A Good Comic Book Gone Bad

NCIS Los Angeles is not really a drama or a dramatic adventure program. It is more a televised  version of what these days is grandiosely called a graphic novel, i.e. a long comic book.  With its outlandish  plots,  slam bang action, and colorful characters  with interesting origins or backgrounds, it has often been a very good comic book.  It has been one of only two or three network TV shows  that I have enjoyed watching. However I think I’ve had just about enough since comic books are better taken straight and unadulterated by political correctness. 

It was bad enough when a suspect’s high moral character was attested to based on her support for the Occupy Wall Street gang, but that was a while back and only a single incident.  Then a week or two ago an obnoxious under cover persona assumed by one of the characters was criticized as an example of white privilege. I  did not care for the gratuitous insult from that term and the claims and attitudes behind it to me, my wife, daughter, and grandchildren, most of the rest of my family and friends, and over two hundred million other Americans who do not deserve to be spit on. 

Last night on the show in a plot worthy of Lex Luthor or the Joker, a group of villains took over a group of ICBM silos and planed to launch the missiles and start a world war.   However these evil doers were all clean cut, ROTC trained, Air Force officers whose right wing politics had led them to decide to win the war on terror by nuking Mecca and most of the large Muslim-populated cities around the world.  There was even an evil professor – not quite a mad scientist, but close -  who had recruited  these malefactors based on their scoring as right wingers on some sort of survey of political attitudes.

We libertarians generally don’t buy the left/right political spectrum nonsense.  (We prefer a model ranking governments and political systems based on the degree to which they favor or oppose the liberal notions of liberty and individual rights, one  that places Nazis and Communists, and fascists and socialists together as opponents of liberty rather than as opposites who coincidentally behave in the same ways as each other.) However in the present political context in this country, “right wing” means conservative, and by making their genocidal maniacs right wingers, the show was smearing conservatives – pointedly, needlessly, and self-righteously.  

The conservatives have their faults, but  they don’t deserve that. It’s just dirty.  Besides, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are conservatives. So I think I may give the show a pass for a while.