A quick note: I hate to agree with TV critics, but Aliens in America on the CW really is a charming, 
unaffected and accurate look at the torture being a high school reject. The boy who plays Justin, the geeky high school reject, really is goofy looking. And the actor who plays his Pakistani exchange student, Adhir Kalyan, seems like a real boy, not a Hollywood creation doing sitcom schtick. The weirdest thing about this show, however, is that Boomer Scott Patterson (born in 1958), formerly Lorelai's boyfriend on the now-cancelled Gilmore Girls, has mysteriously morphed into a balding, clueless Midwestern dad on this show. Didn't he skip a casting step, between hot youngish love interest and neutered father figure? My favorite line of the pilot episode is when Justin's parents are discussing whether a Muslim high school kid could possibly be a terrorist intent on destroying their
hometown.
Dad (with disbelief): "It's Medora, Wisconsin."
Mom: "So now Medora is not important enough to blow up? Where's your civic pride?"
We're sufficiently removed from the memory of horrific terrorism to be able use it as sitcom fodder, apparently.
Speaking of terrorism, a new novel by Rudolph Delson, Maynard & Jennica, is an entertaining portrait 
of two idiosyncratic, New York City oddballs in love, set in the city just before September 11, 2001. The story is a kind of oral history, with shifting narrative viewpoints--which I don't really enjoy, because it's as if the author has ADD and can't really concentrate. But Maynard, a child of privilege who is a down-on-his-luck composer/piano teacher, has a clear-eyed view of the hypocrisy inherent in the uber-patriotism associated with the September 11 attacks. He rails against the ubiquitous plastering of American flags everywhere, including those on every subway car.
"What is the message? 'Fuck you--this uptown No. 6 train is an American uptown No. 6 train?'"
But he goes further, lamenting the crocodile tears of the unaffected, who appropriate other people's loss and grief as their own.
"This must be a tragedy, because we feel so sad! And our tragic flaw? Our tragic flaw is our--freedom. They killed us for our--freedom. They must have been--heroes, those firemen. Do not attempt to discriminate between the heroic and the merely unlucky. They cannot simply have been rank-and-file union members who never heard the order to evacuate...."
I enjoy this piercing of the self-righteous bubble; but it's also a lovely little love story.
