For its second season, the creators of the FX series “The Americans”
have chosen a new source for insight into the Cold War during the
Reagan years – one Lt. Col. Oliver North.
It's a dramatic reversal from the first season and it has infuriated
some hard-leftists. The show began with the shocking promise from
creator Joel Weisberg that the show’s heroes would be KGB agents: “We’re
making them the sympathetic characters. I’d go so far as to say they’re
the heroes.” It quickly became apparent that these characters could be
unsentimental killers of innocent Americans, so perhaps that triggered a
change of heart.
What’s resulted for Season Two has been a more conventional dramatist’s
take: the KGB agents are morally conflicted, and so is the FBI agent
who lives across the street. The reaction from the hard left is equally
conventional. After shocking conservatives before the first season
began, Weisberg’s decision to hire North to consult on the second season
has thrown these liberals for a loop.
The New York Times ran a nasty article headlined “Oliver North, Now In
The Service of the KGB.” Get a load of how TV reporter Dave Itzkoff
described liberals who are annoyed with North’s support for
anti-communist freedom fighters in Nicaragua during the '80s: “Close observers of contemporary American history say they are irritated by what they see as Mr. North’s continued attempts to aggrandize and whitewash his role in it.”
But what does Iran-Contra have to do with this FX storyline? And who are those nameless "close observers" anyway?
The “close observers” who must not be called “liberals” included Leon
Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who said North’s
involvement in “The Americans” was “basically a bad joke.” He complained
“Everything that happens in history in this country eventually winds up
as entertainment....you become notorious, and your notoriety makes you
famous, and fame is the American version of glory.”
Wieseltier
concluded: “Given his insistence upon his purity of heart and soul,
there’s something a little tacky about his exploiting it.”
The Times and Wieseltier do not hold this opinion on other modern
historical figures if they're standing on the other side of the fence.
Valerie Plame Wilson certainly cashed in with lucrative book and movie
deals after her identity was revealed, but she was trashing George W.
Bush, so she wasn’t exploiting, aggrandizing, or whitewashing. Her
sudden wealth was a cash reward akin to an alternate Nobel Peace Prize.
Or take Anita Hill, a favorite of Times editor Jill Abramson. Hill
insisted on the “purity” of her heart and soul after her unsubstantiated
charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. Even when Hill
exploited it for a book deal worth more than a million dollars, after
insisting she'd never do such a thing, still it didn't chill left-wing
enthusiasm. In fact, they're still at it.
The Times recently lauded a new liberal documentary called “Anita”
hailing Hill. The Times described it as “an important historical
document about an event that prompted a larger cultural conversation
about sexual harassment.”
The paper wasn’t impolite enough to nudge out of its own editorial-page archives an Anita Hill article defending Bill Clinton [1]
during the Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Hill bizarrely claimed “The
substance of sex-related accusations against President Clinton differs
dramatically from those raised against Justice Thomas or [Senator Bob]
Packwood.” That’s ridiculous on its face.
For all their alleged appreciation of nuance and complexity, liberal
journalists play a simplistic game in identifying saints and sinners,
geniuses and goons. The degree to which you embrace and advance
liberalism is the degree to which you can do no wrong, and commit no
ethical, egotistical, or mercenary offense.