Lost characters as conservative icons
Ben Shapiro at Big Hollywood finds conservative virtue in the Lost characters. Go read it, then come back for my reaction.
WARNING - SPOILERS FOR SEASONS 1-4 BELOW:
He's clearly cherry-picking his data here, heh. Biggest goof - John Locke. I mean, come on. Locke lived in a commune with a bunch of pot-growing hippies, forpetesake. He was in Australia in the first place to go on some heathen spiritual quest, and when in doubt on the Island, he gets inner direction by ... taking drugs in a sweatlodge. He's no conservative icon, he's a hippy-dippy neo-pagan. His spirit name is probably Dances with Guns (or possibly knives).
I'll give him Mr. Eko. Yeah, drug-running warlord turned Jesus-freak? Total conservative.
And Sawyer? More conservative that his description would have you believe. I mean, think about it - Sawyer, seeking revenge on the guy who caused his parents' deaths, shoots and kills.... the wrong guy. An innocent bystander, set up by people who wanted him dead, who feed wrong info to Sawyer to goad the gullible, not-terribly-bright conman into performing the hit for them. Lessee - suckered into killing someone who didn't harm him... yeah, that's a conservative alright.
The jury's still out on Ben. Oh, it's easy to call him 'evil' if you were on Flight 815, but from an outside perspective, the Oceanic Survivors have killed more of the original inhabitants than vice versa. One might be justified in considering Ben's people patriots fighting back against alien occupiers. Oh sure, he stole a stranger's infant daughter and raised her as his own, but I'm sure he thought he was justified. After all, he could give the child all the benefits of suburban life in New Otherton - backyards, modern medicine, shielding against smoke monsters... he's the equivalent of nanny-state liberalism's Child Protective Services, taking children away from their unfit parents (or their rightful parents, if you're a conservative).
I don't care enough about Claire and Charlie to argue his characterization of their 'conservative icon' status. I do however have to wonder how he missed the most archtypical of the conservative icons on the Island?
I refer, of course, to Rousseau. She's a central casting conservative - after being shipwrecked, she decides her colleagues are 'sick' (now there's a good Gingrichian term for you) and kills them all. She lives in underground bunkers in a state of perpetual paranoia. She likes to blow things up. Oh, and she's batshit insane.
I'm surprised she doesn't already have a blog on PajamasMedia.
