So The Newsroom second season began last week. The dialogue was so fast and so confusing in the first episode, I didn’t finish watching the whole hour. Hoping for an improvement in week 2, I tuned in last night at the beginning of the 2nd half. Why midway? I hadn’t finished watching Masterpiece Mystery yet, and The Newsroom is always available from On Demand…always thinking & planning…

Most noteworthy about last night’s episode was the plot line wherein Sloan, the fastest talker, is upset about…wait for it … drone strikes. Imagine such a thing…she informs Mac that an American has been targeted and killed by a drone strike. Mac brings it to Will and they have a mini discussion session – echoing comments that result from every editorial on the topic, and in fact rehashing the same discussion that took place in our very own family room when the Daniels’ clan came to call. The two sides: lack of due process trumps all versus when you go to Yemen and advocate jihad against the U.S., you get what you deserve. No mention yet of the 16 year old son…does that come in a few episodes, or is a little angst enough on the topic, since there is a love quintangle to deal with (Don & Maggie, Maggie & Jim, Jim and Maggie’s roommate what’s her name, Maggie and the roommate (no – not that way..oh, never mind) Don and Sloan…geez, you need a scorecard)…

So I guess you can tell from my tone that the second season of The Newsroom is less than fulfilling at this point in its juncture…too many drinks thrown into faces and laps, too often leading characters (Will) having instantaneous catherses, and frankly just caricatures of reality that aren’t working for me any more.

OK, so what of it? Hey, this is just the intro to the main topic denoted in the Heading: I Need a Hero (Not).

Remember that bouncy Bonnie Tyler song, adoreably used in Footloose as two suitors square off playing chicken on farm vehicles? Of course you do…OK, if you’re too young or too old or … whatever, here’s the refrain…you’ll say “Oh, yeah!” after you read this part, silly…

I Need a Hero
I’m holding out for a hero
‘Til the morning light.
He’s gotta be strong
And he’s gotta be fast
and he’s gotta be fresh from the fight..

Think Kevin Bacon…got it now?

OK, but here’s the thing: we don’t need a hero.. Nope … plenty of those … in fact 30 of them brought onto the field at last week’s MLB All Star game in New York City…thank goodness Erik declined my invitation..it was embarrassing to watch them trotted out as part of a propaganda moment (Erik’s description, not mine…but he’s spot on). So the last thing we need is another hero.

What we need is a villain. Someone straight out of central casting that looks like Hitler, acts like Stalin and kills white people.

Why, you may ask? Well, I shall tell you why.

First, some background. In the history of America between the Civil War and now, we have gotten involved in major conflagrations only when a character as described above emerges to behave really badly. I’m not taking about little wars like the Spanish American War or the Mexican war, but the real deal: World War I and World War II. Even Korea and Vietnam don’t count because of the scope and scale.

In WWI, we had Kaiser Bill with his pointed helmet and bushy mustache, trampling those folk in Belgium and causing mayhem in France. In WWII, of course we had Adolph to hiss and boo at in movie theaters. Villains responsible for the death of millions of white people.

Now for the past 12 years we have been engaged in a “war on terror”. As you’ve likely heard countless times before, terror is a tactic, not an enemy. So therein lies the problem! We don’t have a face – a character upon whom to heap our vituperation. For a while we had OBL, but he was too quiet for too long, and in the end our satisfaction with killing him was too short-lived and unsatisfactory.

So why do we need this character? I’ll tell you why. We are currently engaged in the equivalent of gang warfare. We are the Jets and those other guys are the Sharks…we are defending Tony and Riff, dontcha see? But drone warfare is so lily-livered…so cold and sanitary, that we never get enough. The ‘death by pecks’ revenge never quite measures up to the scale of 9/11’s double whammy, so on and on it goes.

If we had a real bad dude to fight, to prove our ‘street creds’, maybe we’d get it out of our system once and for all and go back to watching The Biggest Loser and The Bachelorette. We’d escalate this thing to a scale that will prove once and for all that we are the toughest gang on the street.

Oh, but there’s the bridge in “I Need a Hero” that is somewhat more revelatory…here it is:

“Up where the mountains meet the heavens above
Out where the lightning splits the sea
I could swear that there’s someone somewhere watching me
Through the wind and the chill and the rain
And the storm and the flood
I can feel his approach like a fire in my blood”

I could swear there’s someone somewhere watching me. That’s not just a feeling..that’s the reality we’ve known for years, the reality that Little Eddie Snowden thought was a huge revelation. So in the process of looking for the archvillain Bernardo and only finding little Chinos, we watch and we collect data and we expand the drone “war on terror” to the war on narco trafficking and the war between the Turks and the PKK over freedom for Kurdistan. This is no way to be the toughest gang on the street. This is a recipe for self annihilation. Maybe that’s what OBL had in mind all along, and why I believe the continued use of drones will be the end of us all.

Blame The Newsroom for bringing this all back home. But I’ll likely watch next week, hoping it gets better. We’ll see.