Lessig Media Archive
March 15, 2005
Lessig On West Wing

Man I hate to even link to this, because it's such crap. But I was as curious as the next guy, and Aaron Snitzer was nice enough to send me the clip, so
here it is.

(Please download it to your hard drive and watch it, due to my current bandwidth restrictions. And somebody, make a torrent file right away :-) Update: Here's the torrent - thanks to Ask Bjørn Hansen!

And now, a brief rant about what a sorry-excuse-for-a-portrayal-of-larry-lessig this is. I haven't read anything that Larry's written on his blog about it yet, but I'm sure, due to his tendency for tact, he didn't say what I really needed to be said.

Well I haven't gone off on anything for a while, so here goes:

They've got Larry as a stuffy 60-year old pompus ass -- kiss ass that is -- as his staff watches in disbelief (he's got more important things to do, apparently), the President takes five minutes of his valuable time to shoot the shit about a topic that he otherwise doesn't think about much: the constitution.

Whoever cast and directed Christopher Lloyd (disclaimer: Christopher, I love you. You're a great actor, and I know you were just doing your job. This is not meant as a personal attack on you in any way!)
could have at least watched a single minute of one of the billions of videos of Larry that are online in order to get his look and accent correctly. (When did Larry pick up that Masterpiece Theatre accent? I guess all of us constitution-lovers talk like we're in I Claudius all the time while spending our time hanging around important people, hoping to be taken seriously.)

The idea that Larry is some old man who hangs around leaders hoping to have esoteric conversations couldn't be further from the truth. Larry is a 40-something spring chicken who is up to his neck in current events -- like the current and relevant dilemma we happen to be in regarding our constitution being used as toilet paper by the current administration.

And he's doing this in the courts -- not by hanging around presidents that couldn't give a shit, trying to convince them of anything. Or travelling around the world, waiting for constitutions to be written (since there's no hope for ours anymore).

Making him 20 years older was a nice touch. It lets us know that West Wing didn't even spend five minutes fact checking. We're lucky they got his name right!

OK I'm done now. Go see this crap for yourself.

Sorry Larry, but it's still (historically-inaccurate-unresearched-tv) history, and, for that reason, it belongs in the archive.

I hope you at least sold a few more books when it was all over. They did at least plug the book! Thank god for small favors.

Posted by Lisa at March 15, 2005 07:53 AM | TrackBack
Me A to Z (A Work In Progress)