We just finished watching Season Two of Treme, the HBO drama highlighting the struggles of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and, like David Simon’s previous series Homicide, Life on the Street, and The Wire, there are multiple and interlocking story lines to follow, as well as many questions posed in the course of the eleven episodes. We both felt, after watching the first season’s DVD, that this was less intense and focused than The Wire, and we still fell that way after the second season, but also that the diminished intensity and focus doesn’t really detract from the interest and entertainment value of this series, and that intensity and focus are sufficient to highlight the conflicts and questions of values raised by the show. As in previous works. Simon depicts the breadth and depth of corruption that accompanies the personal struggles of the various characters. Jon Seda’s portrayal of Nelson Hidalgo is a perfect fit for all of the shenanigans put in play to significantly alter the essential character of New Orleans following the flooding of poor neighbourhoods and the subsequent dispersal of a large segment of the city’s black population to other parts of the country. It seems clear that a certain group wanted to turn the city into something of a sanitized white-bread, Disneyworld-like haven for tourists and a gold mine of redevelopment schemes for sponging up recovery and rebuilding funds, as well as for selling a different city to a different clientèle. There are great scenes in clubs and on the street celebrating Orleanian culture, in particular the music, but without any rose-coloured glasses: there is ample portrayal of the tawdriness of much of life in the city, including the ever-present threat of violence visited on relatively innocent citizens. Included as part of the tension of living in NOLA is the oft-conflicted relationship between the NOPD and the citizens it purports to serve, making an interesting backdrop for several of the story lines. In addition, we’re offered spoiled and conflicted teen angst, hyper-testoterone fired lives, all the flakiness that comes with creative types, well-intentioned poseurism and lots of the confusion and lack of clarity that constitutes much of life for all of us. Simon doesn’t pretend to have any answers to any of this, being quite content to hold up mirrors to let viewers see what they will and decide whether or not any of these situations relate directly to the viewer. He does, however, offer a view of a world full of flaws venial and mortal and helps to formulated a series of questions that we can choose to address at or discretion. It could just be entertainment…

OK, the real reason I bring this up is that my concern for our local BC film and television industry is that they are pawns in a Hollywood game, a game where the Hollywood production people get to pretend and in which the crews on the ground get to be part of the stakes, along with considerable taxpayer funds. Hollywood has done a splendid job of finding the lowest common denominator, exploiting it to the point where they’ve lowered an already low standard, and they want us to forego even more tax revenue so they can continue to shovel out more of this drivel, the same tawdry content recostumed, updated, prettified and sleazified for injection into the already toxic content stream. David Simon’s work isn’t perfect, but it has some sensitivity and incites the viewer to reflect on more than the inadequacy of fortune or looks in relation to the latest crop of celebrities. Is there room for a huge increase in the volume of meaningful content? Probably not to the extent that trash is being created in whatever version of Hollywood exists either in SoCal, or Vancouver, or Toronto or whatever might be the latest incarnation of cheap remote location that turns Gastown or Hogtown into downtown Cleveland. I would love to see the Hollywood moguls go off in a little corner and visit their silliness on each other, but I fear that we live in a world that cannot physically stand that kind of a waste of resources. I certainly resent being forced to participate through government subsidy in the creation of this LCD slime. I’m willing to pay for decent content, and that’s how a market is supposed to work, but here we have yet another example of how the “free” market is rigged through the sale of the political will. At some point, there should perhaps be some sort of dialogue about the skills we possess and how best to deploy those skills in a way that ensures that people such as the film and television crews of BC (and all jurisdictions) can make a decent and stable living doing work that produces content with some lasting value beyond the kind of “sugar high” to which we could liken the majority of what comes out of studios.

Over at the Globe and Mail, we have this clever fellow Jeffrey Simpson who’s keen to tell us that those French should be careful about undertaking foreign adventures from which they may have more trouble extricating themselves than they had in inserting themselves. Perhaps the readership is as short on memory as the French leadership, which all seems a little nonsensical given that the French only recently pulled the last of their troops out of Afghanistan after ten years of what can best be described as futility. We still have people there, though not in combat positions (is there anywhere in Afghanistan that isn’t a combat zone?) and who knows where all the Americans are these days. Given their jag of base building since March of 2003, I find it hard to believe that there aren’t still significant numbers of American military personnel in Iraq, which brings us to the instant parallel that came to mind when I read the headline on Simpson’s discourse:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/entering-mali-is-easy-exiting-not-so-much/article7536744/

This was around the internet just about the time W sent the boys off to finish Saddam Hussein, a sly little ditty from the man who recorded the Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag as the Vietnam War raged, and so had a bit of a perspective on this here-we-go-again routine in 2003.

Cakewalk to Baghdad Lyrics and music by Bruce Barthol © 2003I remember back, before we whacked Iraq I was watching the news, were we gonna attack? A man named Richard Perle came on and talked He said going to Baghdad would be a cakewalkCakewalk to Baghdad, Cakewalk to BaghdadIt went real easy, Took a couple of weeks Tore down that statue Set those Saddamites free The Frogs and the Krauts, they feel real bad, They missed out cakewalkin’ into Baghdad Cakewalk to Baghdad, Cakewalk to Baghdad Next we’re gonna cakewalk into Teheran, Gonna cakewalk to Damascus and Pyong-yin-yang When we strut on in, Everybody’s gonna cheer They’ll be wavin’ old glory, We’ll have kegs of beer, just like that… Cakewalk to Baghdad, Cakewalk to Baghdad Cakewalk to Baghdad, Cakewalk to Baghdad Now moms and dads don’t worry ’bout Your soldier boys and girls We’re just sending them cakewalkin’ Around the world When the coffins come home and the flag unfurls Cheer for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle Cakewalk to Baghdad, Cakewalk to Baghdad Do you think we’ll see those Bush boys patrollin’ the streets Like our soldiers got to do in Basram and Tikrit? We gonna see Richard Perle cakewakin’ ’round The streets and alleys of Baghdad town? Cakewalk to Baghdad, Cakewalk to Baghdad Easy to cakewalk in … not so easy to cakewalk out.   http://www.countryjoe.com/cjb.htm#cakewalk If you go to this page and click on Richard Perle’s face, you can listen to the song (I love it) via Real Player, and there is a version of it available through iTunes.   In any case, the French have Vietnam experiences of their own on which to base a certain sense of caution, along with the nastiness of the war in Algeria leading up to the Evian Accords of 1962, along with a bit of a misadventure in Rwanda in 1994 and the recently ended Afghan sortie.

Looking at the multiple recidivism of so many countries when it comes to intervention in foreign countries, we perhaps come to the conclusion that this is part of the scheme to drive the economy based on blowing things up, hopefully someone else’s stuff and in someone else’s yard, but as long as we can call them terrorists, we’re good to go. Meanwhile there are rumblings in the French press that the bigwigs in Bamako, on whose behalf our C-17 is ferrying French stuff to Mali to be blown up, are more concerned about the independence movement among the Tuaregs of the northeast than they are about Al-Quaeda au Maghreb Islamique in the northwest (who knows?) and perhaps the French have their own little agenda relating to gas, oil and uranium resources in the northern desert section of Mali.