So Long, We Hardly Knew Ye

I always knew it was coming, especially this season, but the official news that The West Wing is ending broke my heart. Here was the smartest show on television and yet no one was watching. Maybe they were too busy tivo-ing all of the other garbage that passes for t.v. shows today; maybe they were busy playing video games or text messaging. Maybe the show, like an ideal White House that serves a liberal, progressive administration is as fictional as the network's premise. Here was a show that showed both the majority and minority to be people with political goals and humanity still; today's politics won't ever see the president as a true renaissance man, one who sees that the chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Today's president and his majority party can only keep altering the politico-speak and rhetoric, the rules and methods of playing the game in order, God forbid, to keep anyone else participating in our blessed and failed "democracy." Today, we watch a Harry Truman and yet read on the front pages a Richard Nixon crossed with Napoleon; the television portrays a modern Thomas Jefferson and yet what we get is a cro-magnon King Saul; maybe I always wanted the fictional West Wing to outlive the real one; I guess I would have been happy with the show's cancellation if the results of last year's election were different; maybe I can only hope and pray that such a vacuous absence in the lives of WW viewers will reveal to them that, with the reminder that Martin Sheen is imaginary and George Bush is all-too-real that maybe we need to do something to keep the imaginary ruler from thinking he has too much real-life powers.