Brass Tacks

"It sounds like a movie." --Dorothea Stillman, when Newsweek was still a viable rival.

The production values in and of themselves weren't all that flawed. The NBC derivative on the original was shot well. The dialogue was brisk. Underwood was credible, but in the dialectical tension between network past and network present, Burr's more abstract chief was more viable. Those of us who watched Underwood in this tinsel song and dance knew the con was on, but what were the contents which made the snake oil difficult to swallow? The veracity of the character was wrongly concentrated in the script; I've no doubt the FOP bats for officers disabled in the line of duty. Perhaps some get day jobs, but playing a paraplegic who becomes a mimetic of his former mobile self whose physical dignity is respected by his perpetrators pitted against him in a hissing of discharged helium going over the top, this was simply an assault on any viewer's intelligence.

I remember as little as possible about Raymond Burr, but recall enough to know his series was wisely treated as a stage play, Burr expounding accordingly, a muscular, if two dimensional pitch on how Arthur Miller would define manhood akin to the lion in winter. I kept thinking of Denzel, comparing major and minor notes, perhaps even the praxis of performance between them, especially when a girl in school clothes screamed with piercing pitch in my right ear, turning me into a court tv troll. I frightened her, in my beret, glasses, distended teeth, as I admonished her and minority wilding sisters to control themselves in public. Sales associates who know me, witnessing this, suspected something else was afoot. I only occasionally get combative with these cliques, if I see something particularly abysmal. In this instance, the girl's scream triggered a slightly painful leg seizure, so I took it on, the admonishing, not sure what I should feel that I intimidated a school girl who forgot herself.

A racial incident? Yes, no, or depends on the perspective. Kids screaming in the streets could be a harbinger of escalation. I would have flunked out, handling this behavior at the scholastic level or above. Am I a slightly more pliable version of my father? Yes, despite the fact that I can cite socio-economic rationalizations with the progressives in Reich's tableau. I came back to the city of my birth with the best of intentions. There were, or are, remnants of Philadelphia's leisure class who deplore the city's self-depreciation; it is this which is the real blight on the Greater Delaware Valley, regardless of ethnicity. It does not excuse the sense of entitlement which suborns poor social behaviors.