In late September 2001, the series Alias premiered starring Jennifer Garner. The series, coming online right after 9/11, was the story of a young, beautiful secret agent for the CIA. I never saw the show, not even once, but perusing the episode descriptions on Wikipaedia, it seems that the show did not deal at all during its five year run with any of the War on Terror, except in one season to paint a government detention facility (Guantanamo) in a bad light. A harbinger of things to come? Hollywood has done an extraordinarily bad job in depicting America's war against Islamic terrorists, generally putting America in the role of the villain. (See Rendition, Lions for Lambs, Redacted, The Green Zone). Where are the stories of unabashed, unapologetic American heroes fighting a foe that, by its own pronouncements, wants to take the world back to a caliphate governed by sharia law in which infidels are either murdered or treated as second-class citizens; where women are sub-humans to be used and abused by their husbands; where homosexuals are to be scourged from society; where the Jewish state of Israel and Jews in the Diaspora are to wiped from the face of the earth? Does Hollywood not realize that the Arab world was an ally of Hitler in World War II, and learned much of its anti-Semitism from German Nazis? Would it be so hard to write and produce a film or TV show about idealistic, hard-fighting Americans closing with the enemy and destroying him? (Say, a story about the Horse Soldiers who defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan in the months after 9/11?)
Anyway, Jennifer Garner was at least very pleasant to look at, even if her show was typical Hollywood fare.
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