A priest, a terrorist, an FBI agent and a covert alien on TV's "V"

I have written before about the TV show “V” and its use of religious people and imagery in a plot about aliens visiting the Earth with sinister intentions. In the wake of continued coverage of the Times Square bombing attempt, and the continuing links between the failed bomber and some radicalized militant strain of Islam, this week’s episode seemed more sinister. Allow me first to recap some salient points of the show.

An alien race who looks to be human and is called the Visitors, or V for short, arrives unannounced in major cities around the world. They declare themselves to be “of peace, always” but a few bright-eyed Americans aren’t so sure of their good intentions. Sure enough, the V are up to no good and are actually lizard-like creatures in human skin. Their claims to be peaceful are hypocritical at least and apocalyptically sinister at most. Our heroes are a TV-friendly rag-tag bunch: a terrorist, a V who has turned against their sinister machinations, an FBI agent and a Catholic priest.

This week’s episode has our heroes blow up a shuttle which they thought would be full of only evil aliens. It seems that they’ve been misinformed, as all they find in the wreckage is human remains. But wait! There’s a twist: the V learned of their plans and put 20 or so already dead humans on the shuttle instead. The guilt of our heroes is assuaged, and the priest–who had quit over the shuttle blowup–comes back to the group. Here’s where a strangely coded message comes in. Are we talking about space lizards or Muslims here?

Anyone who has studied the Islamic faith or even spoken with its adherents will be able to tell you that the official and orthodox rendering of Islam is that it is a religion of peace. People like Faisal Shahzad do not represent mainstream Islam any more than the Hutaree Militia represent mainstream Christianity. Note, however, the similarity between the message of the evil-doers on the show (“We are of peace, always”) and the message many of us try to express about Islam as a peaceful religion despite what some would do in its name.

That’s not where the between-the-lines messages begin or end. In the show, a few good people with God on their side (remember, there’s a priest!) are fighting an evil that hides among us and looks like us but isn’t even human. Their foe professes to be peaceful, but is in fact quite sinister. Their foe sees no value in human life, but our heroes have deep consciences. The priest quit fighting when he thought he had been involved in killing innocent humans. One more thing our heroes have done? They have tortured an enemy combatant to get valuable information that might save lives.

If I were a more cynical person, I might watch for Dick Cheney’s name in the end credits of the show. After all, how different is the conflict between humans and aliens on this fictional program than the conflict described by our government and media when speaking of terrorism? The enemy says that they are peaceful, but they are not; the enemy can look like anyone; the enemy isn’t even really human; we value life more than they do; we might have to get our hands dirty and permit torture to get information out of them. It’s either the hawkish line on Al Quaeda or the plot of a weekly sci-fi show.

So why does this matter anyhow? We turn to TV fictions to escape the fears and stresses of our daily lives. When we are fed a veiled narrative about what most of our nation sees as an existential struggle, those messages can seep in. I am not proposing that this program is outright propaganda. What I am saying is that the line of argumentation advanced by the government and media about the struggle with terrorism is so pervasive that it echoes through our recreation time. I don’t know if this show was purposely written to tap into that anxiety or if the anxiety itself makes these themes pop out from wherever they might hide.

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s takes on the intertwining of fiction and non-fiction narratives in the comments.

Links:

• V on ABC
• V on Hulu
• “Evidence Mounts for Taliban Role in Car Bomb Plot” NYTimes.com
• “Money Woes, Long Silences and a Zeal for Islam” NYTimes.com

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon a/k/a Maimonides

The New York Times features an op-ed piece from Andrew Baker this morning that should serve as a stirring reminder of the importance of shared religious heritage and diversity. It regards the difficulty of restoring the yeshiva and synagogue of Maimonides in Cairo, Egypt.

This is not, however, simply a story of how difficult it is to secure government funding for historical or architectural restoration. At least, it is not only that kind of a story. The story of restoring Maimonides’ yeshiva carries important messages about history and religious diversity. All in one building, we can see a microcosm of conflict between what we’ve dubbed a shining star of the modern Islamic state (that is, Egypt) and its troubled relationship with its own Jewish heritage.

Baker’s article aptly lays out the history of Maimonides and of the Jewish population of Cairo, so I will not belabor that history in this short article. I do want to point up the narrative nature of history here. We must endeavor to preserve the fact of humanity’s religious diversity in history from the narrative aims of a dominant state apparatus. This is not only true for the Islamic-Jewish tension in Egypt: it is equally true for the United States. We must continue to write humanity’s religious diversity back into the dominant narrative of history at every opportunity or we risk really and truly losing that rich expression of human longing for connection with the transcendent.

It’s been just over a week. That’s not near enough time to make definitive statements. This event is laden with complication and questions, ones that will be worked out for months to come. So, Peter, when you ask, “isn’t he like us?” I want to say yes and no. And the no must be investigated thoroughly.

We are all fallible and fractured humans, estranged from God’s love. It’s an estrangement buoyed by our backwardness. Whether it be greed, pride, apathy or in the case of Hasan utter despair—for only a deep tragic despair could fall to such destruction—we find ourselves separated from God’s wholeness. Then there is certainly undeniable distance between Hasan and “us”. This, however, has nothing to do with Hasan being Muslim. Any killing in the name of God is perversion. The difference centers on the proverbial compass needle. Maybe it’s a fallacy, but I’d like to think in all of our imperfection, we (the “us”) can and do value the good over evil and that we can distinguish between the two when we engage in thoughtful reflection. In doing so we ask ourselves, “how do we keep the needle pointing north?” For many of us it’s a reflection through religious imagination, which helps us make sense of our fallible characters and endows us with a power of transcendence.

But when that religious imagination becomes the vehicle for violent action, it is perversion plain and simple. It’s becoming more clear Hasan was a more troubled man than anyone ever recognized—a trouble that led to a manifestation of religious perversion.  It’s why American Muslims have been so vocal in the last week to say: “this is not who we are, it is in fact the exact opposite.”

So we can see Hasan as the wholly, evil “other,” ask for our pound of flesh, and move on in dismayed anger. Or, maybe we can thoroughly investigate the whys and the hows. That is, how did such undeniable distance develop between Hasan and us? How did this man become encumbered by such deep trauma? And how did no one recognize his troubled nature and fail to speak out, or even more, help him work through such despair?

If we’re about healing, we’ll not gloss over the difficult questions that indict us all. We’ll approach them stumbling forward, but we’ll do it together—rechecking the compass with each step. We have to.

Hasan’s Presentation to Senior Army Doctors on Adverse Effects of Muslims in US Military

More Unending News:

NYTimes: Tangled Story
Slate: “Is Hasan a Terrorist”
NPR: Interview with Muslim Military Chaplain
Hasan Family Statement
Face the Nation

It turns out that the man in custody for these shootings is a United States Army psychiatrist named Nadal Hasan. He is a Muslim. That’s about where the media coverage flew off the rails of discourse, crash landing in a smoking heap of polemic. Some bloggers have posited this indisputably tragic event in terms evocative of Armageddon. Other opinion pieces point out the thorny nature of the question posed by Hasan’s actions: namely, can we talk about one extremist’s beliefs without maligning an entire tradition?

I confess that I do not have an answer. I have known too many Muslims in my life to think that Maj. Hasan’s beliefs are normative. I want to assign him to a category analogous to Fred Phelps: a fringe figure who speaks for no-one but himself. Even this lets me too much off the hook. I need to think about a bigger issue raised by Maj. Hasan’s actions.

I want to know about the chickens coming home to roost. I want to know why the possibility of his being traumatized by exposure to war through his patients is not being explored any longer. This came up briefly in early news coverage. As soon as there was a simpler–dare I say reductionist–answer at hand, the complex and human picture was discarded. The news networks are no longer interested in interrogating the relationship between war and violence on one hand and the traumatized human psyche on the other. Now we just have a boogeyman to fear. Now we can just be thankful that he isn’t like “us”.

Isn’t he?

Further reading:

• Faith or Trauma: Questioning the Motivation of the Fort Hood Shooter
• Spinning Ft. Hood
• On Faith: Religion In The Military
• On Faith: Islam and the Fort Hood shootings
• Dan Gilgoff on Obama’s response to the shootings (U.S. News & World Report)