Caught an amazing piece on PBS's Frontline last night on John O'Neil. He was one of the FBI's foremost counter terrorism experts and was one of the first to recognize the the threat that Al Qaeda posed to the United States. Unfortunately, his style was not appreciated by some of his superiors and he left the FBI in the summer of 2001. His new job was as security director at the World Trade Center and was he killed in the September 11th attacks. It was a riveting and utterly fascinating story delivered to the usual standards of excellence that Frontline has established. I don't always agree with the perspectives presented on Frontline but it is easily the most detailed, in-depth program of its kind on television. And the guy who usually narrates the show has a serious yet soothing vocal delivery that I first noticed on the documentary series 'Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War'.
Yet another rebuttal of the notion that television is all mind numbing garbage devoid of intelligent thought. James Lileks has made this point on more than one occasion in his daily Bleats but it bears repeating. There are a number of pseudo intellectuals out there who like to throw a blanket over all TV viewers and belittle us as ignorant dullards while acting is if reading the latest Barbara Kingsolver novel is the height of intellectual enlightenment.
The problem is that these pointy headed poseurs make it an all or nothing proposition.You either watch four hours of junk TV a day (bad) OR you read books (good). Au contraire, I say. Rather than satiating my desire for information, watching a well done television program only whets my appetite and often sends me to the local library, bookstore, or the Internet in a quest to further my knowledge of the subject matter.
By no means am I say it's all good. It ain't. Or that watching 'Friends', 'Survivor', or 'Boston Public' will make you a better person. It won't. Watching TV is like drinking whisky. You need to be discriminating to get the most out of it. There's a lot of Windsor out there but you can still find the Oban if you know where to look.
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