How Strong Are the Walls of Jericho?
Published on Imagine 2050
Jan. 25, 2009
http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2009/01/25/how-strong-are-the-walls-of-je...
By Walidah Imarisha
Last month I was stuck in the house for more than a week, thanks to the worst snowstorm Portland, Oregon had seen in the past 30 years. Over a foot of snow and the city just had no idea how to deal with it.
It is ironic, then, that I picked up the first disc of the CBS series Jericho at the Blockbuster I slogged to through snow and freezing ice, out of sheer boredom. Jericho, which ran from 2006 to 2008, explores what happens to this country after nuclear bombs detonated in twenty three major cities in the U.S., through the lens of Jericho, a small town in Kansas.
The season and a half of the show (it was cancelled after the first season, but the most massive protest the networks have seen brought it back for an eight episode wrap up) has all the characters you might expect in a small town very akin to Mayberry before the bomb: the loveable mayor who has been in charge for 25 years (Gerald McRaney); his son Eric he is grooming to follow in his footsteps (Kenneth Mitchell); his other bad boy son Jake (Skeet Ulrich) who has seen and done too much.
Toss in some love interests and other colorful characters, add one possible FBI agent or possible “terrorist suspect” (and the only significant black character in the film I might add) (Lennie James) and the stage is set.
Right now, I have to give my usual disclaimer for another creating by this mass media: it's racist, sexist, xenophobic and heterosexist. Duh, right? But beyond that, the writing is good, the characters develop and the plot is intriguing enough to make me go back out into the storm to get the rest of season one and all of season two.
The reason for that is expressed by the FBI agent/terrorist character when he is talking to his daughter. She asks him a question about Jake: “Dad, is he a good guy or a bad guy?” Her father replies, “Honey, there is no such thing.”
This to me, is the crux of the series, why it is so compelling, and why I consider it to be a subversive piece of programming. Not because of the ending of the series, which I won’t ruin for you, but of course ends up reinforcing the status quo.
No, I find it subversive because it opens up a dialogue, in a time where this country is supposedly so clear on who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are that allows us to see that things are never so simple, and so easy as we imagine them to be. That the cowboys in white hats with badges riding over the ridge may not becoming to save the townsfolk but slaughter them, and that those deemed “terrorists” may be able to tell us more about ourselves than we ever wanted to hear.
This is done masterfully by one of the plot threads that weaves the series together, that of the use of military contractors and private armies to fight, exploit and “rebuild” nations. These companies, BlackWater, Aegis Defense Services and more, have been accused of atrocities in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in the gulf region of the United States post Hurricane Katrina. Taking information from real life situations, Jericho doesn’t ask the question, what if these private armies go too far, it asks the question, what do we do because they already have?
Throughout the series, it is a quest to piece together what happened to amerika. We see through the eyes of Jericho’s people. We do not know what happened, or who caused it. All we know, as the series unfolds, is that there were bombs that completely devastated the country’s infrastructure and power centers. We get to see how people react to losing everything they knew in the blink of an eye. And this opens up another dialogue, a dialogue about morality, and about interconnectedness.
The series is riddled with lines like “This is amerika, not some third world country." But looking beyond this incredibly problematic and racist rhetoric, I think Jericho poses an interesting question: What do people do when they have no other options, no resources, and no hope? And what the series shows is that things can degenerate very quickly, much more quickly in fact in "civilized" middle amerika than they do in so-called third world countries.
Strong parallels can be made between Jericho and the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducting in the 1971. Sociologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University took a carefully selected group of 24 students, picked for their lack of "criminal tendencies" or "violent behavior," and randomly assigned some to be prisoners, and some to be guards. He placed them in a mock jail, and told the guards they had to get the prisoners to follow prison rules. They could not use physical violence to coerce them, but any other tactics were fair game. The prison simulation was supposed to run two weeks. Zimbardo shut it down after only six days. The “guards” used fragrantly sadistic tactics to impose their will, from forced physical exercise, to deprivation of bathroom facilities, and sexual humiliation. After two prisoners were removed early because of emotional trauma and a prison “riot” broke out amongst the prisoners, the experiment was ended.
These students from one of the most prestigious schools in the country, were, by society's standards, the cream of the crop. They were all white and middle class, no history of violence, no criminal records, exceptional students. And in six days, they degenerated to a level of abuse and victimization that horrified even themselves when they were shown the tapes later on.
Jericho explores these same issues, on a national leve, and asks, how long will it take us to become what we supposedly hate and fight against? And if that happens, then what, exactly, are we fighting for?
