Roland Martin has been suspended from CNN after tweeting that, “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him! #superbowl.” He then insisted that, rather than making a joke about violence against men who are attracted to men, he really just hates soccer: “@DrMChatelain @notjustsexuality well that shows how ignorant you are. I rip on soccer all of the time. Learn to pay attention!”

It’s the second time in a month that CNN commentators have come under fire for controversial comments: Dana Loesch recently cheered reports of members of the United States Marine Corps urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans and suggested that had she been present, she would have joined in. But while Martin apologized and will experience an indefinite suspension, CNN and Loesch refused to apologize for her remarks, and she’s remained on the air.

The clear difference between the two cases? A sense that CNN’s audience was offended. GLAAD, which keeps a careful eye on defamation against gays and lesbians in the media, moved quickly to call for Martin’s dismissal and to track the network’s response to the incident. CNN got the message that its own constituents were upset, and that it would suffer consequences — or at least a lot of annoyance — if it failed to act.

Loesch’s comments on the other hand, offended human rights advocates and decent people everywhere. But that’s not the same as running afoul of an organization with a well-established plan to respond to these kinds of events and a well-worn path to media outlets who would cover and amplify their response. While Loesch’s comments were reprehensible, there was also no organized group who was likely or able to hold CNN accountable for her words, and for continuing to let her appear on-air without penalty.

Taken together, the way CNN handled Martin’s and Loesch’s comments makes it look like CNN has no consistent internal values, and no internal standard for how to respond when it commenters express sentiments that are an anathema to those values. I’m glad to know, per CNN’s statement, that “Language that demeans is inconsistent with the values and culture of our organization, and is not tolerated.” But why should it take several days of consideration for CNN to arrive at that conclusion? If the network’s truly committed to the proposition that violence against gay people is no joking matter, that’s something it should know in advance, and CNN should have a personnel policy in place to determine what the appropriate penalty is when someone violates their standards. Similarly, whether Loesch’s comments violate CNN’s internal values shouldn’t be something that’s determined by the level of outrage outside the network’s headquarters.

George R.R. Martin, continuing his campaign to torture us with good things that are still far off, has a selection from The Winds of Winter online. There’s nothing exceptionally surprising about the information that’s revealed in it, but I appreciate the fact that we’re still going to be spending time in Theon’s point of view, however painful it is to be there:

My sister, Theon thought, my sweet sister. Though he had lost all feeling in his arms, he felt the twisting in his gut, the same as when that bloodless Braavosi banker presented him to Asha as a ‘gift.’ The memory still rankled. The burly, balding knight who’d been with her had wasted no time shouting for help, so they’d had no more than a few moments before Theon was dragged away to face the king. That was long enough. He had hated the look on Asha’s face when she realized who he was; the shock in her eyes, the pity in her voice, the way her mouth twisted in disgust. Instead of rushing forward to embrace him, she had taken half a step backwards. “Did the Bastard do this to you?” she had asked.

“Don’t you call him that.” Then the words came spilling out of Theon in a rush. He tried to tell her all of it, about Reek and the Dreadfort and Kyra and the keys, how Lord Ramsay never took anything but skin unless you begged for it. He told her how he’d saved the girl, leaping from the castle wall into the snow. “We flew. Let Abel make a song of that, we flew.” Then he had to say who Abel was, and talk about the washerwomen who weren’t truly washerwomen. By then Theon knew how strange and incoherent all this sounded, yet somehow the words would not stop. He was cold and sick and tired… and weak, so weak, so very weak.

She has to understand. She is my sister. He never wanted to do any harm to Bran or Rickon. Reek made him kill those boys, not him Reek but the other one. “I am no kinslayer,” he insisted. He told her how he bedded down with Ramsay’s bitches, warned her that Winterfell was full of ghosts. “The swords were gone. Four, I think, or five. I don’t recall. The stone kings are angry.” He was shaking by then, trembling like an autumn leaf. “The heart tree knew my name. The old gods. Theon, I heard them whisper. There was no wind but the leaves were moving. Theon, they said. My name is Theon.” It was good to say the name. The more he said it, the less like he was to forget. “You have to know your name,” he’d told his sister. “You… you told me you were Esgred, but that was a lie. Your name is Asha.”

I initially hated Theon—and it was hard not to. He was the character who was perhaps most invested in both the lies of the path and in the idea that the path to glory lies through conquest. But he’s become a moving testament to the lasting impact of brutality. And in this passage, he’s an illustration of how history gets mangled. It’s hard for people to believe the things that Theon is telling them about Ramsay Bolton because they’re too terrible, they’re the kinds of events and behavior that we all want to believe can’t be true. And living through the worst events of history can turn our most direct eyewitnesses into wrecks other people consider unreliable narrators.

This post contains spoilers for the entire first season of Showtime’s Homeland. Be warned.

“I’m not.” -Sgt. Nicholas Brody

The war on terror has made America sick, and accepting a cure will kill us. The finale of the first season of Showtime was full of philosophical debates. And it ended with a Carrie, a patient driven mad by a basic and critical impossibility behind those debates — the dream that we can ever be completely safe from terrorism — wiping out her own brain, all the joy and love and agony, and crucial insights, of her last few weeks. Whatever you may think of how the show has handled Brody’s motivations, there’s no question that it’s successfully walked an exceedingly fine line in making a difficult point: that it’s insanity to let yourself be consumed by a fear of terrorism, but equally insane to refuse to see the risk. It’s a tragic madness to let terrorism convince you to give up who you are, whether you’re an American elected official or a captured Marine. And it’s equally devastating to cling rigidly to the past when you desperately need to change. The show hasn’t forged a compromise, and neither have we in the world beyond the screen. But Homeland is articulating that central dilemma, the one that’s governed so much of our politics for the last decade, in a critical and urgent way.

It’s also become a fantasy about assassinating or undermining Dick Cheney, who is the clear model for Vice President William Walden. “My action this day is against such domestic enemies,” Brody tells us in the suicide video that he records and that begins the episode in language that echoes charges lobbed at both Cheney and President Bush. “The Vice President and members of his national security team who I know to be liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never hold accountable for. This is about justice for 82 children whose deaths were never acknowledged and whose murder is a stain on the soul of this nation.” In the video of him working with David to order the drone strike, Walden declares that “If Abu Nazir is taking refuge among children, he’s putting them at risk, not us.” There are no innocents. In giving the order, he falls into obscurantist language, saying “It’s our collective opinion that the potential collateral damage falls within current matrix parameters.” Watching years later, Saul has the reaction that many of us would: “Good God. Someone actually came up with that language?” And that’s not all he’s done. In his sitdown with Walden, Saul reminds the Vice President that David may be willing to throw evidence down the memory for the sake of his career and clothe that decision in an ideological shift, but he is not. “I’m a sentimentalist,” Saul declares with controlled venom. “I like to hold on to things. For old times’ sake. Whoever told the American people these interrogation tapes had been destroyed is mistaken. Coercion. cruelty. Outright torture makes for a very unhappy human. You gave the orders, William.” When he survives Brody’s botched attack, Walden makes grotesque use of Elizabeth’s death to kickstart his presidential campaign. He’s easy to despise.

But while Cheney is out of power, the ideas he promoted persist, and Homeland focuses instead on what the real and fictional vice presidents have wrought. Brody and Nazir come to a collective conclusion that the man isn’t what’s important. “Why kill a man when you can kill an idea?” Nazir asks Brody, as they reach an uneasy truce over a new strategy.
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This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 13 episode of Homeland.

I’m feeling rather pleased with myself for theorizing correctly — or so it seems for now — that Brody would turn out not to be a terrorist, but that Carrie’s initial information from her source would be correct, and that the two would have to find a way to work together. But I’m down in a paranoid enough place to wonder if Thomas Drake is really alive, or if there’s some sort of plant. And the mechanics of plot feel almost irrelevant in light of the larger questions posed by this extraordinary episode of television.

Carrie and Brody’s recklessness and tenderness are a marvel to behold. Just as an artistic juxtaposition, the contrast between the way Carrie plays a neo-Nazi in a bar, telling him “I love sucking Nazi dick,” with her confession to Brody that she wasn’t actually much of a mankiller in college is wonderful. Similarly, I love their tentativeness even though they’ve effectively run away together, Brody’s “Can we graduate to cabin sex?” their slow escalation from a quick fuck in a car to tender, sober, emotional sex, is great stuff. Even if the show didn’t have such enormous stakes, this would be the stuff of great romantic drama, of the negotiations between us. The heart is its own adventure.
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I’m almost done with the second season of Sleeper Cell, and it’s fascinating how much the show changes from the first miniseries to the second. Where we initially got to know the members of the first cell through a combination of frantic action and hanging around, the second cell’s sort of presented to us as a packaged deal and we don’t get to know them as well as people. But more importantly, the second season raised some interesting questions for me about how we address Islamophobia and torture as practiced by the United States government, and how to best build villains that let us condemn those attitudes and behaviors.

There’s the contrast between Darwyn’s three case agents. Ray’s well-intentioned, but not particularly ideologically engaged: to him, terrorism is a crime and it doesn’t seem to be particularly important to him to learn about Islam as a motivating force for that crime. Patrice actually knows a lot about Islam — she’s more knowledgeable about and respectful of mainstream Muslims than Ray is, but she’s also more militant than Ray about fighting extremist forms of the faith. She’s willing to put her body on the line to try to kill extremist Iraqi insurgents. And when she’s killed by those same kinds of extremists, they’re murdering not just another foot soldier, but someone who was working on eliminating the misunderstanding between non-Muslims and Muslims that is jidhaists’ most powerful recruiting tool. Warren Russell, the case officer who replaces Patrice, is all too easy to dismiss as an arrogant, inexperienced ass even though his skepticism of Darwyn’s faith is probably a realistic portrayal of what happens when you go through the FBI’s Islamophobic training regimen. And presenting his distrust of an entire faith as a deeply ingrained institutional problem rather than as something only jerks fall prey to would be more useful and disturbing, an actual spur towards reform rather than an isolated incident.

Similarly, I have mixed feelings about the way the show presents Farik’s torture at American and Saudi hands. At one point, one of his interrogators complains that torture isn’t consistent with U.S. values but that it’s something the country’s been forced into by terrorism. Of course it’s true that the greatest victory Osama bin Laden won on September 11 was suckering us into giving up on core American values, but that’s only part of the story here. I don’t really think there’s a question that there are people who believe that torture should always have been part of the menu of options for the military and law enforcement, and who saw the September 11 attacks as an opportunity to tear down rules against torture. The key is how to get folks to recognize both that streak of thinking and the wrongness of it. If you’ve got a cackling, black-hooded dungeon master representing that position, it’s easy for audiences to turn away in revulsion and reject it as implausible.