Eerie Echo of Obama's Speech In "In Treatment"
Does anyone at XX Factor watch "In Treatment"? I watched last night's episode immediately after watching Obama's magnificent speech on YouTube, and was struck an echo of the speech in the show. It had me thinking about something like the point you made, Dahlia, about having to apologize for one's crazy elders.
Here's the echo: As you all know, every day of the week, Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) sees a different patient, and we see the session. Well, over the weekend, his Tuesday patient, a black Navy pilot (Blair Underwood), died. He had been struggling to unpack a suitcase full of anguish--guilt over having bombed a madrassa full of teenage boys, gay impulses, the legacy of his father, a harsh sometime civil-rights activist. Then his plane crashed during training exercises. He was considered one of the Navy's best pilots, and it is unclear whether his death was accidental or suicidal. And the father (Glynn Turman), who had emerged during the sessions as not just as a harsh man but as a soul-destroying monster, arrives on Dr. Weston's doorstep. He wants to understand what has happened to his son.
Turman gives a menacing, heart-breaking performance,well worth watching [http://www.hbo.com/intreatment/tuesday/], but his accomplishment per se is not what made me think of Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That came at the moment when he makes us see the father's side of things. He draws himself up, this thin, erect, bitter man, aware that the doctor partly blames him for the son's death though is too professional to say so, and he narrows his eyes and says (I'll have to paraphrase and make it sound more banal than it was): "I saw terrible things as a child. I understood that only the strong could survive this world. I wanted my son to be strong." And the doctor gently chides him, saying, "Couldn't you see that the world your son was born into was not the world you were born into?" And the father looks around at Dr. Weston's gorgeous office, with its deep sofas and mahogany furniture and picture windows full of leafy views, and says, in effect, "How can you, who know nothing of where I come from, of my culture, dare to judge me?"
The scene volleys our sympathies back and forth many more times before it ends, but I found myself thinking about some of the same people Dahlia did, Robin Morgan and Jesse Jackson and yes, Hillary Clinton, and all those other public figures who saw terrible things and fought bitter battles and said things we couldn't possibly agree with today and may not have agreed with even then--with the result that, as Obama said, and as Dahlia repeated, we can now afford to see things differently. What felt so new about the speech was not that he apologized but the degree to which he refused to, as well as the extent to which--and this was REALLY new--he eschewed derision and ridicule and the very American sin of presentism, of seeing the past through the lens of the present. Like Glynn Turman, he changed the way we see these people. They're not drooling on the sofa. They're battle-scarred, and so will we be one day. Hillary has a deep historical understanding of such matters, I have no doubt, but I am afraid she may lack the political courage required to articulate such complicated thoughts in the heat of a campaign, as well as the eloquence to make us understand them.
PS I have been told that the show reenacts with shocking fidelity its Israeli model, and I can't help wondering whether in the original, the pilot was in the Israeli army and his father survived the Holocaust. It's the only thing that would make sense. Anyone who has seen the original, please let me know.