profiling and the whiff of Salem

The Path to 9/11 might have been lowbrow infotainment (yes: infotainment comes in many flavors, and see my entire take on the miniseries and related issues here), but screenwriter Cyrus Nowsrateh is one serious dude. And he points up one very serious side effect of the era of extreme political partisanship: the witch-hunting is getting uglier by the day.

In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, “No.” I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings–wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.

The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film.

Nowsrateh, the son of Iranian immigrants, also says that he undertook the project as a sort of (nonpartisan) mission:

I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe. … I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal–to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. The American people deserve to know that history: They have paid for it in blood. Like all Americans, I wish it were not so. I wish there were no terrorists. I wish there had been no 9/11. I wish we could squabble among ourselves in assured security. But wishes avail nothing.

“The Path to 9/11″ was intended to remind us of the common enemy we face. Like the 9/11 Report itself, it is meant to enable us to better defend ourselves from a future attack. Past is prologue, and 9/11 is merely another step in an escalating Islamic fundamentalist reign of terror. By dramatizing the step-by-step increase in attacks on America–all of which, in fact, occurred–we are better able to see the pattern and anticipate the future. That was the point of the series, its only intention. Call it the canary in the coal mine. Call it John O’Neill in the FBI.

Read the whole thing.

Good for Nowsrateh. His movie may have been lowbrow, but it seems to have been an honorable attempt to communicate important information to everyday people who don’t follow the news too closely.

This is not to say that his version of the story of the 9/11 Commission is accurate according to the historical record (which has not yet been fully revealed), but it gets the important part of the report out there in a way that people can relate to.

That’s the power of infotainment. That’s why the project was endorsed by Tom Kean. And Clinton was a narcissistic asshole for the arm-twisting and kicking and screaming he did over it. And some Democrats were willing to stain their reputation as democrats over it.

Nowsrateh makes one other wholly nonpartisan point that is being avoided by partisans on both sides—because it’s about human nature and you can’t make hay from it for either “side”:

“The Path to 9/11″ was set in the time before the event, and in a world in which no party had the political will to act.

That is a very shrewd observation: the failure of imagination that was the backdrop and the run-up to the terror attacks of 9/11 was accompanied by a narcotized, celebrity-obsessed, glamour-obsessed, addicted-to-the-good-life population that had to be—and still has to be—roused from its long slumber.

Infotainment is a good way—maybe the only way—to get through to…us. Because in addition to being impossible to pin down in our media choices, we are also addicted to being distracted. About which more another time.

UPDATE: Edward Wyatt of the NYT certainly doesn’t agree with me. He thinks it’s “puzzling” that ABC aired the movie:

It’s little wonder that ABC?s mini-series “The Path to 9/11″ drew stinging criticism earlier this month for its invented scenes, fabricated dialogue and unsubstantiated accounts of how the Clinton and Bush administrations conducted themselves in the years encompassing the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001.

A more puzzling question is why ABC spent $30 million on what, since it lacked commercials, amounted to a five-hour public service announcement.

Of course Nowsrateh did consider it a public service announcement, and it may well have been one. Robert Thompson, the go-to pop culture guy when Neal Gabler isn’t available, sniffs his dispproval:

“Saying it is a public service is the same as claiming ideological ownership,” said Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “If it is being packaged as a way to expose people to the contents of the 9/11 Commission report, and you’re encouraging it to be used in schools, then you do have to present it as factual. It doesn’t do a good job of that.”…

Maybe it didn’t do a good enough job for the politicians, but the audience isn’t interested in their reputations.

Mr. Thompson asserted that however that form of entertainment was categorized, it did little teaching about history. “ ‘Richard III’ is one of the greatest plays ever written,” he said, “but it is not very good history.”

Maybe not, but that’s not why people stage and attend the play, as Mr. Pop Culture should know.