The Unit

Alright, I like TV. I like it especially on netflix without the commercials. I like the hour long show as compared to the hour and a half to two hour movie. I can watch a tv show while having dinner then get on to something else.
I like the Unit. This is a military soap opera, with absolutely fantastic cutting edge elite force action, male comraderie and the story of the wives and children going on parallel along side. I like the gender balance. I like the episode on base with the sick child couple with the father soldier fighting his way to safety in a far away land.
I love the American patriotism of the show. It's a group of men and their wives serving their country in an honorable and responsible way. It's not intellectuals living in the safety provided by working men and women and criticizing everything about their present and past.
I love the down to earth quality of the Unit. I like the philosophical and even spiritual moments. The soap opera quality is all the human qualities of relationships and humans being human. It's just at a higher level than afternoon tv. It's written with the working person with a job as opposed to the person at home on welfare. The Unit aired in the evenings at prime time. It's prime time TV and deserves whatever awards it's received. Each character is believable and the acting is superb.
It's Saving Private Ryan and Brothers in Arms. It was based on the Delta Force but I think it's own kind of special.
I've watched dozens of episodes over several years and I still come back to it whenever I can. I like the message that democracy is worth fighting for. I know it's 'politically incorrect' . All that is good and true in the world is politically incorrect.
The Unit is realpolitick. It's action and suspense and real human beings trying to love in a really tough disruptive service. It's about life on the base. It's about all the sacrifices that the military has to make.
It's about Americans and the American empire. These are the legionaires of the present day but the American presidents aren't Nero. They're more like Claudius and Constantine. America is indeed the best choice in my mind of some really bad alternatives.
It's often 'politically correct' to malign the US except the alternatives to date have been empires lead by Russia which simply killed 80 million citizens out of hand and jailed more than American ever hoped to. It's devolved into gangsterism and after years of pogroms against the Jews it's bolstering it's own depravity with attacks on gays and lesbians. Alternatively there's China which killed 120 million of its citizens, though some suggest that number is only half of the true number killed by the Chinese government. It's certainly not a country known for civil liberties, religious freedom, occupational safety standards or health care and old age pensions. Yet there continue to be Westerners who knock the US not realizing that without the US the most likely country to fill the vacuum with an army of single men and the women aborted in the womb is China.
Then there is the Moslem mainstream. True there's a minority of Moslem moderates and many of the highest spiritually developed of individuals but all the Moslem lead countries have tended to maintain almost medieval tyrannies resulting in dessert spring with its mass killings of protesters. America had Kent State in comparison , a few dead. True a few more blacks were killed but American leadership didn't turn chemical weapons on its citizens or kill tens of thousands of dissenters. Even the relatively enlightened Turkey allows police brutality in the streets which makes the beating of blacks by LA police look like love taps. There's no free media in these countries and intellectuals are told what they can think and routinely shot if they step out of line.
So I like the Unit because I believe that America and it's military are presently what stands between barbarian hoards and corrupt communist gangster regimes lead by the likes of the throwbacks in North Korea and the pirates of West Africa.
America, Russia, France and England are all arms dealers. No one is a saint but I choose America over the alternatives. Europe is America's ally and given the difficulties of the European Union it isn't as reliable as America.
And yes I'd love world peace and I could write a speech for Miss America and I could tell any intellectual all sorts of things about what the problem in America is but I don't have or see a better solution. That said, I like the Unit because it brings home the complexity and shows that the men and women doing their jobs aren't the ignoramus hillybilly lame brained killers that the effete protected priviledged intellectual class would paint them.
I like the Unit. I really do.


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