‘Enlightened’: The Dark Side of Spiritual Awakening

Before I launch into an appraisal of Enlightened—part of my on-going series about HBO dramas while we wait for cinemas to recover from the summer crap fest and play something worthy of reviewing—let me say a few words about the season finale of another show of theirs I reviewed a few weeks back, Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.  In an ideal world—the sort of upright, conscientious world Republicans dream of and fancy they can create if, like characters in an Ayn Rand novel, they stubbornly resist the misperceived evils of liberalism for long enough, but which in reality is a world that will forever elude them if they keep up these shenanigans—the last episode would be mandatory viewing at the RNC this week.  It would be just an hour taken away from all of the tacky hoopla while conventioneers turn their sights from willfully deluding themselves that Romney is worthy of being the President and focus on what that episode has to say about who they have become as a tribe, spoken from the point of view of Republican In Name Only (RINO) Will McAvoy.

Of course, few conventioneers will watch it, and only RINOs among the GOP like David Frum will agree with the message, I hope with wistful tears of remorse for where their party has gone, although I suspect they will be more like the tears my father shed when Richard Nixon resigned.  As I commented on HuffPo today with regard to the “Jewish” Hurricane Isaac upsetting the convention: “This has gone from a traveling clown show, to a farce with duplicity as its core theme, to a classic Greek tragedy complete with Athena and Poseidon making a pact at the beginning to teach the Republicans a lesson for their crimes against reason and for denying global warming.”