WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- NBC's award-winning dramatic series "West Wing" aired a special episode devoted to terrorism on Oct. 4. It began promisingly enough with a group of high school honor students confined in the White House while the Secret Service interrogated a White House staffer, an Arab-American whose name matched an alias of a known terrorist.
It still stands out even several weeks after it aired.
The episode moved back and forth between the tense and powerfully rendered interrogation and an improvised classroom seminar over lunch between White House staffers and the students. The scenes with the students and their impromptu teachers, as written by the talented Aaron Sorkin, were so sophomoric I thought I could smell the unwashed gym clothes lying in a pile in the corner.
Let's hope that the real staffers in the Bush West Wing don't talk to each other with the jibes and condescension that were demonstrated in this episode. The constant recourse to stereotypes on both side of the political spectrum, for and against a forceful military intelligence service, didn't even come close to embodying the sense of unity that has prevailed in this country since the attacks.
Especially troubling was the grand finale delivered by the Deputy Chief of Staff, Josh Lyman, played by Bradley Whitford, who intones that the fundamental lesson of terrorism is respect for "pluralism." Freedom, he reminded us, is nothing less than being receptive of many ideas while refusing to be gripped by the absolute certainty of any one of them.
To say that terrorists attack the United States because they are not "pluralists" and we are trivializes the whole tragic occurrence of Sept. 11. American freedom was fought for and gained by men and women willing to die in wars waged over the past 200 years -- they fought for and passionately defended fundamental ideas underlying the respect for pluralism that "West Wing" so vacuously celebrated.
Paramount among the founders' ideas with respect to pluralism is human equality. The equality of all men and women before their government and its laws is hardly an idea that encourages fanatics to take innocent lives. On the contrary, equality is one of those great ideas from America's founding that makes pluralism possible.
This confusion was echoed in the brief appearance by "West Wing's" president, played by Martin Sheen. When asked whether or not he admired martyrs willing to die for their cause, he replied that what we needed were not martyrs but "heroes willing to live for their country."
Sorkin missed an obvious opportunity to affirm the heroism of martyrdom in the service of a good cause. Why lump all those who have suffered and died for their beliefs with those who slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
West Wing's failure to help its viewers think through the tough questions can be traced to the basic relativism that pervades the whole of primetime television. When all ideas are of equal value and all martyrs are blind fanatics, then we can do nothing better than to esteem the idea of pluralism rather than the truths that make it possible. How sad.
(Deal W. Hudson is publisher and editor of Crisis, a monthly magazine that surveys the political, spiritual and cultural landscape from a Catholic perspective.)
