C.O.P.S.— the Catch An Alien version

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (Dios Mio, that name still creeps me out) pushes its probes and policing into more and more layers of our culture and our lives while at the same time fluffing up its image.

It’s obvious to many that an arm of the State or behavior of the State that the citizenry would normally recoil from—something like anti-constitutional raids, profit-driven prisons, cruel conditions of mass-detainment, or simply denial of rights sown by a machine made of corrupted legal processes—will first be enacted upon the Other. That is why so many in the SanctuarySphere (those who believe in human rights, dignity, and due process for all people on this land) have been infuriated for so long. We watch horror after horror visited upon (immigrant) families, children, women, and men—and the general public shrugs.

We could posit many reasons for the shrugs. We could say US Citizens have abdicated for the most part doing the work of questioning authoritative sources, or seeking out original information, or being skeptical of organizations that have accrued so much money and power they escape (or manufacture a replica of) true scrutiny. Or we could say that the general populace doesn’t care about human rights violations or injustices visited upon people who don’t look like they do. Or that we have lost all sense of how interconnected everything and everyone is and we imagine, on the whole, that if we can put something behind bars or a fence, then there is longer a problem. (Sort of an adult lacking the infant development stage of Object Permanence.) But there is a poem that talks about who They came for first…and who was next. Word to the wise.

The fluffing part is coming on a few fronts, as I’ve noticed lately. And I’m betting it has to do with the fact that real dialogue about immigration and the harm being done by DHS as it muddles about punitively to try and address a situation in which the roots lie elsewhere is beginning to just barely bubble up to the surface. And what is the Right’s response to injustices that the public is beginning to learn about? We see it in our politics and the war that our politicans love so much:

All together now: “We need to better sell this to the TV-watching Public.”

“Homeland Security USA,” a reality show produced with the full cooperation of several agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, will have its premiere on Jan. 6 on ABC.

In an announcement Thursday, ABC said the production “has been given unprecedented access to the agencies,” including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

The show will spotlight the work of border patrol officials who work on land, sea and air to keep the United States secure. ABC has ordered 13 episodes of the series; they will be shown on Tuesdays at 8 p.m., opposite “American Idol” on Fox. While reality shows about harrowing jobs have prospered on cable — think of “Deadliest Catch” and “Ice Road Truckers” — they have yet to find an audience on broadcast TV. [...]

In May, The Hollywood Reporter said the show was “billed as the first multi-episode television series to be shot in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security.” The project elicited complaints from some Internet users, who labeled it “propaganda.”

The executive producer, Arnold Shapiro, acknowledged at the time that the show was meant to portray Homeland Security in a good light.

“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re doing,” he told The Reporter in May. “This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us.”

Yet another instance of the militaristic Right buying, yes, propaganda. Like the bullshit stories they fed us from Iraq (using OUR tax dollars to both bomb a country that did nothing to us and then to lie to us about it), like the way in which TASER buys and lies up its PR, like the way FOX became PRAVDA for the NeoCons.

In the face of all the people suffering behind a patchwork of contradictory, inept, and inefficient immigration laws, jazzing up the punitive arm of that body of laws into some sickly TV tidbit that feels like “Ice Road Truckers Meets Deadliest Catch to Steal American Idol Demographic” is a terrible and shameful idea for “entertainment.”