Well, hello, there!
I did not plan to write about pop culture for my first entry on Hang Together. After all, the run of posts on Frozen has been making me wish my wife and I had gone to that rather chilly drive-in double-header that she mentioned a while back, and who wants to break in on a good pop-culture review in progress? Besides, I still have that post about today’s “preachy” moment with my students to write, and that other one about teaching students about the role of shame in deliberative democracy, and–but every day brings a new topic, and sooner or later one must simply write.
So, today, it’s about a piece of pop culture that was startlingly insightful, though quite possibly by accident. Submitted for your approval: Season 6, Episode 19 of the ABC series Castle, titled “The Greater Good,” in which Castle and Beckett (joined by Beckett’s police superior Gates and Gates’s sister, a hotshot prosecutor) confront a rogue ADA with the evidence of her misdeeds. The murder victim had been victimized first by the prosecutor, who planted drug evidence on him so her office could coerce him into “wearing a wire” and informing on his boss, a suspected white-collar criminal. When the rogue ADA discovered that her victim had informed his boss about the investigation, taken a huge bribe, and left the country, she murdered him and tried to frame his boss. All very average TV mystery plotting, fairly well executed.
The kicker, though, is the way our murder victim left the telltale message. He was wired, you see. And before he left his recording device at the rogue ADA’s “dead drop” (all very cloak-and-dagger), he recorded one final message.
You can listen for yourself on ABC or Hulu, if you care to. (The scene is 37 minutes in on the Hulu version, if you don’t prefer to watch the whole episode now.)
Our victim says to his persecutors, in my paraphrase, “I came to America because I believed in the American Dream. I worked hard for people I knew might be corrupt because I believed. And when you, the U.S. government, planted evidence on me, to force me to turn on them, what was I supposed to believe in?” So he took the payday and went home (we find later that half of his payoff went to rebuild his hometown).
Do you see what I see in that speech? I see someone who weighed American civic religion and found it wanting.