Scary TV

My newest letter to the editor which will never get published:


I have never been a fan of horror movies and usually keep my eyes closed during really unnerving scenes in TV shows but I did watch several really scary spectacles in the last couple of weeks. They were called the Republican Debates. To begin with I hadn’t seen less diversity on TV since watching the 1957 version of Twelve Angry Men. I watched as ten old white men stood answering questions being thrown out by more old white men like Chris Matthews of MSNBC and Brit Hume of Fox, and Wolf Blitzer of CNN. At least Fox let an African American ask a couple of questions; otherwise anyone watching from another country would think the only people who inhabit America are old white men. In a multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-cultural society, isn’t it a little creepy that the Republican Party only has white men running for President in their party? David Letterman said, "They looked like the evil law firm in a John Grisham movie."

Now I have to admit most of the debate hours were boring beyond belief, but the scary parts were horrifying beyond belief too. I watched as at least nine of the ten opined that a woman should not have control over her own body. In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, also made by men (Justice Ginsburg dissented) that a woman and her doctor do not have the right to choose the safest form of late term abortion if her health would be severely damaged by carrying a child to term, any woman should be alarmed by those nine men.

It was also quite chilling listening to nine of the ten talk about their belief in “enhanced interrogation technique” a pretty Republican term for torture. Rudy Giuliani endorsed water boarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo," he said. With the end of Habeas Corpus and the fact that any American Citizen could be deemed a terrorist and sent off to Cuba with no recourse for redemption, those words should horrify all Americans.

Tommy Thompson declared that employers should have the right to fire homosexuals and then took it back the next day saying he hadn’t understood the question. Since I do not know what he truly holds in his heart, I will take him at his word, but his first answer was quite frightening.

But the thing that left me with nightmares was when three of the candidates raised their hands when asked who didn’t believe in evolution.