Jack Liffey constantly explains that he is not a private detective, but he does find missing kids for a living. He is reading, while his police officer girlfriend Gloria Ramirez watches television.
He glanced up from his book. He was in the living room to be sociable, trying to reread an early Robert Stone, but the cop show she was watching was already intruding. She liked to watch them to make fun of the mistakes, both large and small, over police procedure, or so she said. But he could tell that what she really liked, at least as much, was the flattering portrait of lawmen doing their best to maintain a sense of honor in all the gray zones. There were few bad cops on TV, no racists, no brutal misfits, or bribe-demanders, at least none that survived more than an episode. If America had fetishized anything by the early twenty-first century, it was law enforcement.
The show started up again, and Jack Liffey started to watch a black cop arguing with somebody in a suit outside a courtroom. He could understand the popularity of TV cops. Everybody deep down wanted to be part of a team of like-minded people working together toward a decent goal. It was the same impulse that had finally made Star Trek a hit. He wondered if the cop show passion hadn’t subtly replaced religion for a lot of the viewers. Or maybe it rechanneled their impulses to social activism or civil rights — at several removes. He was drawn to the cop shows, himself, for exactly the same reasons. Yet he resisted out of his perverse loyalty to the need for some disorder in the world. Cop shows were always about keeping things in line.
From Dangerous Games (2005) by John Shannon
Tags: Jack Liffey, John Shannon