Are 20-Year-Olds the Same as 2-Year-Olds?

Democrats have been quick to point out the flexible and situational values of conservatives in the Trump era, abandoning policy positions and moral touchstones they had previously claimed to hold as bedrock principles all in the interest of tribalism.  It's a very fair criticism, but liberals need to look at their own reflection on occasion as well, and one increasingly common theme on which the left is losing its mind is the growing consensus that adulthood doesn't begin until 21.  Worse yet, the left's new love affair with infantilizing young adults appears entirely cherry-picked, isolated only to things they don't like and thus lacking any kind of legal or ethical consistency.

Before I get into the gun issue, the newest frontier of the left's push to reclassify young adults as children, it's an interesting reminder that this movement began with Ronald Reagan, who in the mid-1980s, leveraged highway fund allocation as a means to strong arm state legislatures across the country to raise the age to purchase and consume alcohol to 21.  The argument was that 18-year-olds were buying alcohol for younger kids in their high schools, an argument I consider dubious generally and even if accepted at face value would only justify raising the legal drinking age to 19.

The consequences have been disastrous for young adults, with millions of 18-20-year-olds having been funneled through the legal system over the last 30 years simply for consuming a product legal for those 21 and over.  I'm no fan generally of alcohol and don't touch the stuff, but giving criminal records to nonviolent consumers is insanity.  My sophomore-year college roommate in the late 90s was a whip-smart pre-law student who partook in some alcohol consumption on weekends, and was always paranoid about getting an underage consumption charge that would deny him entry into law school.  I always think back to him and how insane it was that our laws on harmless college campus alcohol consumption could derail a promising 20-year-old college student's future, and always hoped sanity would prevail and the legal age for drinking would drop back down to 18, the same age that we've set as a legal threshold for adulthood on every other matter.

Instead, the trend is the other direction, expanding the scope of legal pastimes on which young adults will be reclassified as criminals for partaking in, with the left leading the charge to finish what Reagan started.  Most prominently--and most cynically--the left has been pushing hard in the last couple of years to raise the legal age to 21 for their biggest bugaboo of all, tobacco.  All critical thinking goes out the window on anything related to tobacco and is replaced by ends-always-justify-the-means equivocating.  Just last week I read a stomach-churningly craven editorial in the Seattle Times mindlessly advocating for criminalizing tobacco use by young adults with an insultingly thin argument that surrenders the principle of the legal rights of 18, 19, and 20-year-olds with a degree of breeziness that should everybody's intelligence.   https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/raise-smoking-vaping-age-to-21-and-save-lives/     This editorial could have replaced cigarettes with anything one doesn't like, from pornography to abortion, and make the same idiot argument with no  consideration of the mockery it makes of the law.

And while that narrative is convenient when it comes to the left's culture war against tobacco, it's jarring that they appear comfortable maintaining the existing the prohibition against their preferred form of smoke when it comes to young adults.  Even with marijuana legalization gaining momentum in jurisdictions across the country, buoyed by arguments about the insanity of cycling users through the criminal justice system, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that continuing to make criminals out of 18, 19, and 20-year-old marijuana users is a dumb idea as the legal age to purchase and consume marijuana has been 21 everywhere it's legalized.  What could possibly justify this distinction?  Why should any 20-year-old still be arrested and be branded with a criminal record for using a legal product?

Which brings us to Dianne Feinstein's proposal in response to the latest mass shooting at a Florida high school to raise the age for purchasing a rifle to 21.  Political leaders, even in an environment where Democrats retake the reins of power, would have very limited capital when it comes to the issue of gun control.  A proposal like Feinstein's needlessly dirties the pool and makes other efforts that much harder.  It's an unwinnable argument tactically that an 18-year-old can deploy overseas and learn how to master a weapon serving his or her country but then be forbidden from returning home at age 20 and buying a rifle of their own.  But even if the argument was winnable, it's still a dumb idea that further redefines young adults as children. 

The principle seems to be the same as what drove Reagan to muscle through an increased legal age for alcohol consumption in the 1980s and is driving the left to do the same thing with tobacco today....that raising the age of purchase would prevent young adults from shooting up their current or recent high schools.  But consider Virginia Tech where the mass shooter was a college student.  There are students older than 21 at college.  So do we next raise the purchase age for rifles to 23 to keep guns entirely of campus?  Or possibly 35 to account for all grad students?  Ditto for alcohol and tobacco.  By raising the drinking and smoking age from 18 to 21 to "keep it out of high schools", it moves the goalposts to where the same argument could be made to keep raising the legal age to "keep it out of colleges".  Do we ever get to the point where adults are considered adults if we take this mindset to its logical conclusion?

I was amused at the irony watching "Real Time with Bill Maher" this weekend and listening to a couple of his guests muse how the voting age should be lowered to 16, arguing that the kids couldn't do worse in selecting our elected officials than adults.  Now I can't know for sure if the panelists making this argument about trusting the wisdom and judgment of 16-year-olds to make adult decisions when it comes to complicated decisions of how the country runs also believe that these same 16-year-olds should spend five additional years being treated with the same legal rights as two-year-olds when it comes to the purchase of alcohol, tobacco, or firearms, but given the cherry-picking of the left on these matters in recent years, it would surprise me if they didn't. 

I'm sure some will think this is a tone-deaf argument to make in the days after a mass shooting where 17 people died, but remember that a lot of really bad choices were made in the interest of "security" in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks too.  Using this tragedy as a backdoor means to weaken the legal rights of young adults is shameless and deserves to be called out as such.  How do we as a society reconcile decisions by young adults regarding sexual activity, financial investments, and the signing of legal contracts, all of which have tremendous short-term and long-term consequences but which are currently legally permissible for 18-year-olds?   Should we take those rights away from them too?  With criminal justice consequences for those who dare to defy a legal system reclassifying them as children?

I can only circle back to the left getting their inspiration here from Ronald Reagan, the architect of the modern "adulthood starts at 21" movement.  Was he right?  Should there no legal difference between college students and toddlers?  Some good-faith critical thinking by the left could go a long way here, but I'm not confident that it's coming.

The New "MacGyver" is Really, Really Bad

Not since the September 2016 premiere of CBS's "MacGyver" reboot have I spoken about the show on this site.  I was lukewarm on the pilot episode but saw some limited potential for a modestly rewarding series that might find its footing if given a full season.  Subsequent outings in the weeks following the premiere were hit or miss, but mostly misses.  The vibe of the original was nowhere to be found and the additional characters were crowding out the core of the franchise, which is of course MacGyver himself.  Lucas Till was respectable as a young MacGyver and seemed as though he could do a decent job with the character if he was given better material and any opportunity at all to break away from the knuckleheaded supporting players constantly surrounding him.  So even when it started to become clear by about halfway through the season that the show was a lost cause, I kept watching...just in case.

Unfortunately, things got worse rather than better in the second half of season 1.   The stories got more generic.  The MacGyverisms became more duplicative and uninspired.  And the secondary characters took on an even larger distractionary presence.  Worse yet, the cardboard cutout of a boss character played by Sandrine Holt was sloppily written out and replaced by an even more execrable Meredith Eaton, who has been in numerous shows and plays the same unappealing character in every one of them.  If I watched the show without context and with the mute button on (not the worst idea!), I'd presume that it was the latest entry in the "NCIS" franchise as it has the same generic look, vibe, and character interactions that has defined that series and its spinoffs for more than 15 years.  I was willing to give this series a full season to find its sea legs but if it hadn't found them by the spring of 2017, I had hoped it would be put to sleep.

Unfortunately, while the show got worse, the ratings did not substantially decline....so it got renewed.  I had no expectation it would improve in its second season, and it's a good thing my expectations were low because the reboot has lived down to them completely in season 2.  The last thing this overpopulated series needed was another new character who would take away even more screen time from Lucas Till, but they got one anyway with actress Isabel Lucas playing another thinly drawn secret agent joining "the team".  The character has been a wildly unpopular addition with, er, "fans", and seems to be in a state of limbo right now while writers have vastly limited her screen time and seem to be trying to figure a way to write her out.  Unfortunately, there are at least four other characters--and pretty much an entire crew of writers and special effects techs--who also need to be relieved of their duties.  But they won't be....because the expansive cast eases the timeline for production.  So expect to see the actor playing MacGyver to continue to have even less screen time than he does now on the show named for him.

Just off the top of my head, here's what doesn't work on this show....

Jack Dalton--I could see George Eads having some charisma if given decent material, but his "Dalton" character is dumb as a rock and more grating than a block of parmesean cheese.  For every one line he's given that's amusing, there are at least 10 that make you want to strangle him.  His character also has zero sense of proportion.  No more how dire the situation, he's still cracking stupid jokes or dwelling on some trivial side issue that kills any sense of urgency in the primary action plot.

Bozer--Again, actor Justin Hires could probably be compelling with his low-rent Chris Rock shtick in the right context, but the wacky roommate-turned-part-of-the-team angle on this series seems forced, and would even without the context of its deviation with the original series.  The writers seem to have already completely run out of things for him to do and have him gobbling up screen time with training exercises and other side projects in season 2.  His character has simultaneously become a little more mature AND even more pointless this season.

Matty the Hun--The aforementioned Meredith Eaton is the most horrific character on this show, a "little person" (hoping that's the current PC term that won't offend) who overcompensates by acting tough and bitchy.  The role almost seems like a parody of itself, and more one-dimensional than even the flimsiest guest characters that appeared in limited roles on the original, but she remains a constant on this series every week and manages to render every scene she's in unwatchable.

Murdoc--While actor David Dastmalchain is sufficiently creepy as a cartoon villain, he's in way over his head trying to fill the shoes of the psychotic hit man Murdoc played by English-born actor Michael Des Barres on the original.  The updated Murdoc makes snarky zingers and is played off as more of a frat boy with a gun than a terrifying international assassin.  It doesn't help that the writers don't seem to have any sense of direction with his character and the semirecurring storyline.

The special effects--Ugh!  I'm not a fan of the transition to CGI generally but some shows and movies are able to do CGI well enough to make it only moderately unbelievable.  Even the earliest blue-screen fakery of 80s TV--or in the case of the original "MacGyver", footage poached from old movies edited in with modern footage--is still more believable than the fourth-rate CGI effects of this reboot.  The cheap-looking effects are even more obvious in season 2, which is hard to believe with as low-budget as it looked on season 1.

The pacing--Apparently there's no such thing as a slow moment in modern TV action shows as producers and directors seem to like to paper over bad writing with a dizzyingly fast pace of action.  This need for fast talk, fast moves, and fast action kill the element of suspense that the original "MacGyver" perfected, especially in its ticking time bomb scenes.  The result is climactic scenes with resolutions that leave you feeling cold....and with a headache to boot!

The MacGyverisms--While the original series occasionally phoned it in with the inventive gimmicks, the new series has been more inconsistent in the quality of the off-the-cuff inventions that define the "MacGyver" franchise.  To their credit, they came up with a few clever gimmicks in the early episodes of season 1, but even then the majority of the MacGyverisms were recycled from the original or else some ill-defined and hastily prepared bit of ridiculousness that usually involved Jack's cell phone.  But in season 2, those fleeting clever originals have come to a nearly complete end and we're down to throwing a random chain up to an electric pole and knocking the wire down being passed off as a "MacGyverism".  And of course the lightning-fast pacing ensures that everything he's doing happens so fast that the viewer can't possibly process it, negating its storytelling effectiveness.

I could go on with lesser annoyances over the music, the character backstory, and the wasted appearances by relatively big-name guest stars, but it would be easier to just say that nearly everything about the reboot sucks.  So is there anything redeeming about it.....

Tristan Mays--At first I was entirely nonplussed by the generic "super savvy hacker girl" Riley introduced in the pilot, but her character has developed some personality and the actress playing her, Tristan Mays, is gorgeous and has enough charisma to salvage a few scenes where she's front and center.  I wouldn't shed too many tears if her character went away tomorrow and the reboot focused entirely on, you know, MacGyver....but insofar as this trainwreck progresses on its current track, at least there's a hot girl in a leather jacket and tight denim with a bit of personality to offer some visual stimulation and rein in the foolishness.

The callbacks to old characters and episodes--The one recurring theme in the reboot that has kept me from abandoning it completely is that the reboot revives characters and actors from the original as frequently as possible, sometimes in subtle ways that only hard-core fans will pick up on.  That's the thin reed with which I still view this show every week as it progresses into the second half of season 2.  But after this past week's embarrassing wasted opportunity with guest star Michael Des Barres (who played Murdoc on the original) I'm not sure those callbacks to the superior product of yore is enough to keep me watching.

I predicted at the beginning of season 2 that the reboot's ratings would fall enough this year that it would be put out of its misery by season's end.  With ratings holding up through the mid-point of the season, that no longer seems particularly likely.  And while part of me just shrugs off this reboot as a poorly executed effort to revive a classic, its prospect for longevity is really starting to piss me off.  With the series likely getting renewed for a third season and who knows how much beyond that, the legacy of the original will fade or morph into the cultural legacy of the unworthy reboot.  An iconic character and show that may otherwise have transcended generational lines will have limited attraction to younger people who only associate "MacGyver" with the Friday night wallpaper currently on CBS.  And that makes this reboot far more dangerous than I anticipated when it was first conceived.  Of course then, I figured it would be no worse than a typical CBS procedural like "Scorpion".  But it's way worse.  And that makes it a scourge on the television landscape.  When a reboot of a TV classic is worse than the average hour of television a generation later, then something truly pernicious has happened....and I now wish CBS had passed on the pilot and this hot mess had never gotten out of the starting gate.