After The Wire perfected a new urban social realism, and CSI (and its offshoots) took Law and Order’s procedural drama to absurd technical heights, the cop show had to get a new angle. The answer: Police the realm of the spirit and cast a non-American English-speaking actor as a brainy detective with a life-changing problem and no easy love interest, and watch him struggle to make sense of life and of time. This is the strategy taken by both Life and Life on Mars.

The past week saw two metaphysical detective dramas return. After a seven-week break in its second season, Life’s Zen detective Charlie Crews resumed unraveling why he’d been framed for a triple murder (NBC, Wed., 8/9c). After an out-of-order episode aired last week, Life on Mars (ABC, Wed., 10/9c) finally delivered the belated conclusion to its mid-November mid-season cliffhanger and brought its contemporary cop, Sam Tyler, a step closer to figuring out the nature of reality-and why he’s stuck in 1973.

Life is the more straightforward of the two. Los Angeles detective Charlie Crews (played cucumber-cool by London’s Damian Lewis) spent twelve years in prison for allegedly killing his business partner and his wife and son. By the time DNA evidence exonerated him, his friends and family had turned against him, and he’d been brutalized by inmates with grudges against the police, fallen hopelessly behind on technological matters, and found comfort in Zen Buddhism. Crews is slowly piecing together why he was set up as a killer, sporadically pining for his since-remarried ex-wife, and gingerly dealing with his partner-in-policework Dani Reese (The L Word’s Sarah Shahi), whose no-longer secret boyfriend is their captain and whose father is connected to the set-up. Zen gives Crews a wealth of  koans to use as ambiguous comebacks—and a sense of peace and interconnectedness that keeps Crews calm as he faces the fact that he’s been screwed out of life (which his $50 million settlement doesn’t nearly make up for.)

Based on a British series of the same Bowie-inspired name, the David E. Kelley-initiated Life on Mars (currently helmed by Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, and Scott Rosenberg, the trio behind the short-lived but watchable writer-can’t-go-home-again drama October Road) has a lot to live up to. Dubliner Jason O’Mara—he’ll pass for The Wire’s Sheffield-Irish Dominic West if you squint—plays Sam Tyler. A detective with New York’s fictitious 125th Precinct, Tyler was hit by a car when rushing to investigate a case. When he gets up, he’s still Sam Tyler of the 125th, but it’s 1973. Is he in a coma in 2008 dreaming that it’s 1973, or does his head injury just make him think so? Is something even stranger going on, or is this just how strange life is anyway?

The coma explanation initially seems most likely; that turned out to be the truth in the BBC version, from which the ABC show is already diverging. Within that framework, Tyler goes about his police duties as he tries to get back to 2008 by learning whatever life lessons or enacting any time-traveling plot-changes the universe is demanding of him. He dreams of his 2008 love and fellow detective, Maya (Lisa Bonet)—we assume the allusion to the Hindu concept of maya as a veiling, illusory reality is intentional—while maintaining a careful distance with his 1973 animas, a pioneering lady cop who serves as his confidant (Gretchen Mol) and a sagely hippie neighbor who opens his mind (Tanya Fischer). He encounters his parents, his young self, future mentors and criminals, real or products of his mind.

1973’s primitive technology is a continual source of amusement for Tyler; 1973’s police force, less so. Michael Imperioli plays a detective who thinks Tyler stole a promotion that should have been his. Harvey Keitel, in the casting coup of the century, nearly reprises his Bad Lieutenant role by playing the hard-drinking, suspect-beating station captain. If the show is largely missing the opportunity to revisit the crime-infested, recessionary New York that may be the future, it balances an infatuation of the style of 1973 (in terms of both visible fashion and a late-hippie aura of freedom) with a rear-view moral righteousness that rarely exceeds its place. Sam Tyler is the voice of progress and tolerance, yet he’s painfully aware that 2008 is little better than 1973. When he dusts himself off after being hit by that car, he barely registers that the housing projects that had surrounded him have been replaced by rubble and by billboards announcing that new apartments will be available on the site in 1974; it’s only when he sees the World Trade Center in the distance that he begins to understand the full magnitude of what’s happened. He rails against his colleagues’ treatment of women, gays, minorities and anti-war protesters; but when he speaks against the war in Vietnam, he also means the war in Iraq, and he has to hint to 1973 of horrors yet to come.

Life is, unsurprisingly, a bit more detached: the closest we get to a sociopolitical history is watching Crews’s former cellmate, pension-raiding ex-CEO Ted Early (Adam Arkin) humbly teaching business school and managing Crews’s money during a recession.

Next week, both shows deal with crimes against musicians and try to figure out what the Russians have to do with their heroes’mysteries. We’ll be hoping that Life on Mars, with all its shadow-dwelling robots and shadowy conspiracies, isn’t going to start emulating Lost and its nonsensical twists, but will continue probing inner and outer realities; and that Life will more fully communicate its Zen mindfulness as its arrow approaches its bullseye. A good detective or two of the human experience might be just what we need.

Photo: Ron Paul at his desk.

Connecticut-born Joe Spiegel works in finance in Boulder and New York City. He’s voting for neither John McCain nor Barack Obama.

A registered Libertarian, Spiegel won’t even be checking the box for party candidate Bob Barr.

Come Tuesday, he’s writing in Ron Paul.

Spiegel, who is in his mid-thirties, has said that of all the structural political ideologies and belief systems floating around the states, the one that resonates most deeply with him is that of Republicanism in its most traditional, 18th century form.

John Adams once defined a republic to be “a government of laws, and not of men.” The original sentiments behind Republicanism put personal freedom and the power of written law over the finicky whims of politicians and other such go-betweens.

Similarly, Libertarianism, also born in the late 1700s, remains true to its name: Libertarians prize “liberty,” despise authoritarian governments, believe that people possessing free will may coexist without the need for a governing body, and encourage respect for property, privacy, and the minding of one’s own business.

Joe Spiegel explains that of all the candidates he’s seen bursting into the political arena, Congressman Ron Paul’s views—anti-NATO, anti-UN, anti-federal income tax, anti-Federal Reserve (in favor of hard currency), anti-Patriot Act, anti-gun regulation, anti-No Child Left Behind, anti-War on Drugs, anti-Roe v. Wade (supporting state decisions), non-intervention—hew closest to his own.

We spoke on the phone about his support for Paul:

Do you think you’re wasting your vote by going for a candidate not likely to win?

The only vote that’s wasted is the vote not cast. Sitting something out says ‘I don’t care,’ but I do care. He’s the only candidate I’ve ever given money to. The purpose of an election is not to vote for someone who’s going to win, but to support a candidate whose ideas most closely espouse your own. I think that in the last 50 to 100 years, people have gotten confused about that. We’ve moved away from what a representative government really is. Politicians have to go to Washington to do what their constituents tell them to do.

And Ron Paul…

…Most closely matches my ideas. He’s one of the last real Republicans. He and [Dennis] Kucinich vote only for what they believe in. There’s no background deal. With most politicians, you can tell they’re looking at each other and agreeing ‘you vote for mine; I’ll vote for yours.’ People who think anything’s going to change with the new president are lying to themselves. You can see people’s voting records, but nobody seems to bother to look. Ron Paul’s been consistent: he’s voted against every spending bill and everything that goes against civil liberties (like wire tapping).

It’s really unfortunate that people have developed the idea that Republicans are religious maniacs. It’s an ‘equality of opportunity’ party. It’s become confused with religious zealotry, but in most parts of the country, that’s not true. There’s a lot of misunderstanding; there’s a huge schism in both parties. The people who associate Paul with that kind of zealotry are ignorant about what he believes in.

What do you dislike about McCain and Obama?

I hate all of Obama’s policies. I agree with him on nothing. I find that on the margin, McCain’s ideas are less bad. They’re not great, but they’re less bad. His government would be smaller than an Obama government. But neither one of these guys has fleshed out his ideas. Neither of these guys has real policies. I don’t see either candidate righting the mistakes of the last 60 years.

Schools are a local matter. Libertarians still believe that. You’d think Democrats would like ‘No Child Left Behind,” but they maintain the world view that everything that Bush does is bad. [Warrentless] Wiretapping was a Clinton invention. It’s a bad thing, but no one complained. A lot of things people find distasteful about Bush, like the horrific Patriot Act, only happened because of a Democratic Congress. Congress makes the laws.

You go to New York or Boulder or Berkeley, and that’s all they talk about, how the Patriot Act and wire tapping are bad. So why are they pro-Obama? He supported both.

For the Democrats to turn around and say that it’s all Bush…it should be called a Pelosi policy because both side of the aisles, and law-passing Congress, bear some responsibility.

What do you like about Paul’s internal economic policies?

His promotion of a small government. The past few weeks have shown us that Americans don’t want huge interventions in the economy. They didn’t want a $700 billion bail out using their money. The stock market’s going down anyway. The bank made bad loans, and that was a mistake. Taking out loans you can’t afford is a mistake. Both sides of the transaction cause problems, and I guess both sides deserve to fail then. People get hurt. They’re the collateral damage. But on the whole, [neither] I [nor] Ron Paul like huge interventions.

Do you think Libertarianism, and thus Paul, promote a sort of selfish antithesis to good Samaritanism? That is, how do you feel about welfare or Paul’s approach to it?

I think morally, people can be asked to intervene and help those in need. But I don’t think the welfare system is a good one. There’s a big difference between unemployment benefits, a safety net you pay for, and block grants. The latter are terrible. They’re massive transfers to people that are based on nothing. Moreover, that kind of system is really demeaning, and it’s not structured in such a way to get you out of a difficult situation.

There’s no mandate in the Constitution that says something like welfare should be a federal responsibility. It doesn’t make sense. What will someone in one place know about how to deal with life at the other? It boggles the mind to think a centralized bureaucracy would know how to deal with that kind of thing. You have to attack the problem on the level on which it is suited. A centralized army? Yes. Welfare? No.

What Ron Paul would suggest, and what I would support, is making each individual community and state responsible for their own. It’s not the federal government’s responsibility. The people helping need to be closer to the problem. The system needs to become more localized.

Does it bother you that he opposes Roe v. Wade?

Well I’m totally pro-choice. But no, it doesn’t bother me because I hate Roe v. Wade too. The ruling establishes a precedent. It implies that the Supreme Court can make something up out of thin air. People are so absorbed by the end that they don’t understand the means. They don’t care how they get there, and that’s very dangerous. By giving the court that kind of power, even if the ruling supports something you believe, it opens the door to a terrible thing. Like, ‘We’re going to pretend you have the right to privacy,’ but by saying the Supreme Court can grant rights, you’re allowing it the same power to take them away.

The Court’s job isn’t to infer a right; it oversteps its power. But the truth is that neither side is really interested in resolving this decision, so they save abortion and gun control as emotional issues to get people riled up and emotionally involved in an argument that no President or Vice President really has any power over.

The President doesn’t have the power to regulate firearms. It doesn’t matter whether or not the President or pro-choice or pro-life, he or she doesn’t have the ability to do anything about it [except through the appointment of Supreme Court justices. But see above argument against giving Supreme Court justices the power to make that decision]. If you’re pro-choice, you’ve had 35 years to enshrine this nebulous decision into an actual law. But no, both sides thus have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

The Constitution doesn’t say anything about abortions. I agree with Paul that Roe v. Wade’s a terrible court ruling. It should be decided state by state. If you live in a state that doesn’t support abortion and you have to move, so be it. There’s no perfect solution. No one’s forcing you to stay there. It’s not Big Brother’s business what you do.

What’s your reaction to Ron Paul and foreign policy?

By and large, I agree with him that there’s no reason to maintain a presence in other countries. Let’s start with the 1940s. After WWII, there was no reason to maintain that presence in Germany. Fighting Japan was a good idea. The Korean war was crazy. In 2001, the Middle East attacked us, so we had to retaliate. We’re already in Iraq, but we should find a way to get out. It’s very murky and messy. If we’ve had the ability since 1945 to subdue enemies without putting our troops’ lives in jeopardy, we should consider doing so.

People fight; it happens. But there are certain ways of doing it without requiring massive amounts of people anymore. We can use technology to our advantage without committing ourselves to large expenditures or putting lives at risk. I think there’s little need for us to have a far flung military presence in most places.

And in the case of foreign genocide?

That’s a slightly different ball of wax. I think we would have gotten into WWII even if Japan hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbor. In terms of something like Darfur, while I don’t think it’s technically the U.S.’ responsibility, we could have a moral obligation to help. Could we be asked? Yes. Should be asked? Yes. Being asked and responding are, however, very different from unilaterally deciding to do things our way and just stepping in.

Being a Libertarian doesn’t mean you have to be hawkish. There will be times when people aren’t going to live and let live. Strong isolationism means hiding your head in the sand. But I am, and I think Ron Paul is, a supporter of weak isolationism.

How do you feel about the media’s coverage of Paul and the election in general?

Every newspaper, magazine and TV station has a bias against the Right in favor of Obama, especially the New York Times. I have to stay that if you take out the editorial section and just leave the news pages, the Wall Street Journal does a pretty good job of keeping it simply about the news and not about opinion, as does the Economist.

So I did what every person who has ever crouched in bed late at night, spilling your inky guts on to the page, fears most:  I went back and read some old journal entries.  I came upon the below and was startled by how different a place I could be in just four short years ago.

It’s a testament to the angst of the early 20’s.  The first dawning of the harsh realization that contrary to what you were told all throughout childhood, you really can’t grow up and be anything you want unless luck, smarts, and perseverance all create the perfect storm of life magic.

The poem was on the opposite page to the entry – a final rewrite of something I had been working on prior to the entry.  The prose came out as a companion piece.  I feel like they say almost the same things.   The paragraph breaks represent page turns.  I’m not quite sure why I’m sharing it other than the fact that I think everyone my age in my position in life goes through similar struggles.

Despite my apparent determination and conviction that I had everything figured out, it took me another three years from that point to leave the spirit-sucking corporate job I was trapped in at the time.   I came out thinking I was going to be a famous screenwriter and ended up working six years between two films studios, only at a desk, staring at spreadsheets with DVD warehouse inventories.  Kudos to people who get juiced from an office environment.  I almost envy you.

For me, the screen part left, but the writing remained, as I’m now one year down in a journalism program at USC.  Everyone puts on this air of panic as the big 3-0 approaches, but I think it’s mostly an act.  I’m glad to see the 20’s go.  Not that I don’t think a decent amount of what I thought then doesn’t hold true now, but it’s the anguish of uncertainty that gave that period the harsh edge.  It’s a lot easier of a pill to swallow in hindsight.

So to that, I say bring on the 30’s.  Time to start living life with my head screwed on.

*****

5/15/04 – 12:19 a.m.

A butterfly is born without first living
as a caterpillar.
An unassuming immaculate conception,
yet deprived of the wisdom of the world
(taught before the cocoon in scattered
doses of blunder and mounting
cynicism) Nevertheless…
Flying was effortless at first:
no one told the wings that they
had to stop flying at some point.

No one can ever prepare you for the spider web of decision making that defines existing in the midst of a first-world, developed civilization.  School means grades: the objective is clear.  Grades are for college:  once again, clear.  All of the posturing and all of the guidance does not account for the deaf ears of American children who are being forced to listen, though.  We are so obsessed with standardizing and quantifying as a culture that we lose sight of the human element as it becomes buried beneath a mountain of grades, stats, and acronyms.  There is a dichotomy at play here, a self-defeating process by which many young and privileged children are set up for disappointment in life.  parents become obsessed with the ultimate measuring stick of performance: the report card.  At the same time, though if these parents are like mine and found their drive and passion for work in the desire to provide a better, more comfortable life than what they knew growing up, they will be compelled

to bestow the rich fruits of their labor upon their children.  This cycle will eventually remove the initial motivation of desire from the equation because the children who have a comfortable life from day one will not be driven to obtain something they have always known.   The parents push their children to do well while unknowingly depriving their good intentions of a major catalyst.  Good grades and performance become necessities to appease the parents and in turn maintain the freedom and comfort.  The recognition of knowledge as power gets slighted because in most instances, achieving good grades not always require the acquisition and/or possession of knowledge.  Some people are likely born with an innate understanding of the need for knowledge.  If that thirst cannot be quenched with other, superficially alluring material or social vices, that person is truly lucky because they do not need to derive

their motivation from their environment.  In most cases, including myself, the human spirit has an abundance of inertia and the natural tendency is towards the path of least resistance.  When the focus is set on gaining standardized prowess, the thirst is easily quenched because the brain and body were not intrinsically parched.  This mentality can persist almost throughout college without causing any severe problems.  But if you coast through university and are not pursuing a career in finance, a law degree, a medical degree, or a career in engineering or computers, you are in no way a necessity when you set sail into the ocean of the “real world” with a flimsy diploma for a sail.  It’s somewhat ironic that the individuals who strive to gain the most well-rounded educations are the least prepared and a lesser commodity.  Even with a thirst for knowledge, a liberal arts degree is merely a small

stepping stone towards greatness.  So this is the dilemma I am faced with.  Twenty four years old and just now becoming familiar with the angst, the questioning, the unrest, and the desire to fight my own inertia.  To strive beyond my means.  Yes, being a doctor or a lawyer or a banker appear to be the more challenging paths at first, but once one summit is reached, the climb levels and the terrain becomes much easier.  And you will always know which direction you need to move.  To want to leave my mark in this world through something creative that originated in my own thoughts, musings, and observations requires a level of will and dedication I ahve not found within myself for a long while.  Everything else just pales in comparison.  Film is universal and I want my place in its history.  To touch so many people on so many levels all at once would be the

most fulfilling personal and intellectual accomplishment I could achieve.  I came out to LA with an English degree and a ton of confidence, hopes, and dreams.  The confidence took some hits as the world rapidly expanded before me.  The hopes and the dreams remain, though, and I am starting to see what must be done to make them a reality.  I’ve come close to laying down and giving in to becoming a desk jockey, but that would be the ultimate acceptance of defeat and a waste of what I am told is an amazing education.  But enough bullshit.  As long as I continue to write, themes will develop and ideas will coagulate.  The lifestyle will always be comfortable; I am lucky enough to be put in that position early in my life.  Now to do something that will satiate a thirst that is finally being provoked into prominence by a life that simply will not remain.

Sometimes genius is simply perseverance.  The willingness to dedicate yourself to an endeavor that 99.9% of people out there would never attempt only because it requires too much time.  Too much conviction.  Too much effort to, say, document your life by taking one polaroid photo a day for 18 years.

But that is exactly what Jamie Livingston did.  Beginning on March 31, 1979 until the day he died on October 25, 1997.  One a day.  It takes about one minute of your time once you actually decide what to shoot, but the startling realization (among several) that hits you when browsing through the 6,700+ images is how you could never conceive of pulling it off yourself.  Just one minute a day is how much you or I could never spare.

Marinate on that.  Jamie Livingston’s life can be seen here.