they wanted to show how this political cipher with all the right Liberal instincts could rise to be a commanding presence. He's like the plain Jane girl in the movie who takes off her glasses, gets her hair done and turns from a ugly duckling into a beautiful swan.

I stopped watching the show after the first quarter hour because that's how long it took me to understand the formula, as I wrote in my comment. When I left the show the governor of Michigan was definitely talking about corralling the Muslims in his state. And, yes, I know about the number of Muslims in Michigan, most are concentrated in southeastern Michigan around the Detroit area. And, no, it's certainly not impossible to arrest hundreds of thousands of any ethnic or religious group. I refer you to the Third Reich, which is exactly what the writers intended to imply.

I understand that the show later showed an Arab kid being beaten to death. Again, an echo of the Nazis.

For a show to be good, it has to reflect reality. This one is pure crap propaganda. To quote Dorothy Rabinowitz"

"Here we come up against the show’s message, or more precisely its gross political tendentiousness: its vision of a vicious American nation, in the aftermath of the attack, hunting down its Muslim citizens; its pictures of police racing around Dearborn, Mich., dragging Muslims out of their homes, beating a teenager to death, all at the behest of the Michigan governor.

Not surprisingly, President Kirkman stands firmly against this brown-shirt brutality, a product of fevered writerly imaginations particularly loathsome to behold given the facts of history—in particular the actual terror attacks of 9/11, after which, through all their fear and rage, Americans comported themselves with the utmost dignity."

Thanks for being a reader and your comment.

Teapartydoc said...

I don't watch any TV shows. Weather, MMA, hunting and fishing shows and old movies.