h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, what goes around, comes around.
Two major U.S. network police shows this last week, "Navy NCIS", and "Without a Trace", have dug up the grinning corpse of a reguritant bad script of the Seventies and Eighties.
The stupid classic in question? "The soldier driven irredeemably mad by war".
This brain dead exercise in cultural short hand used to be solely about Vietnam vets. It didn't really begin to pick up steam until about 1973 and it ran itself into the ground by 1980, where upon the writers drove it subterraineanly as an easy subtext for a few more years until it finally petered out about the time of Desert Storm.

And here it is again:

1. A career officer mixes reality and the past with hallucinations and a paranoid sense that way more is going on than meets the eye and almost gets himself and a lot of other people killed in the process. Only the love and respect of a good buddy can save him.

2. A reservist who got a "Dear John" letter deliberately gets himself shot so he can go home. Life ain't what he thought it was going to be, so he commits a bank robbery, commits homicide during the commission of same, and then commits suicide by cop while in the presence of one of the FBI's famously competent boyos.

Thank you very much, the recycling center of Scriptwriter's Anonymous.

We really needed to see that crap again.

To be truthful, this kind of garbage has been appearing on the boob since the late fifties. It showed up in episodes of "The Twilight Zone", "Route 66", "The Fugitive", "The Man From Uncle", "Hawaii Five-Oh" "Dragnet", "Adam 12", "The Rookies", "S.W.A.T.", "Spencer for Hire", "Magnum, P.I.", "Baywatch", and "M.A.S.H."
Yet, these scripts, however cliched, had a difference from the current crop of ragged pages:
In almost every case, it signally involved a particularly embattled military individual, the draftee.
The modern U.S. military is volunteer. Even the reservist unwillingly called to war in the "Without a Trace" episode was originally a volunteer. So much of the psychological undercurrent necessary to make this kind of script work just isn't there.

That's kinda like Rob Reiner's "A Few Good Men", which was based on a Vietnam-era play, but wasn't produced until the nineties, when most of what it pretended to say was no longer valid because the men portrayed in the film were volunteers. I'm not sure that even the play was all that useful because the Marines had rarely had any use for draftees fresh off the bus. You had to ask to be a Marine and they had to want you.

The surgence of John Kerry, the "Liberal's Veteran", "The War Hero", and the "Champion of Whatever He Feels Right Now", has brought back the ghost of the "Winter report" that famously suggested that My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg of American military atrocities.
Mr. Kerry, who won't even talk about the actual AWOLs of the war, such as the boys who ended up in Leavenworth or Canada, has decided that Bush avoiding even slightly the war that Kerry has characterized as an American sin against it's own Manhood is a really bad thing, for reasons that continue to escape me.
Bush never claimes to be a war hero and Kerry never claimed to be anything but an honest man who was duped by the "Best and the Brightest" of his generation into a gung-ho stupor that only coming back to the world cured him of.

Now it seems that our little sneaky friends in the script writing boiler rooms have decided, ironically, considering the mix of hard-boiled procedural superhero activities and touchy-feely modern PC sensitivity that both shows attempt to project, to scrap the script bible in order to get their votes in early.

Now, I don't think it's a "conspiracy" (hmm. I just noticed that that word contains the word 'piracy'... wonder if that means anything?) because I don't think script writers can get together on anything but plagiarism (how much is too much, and how to get away with it) and unionized salary demands. No, I think this is evidence again of the cultural illiteracy of "writers" who can't be bothered to read.

The current on-air debates and news commentaries will soon fade into the mists of time and memory basically because they are not entertaining.
But shows that are destined (knowing my luck) to resurface again and again in syndication and on cable for the next three decades are going to be pounding this sad nail into the head of the viewer for a long time after the context is gone.

Even if the writers really don't know what they've done, and the network execs are too ignorant or young themselves to have a clue, they both have bought into the cultural miasma of their youth and let the dog of TV return to it's scriptural vomit.

Besides, if you're going to plagiarize, do it from the best. Ambrose Bierce would be a good start, and he's probably in the public domain by now.

A "con" piracy no less!

I hadn't thought of it that way. But, you're right.