I’ve been catching up on TV shows over the summer, since I missed most of this year’s TV season while I was in Iraq. (We actually did have access to some TV, via satellite, but the times were weird and I didn’t really have enough time to watch much, anyway. Besides, there was the distracting presence of FTV when I did turn on the television–somehow this channel became exceedingly addictive. I miss it.)
Anyway, back to the point… I watched NUMB3RS this past weekend, and was intrigued by one of the “imagine it in this way” math metaphors that the fictional math professor, Charlie Epps, uses to make a point. He was talking about the possibility of a gang member from one part of LA traveling to another part of LA, highlighting that in this case there was no way to safely travel through there, because of transiting through rival gangs’ territories. But the interesting part is this: he explained it with the comparison, “It’s like a Sunni traveling through a Shi’ite neighborhood.”
It struck me–we’re to the point that we’re explaining domestic gang warfare by referring to sectarian rivalries halfway around the world–in a primetime drama. I’m not sure what this means, it’s just interesting. Apparently the average NUMB3RS watcher (who might be a bit more educated than, say, your average American Idol watcher, since it is, after all, about math) is more comfortable in his or her understanding of religious distinctions from half a world away than of our local violence and mayhem.
One thought: it would be interesting to see how the number of casualties, over time, due to gang warfare and its concomitant drug trafficking compares to casualties in Iraq (and elsewhere in the Mideast) due to sectarian infighting. Are these conflicts similar in nature? Do they have patterns in common? Do we understand the domestic situation (which I think has subsided fairly significantly over the last couple decades) well enough to be able to use those insights overseas?
Another thought: Is this perhaps a manifestation of the “Two Americas” phenomenon that I’ve been hearing bandied about? No, I don’t mean Red State / Blue State, but instead, the divide between the cosmopolitan, college-educated (but often very ignorant about “real life”), relatively affluent people, and the “blue-collar” crew, who aren’t on average as book-smart or affluent but who have a very firm grounding in the here and now. I doubt one of the latter group would find a Sunni/Shia simile as an adequate explanation of gang warfare.
Though of course I think that the former America is growing, given the abundance that we experience here. We have to import people, after all, to fulfill our need for unskilled labor…
Well, be that as it may… I wasn’t really going anywhere with this. I just thought this was interesting, and that there might be something meaningful about the Iraq War reaching into popular culture as something expected to be understood by everyone.
Posted by Kjirstin 
