Citizen Voters, Which Is So Common in the Modern World

“Can you say in one sentence why America is the greatest country in the world?” The question rings in the silence as the crowded auditorium strains to catch the answer. Will McAvoy, a crotchety, middle-aged cable TV news anchor, glares with the sulk usually reserved for the teenaged toward the moderator who has repeatedly pressed him for a “human moment”. Seconds tick by as Will, played by Dumb and Dumber’s Jeff Daniels, leads the audience with a “will-he-won’t-he” kind of momentary hesitation.

It’s a ruse. True to Sorkinesque fashion, he’s just winding up at the bat. And then he lets loose. McAvoy, the longtime news host of a show best described as anemic (for its shameless pandering to viewer ratings; forever saying lots but conveying little) finally snaps.

Launching into a tirade at the sophomore college student whom he nicknames “sorority girl”, his resounding indictment of Democratic political non-strategy and glib mockery of Republican flag-troop-bald eagle-freedom bravado is captured on the millennial audience’s multitude of iPhones.

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The explosion seems largely unprovoked, yet it follows a painful (yet spookily familiar) exchange between two conservative and liberal academics, empaneled as a 21st-century, bourgeois fight night for the NYU student body. As the words swell and subside only to swell again, the scandalized audience doesn’t seem to process the peppering of expletives, aimed with biting sarcasm at one of their own. For that matter, neither does the moderator. For one shining, spotlighted moment, no one else exists but Will McAvoy, soliloquizing into the abyss with Hamlet’s signature ennui: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” he seems to pine, but in this case, McAvoy decries the rotten state(s) of a disunited America.

To assess why this scene unfolds the way it does, it is necessary to first understand its author. Known for his monologue-y drama, Aaron Sorkin is a writer who only thinly layers his characters’ lines with a veneer of their individual essence. The delivery may be the actor’s, but the words are his own. For some, the end result of a Sorkin episode may feel transcendent, keenly the best that humanity has to offer. His writing is imbued with the raw emotion of a world in turmoil, wrapped up neatly in snappy dialogue. He speaks the people’s hearts, in a way. The world-weariness which incenses his fans at society’s injustice or dysfunction is precisely that which he resolves when, at all odds, the human goodness of his characters fights the proverbial dragon, dodges his or her Achilles’ heel, and saves the day.

They’re victories that are so infrequently won in real life that some of us may prefer to live in the fantasy world he creates. With this background, it is fitting that the whole of the Newsroom, as a series, is an extended allegory for Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The Impossible Dream, in this case, is McAvoy actually “speaking his truth”, as the saying goes, and it begins in this auditorium. Yet, as we will come to find out, he is not the story’s namesake. He is also not the sidekick. He’s the donkey, and he acts like one for most of the scene. This is significant because he is the means by which the whole crux of the show comes together, riding on his unwilling back. The attention is called to Will McAvoy in this scene because he represents the disaffected voter's citizens' millennial generation midlife crises which are so rife in today’s world. The first half of his monologue is dedicated to complaining— soundly