I 'condemned' this pot-boiler on the hideous impressions it created.. beginning with the (mere-) First murder.. as it descended from There. Meth-head as Hero??!ONE!!
I think/thought-Not.
Maybe I was Wrong: (While I didn't/don't need 'the lessons' of what personal corruption can lead to) Sirota does the much harder-Work,
that of bringing Scale&Relativity to a difficult admixture of horror + exquisite associations --> towards some real-Points.
Walter WhiteÂs sickness mirrors America
"Breaking Bad" strikes such a nerve because Walt's ills of body and soul are also those of our country
BY DAVID SIROTA
It is safe to say that as ÂBreaking Bad comes to a close, Vince GilliganÂs series is the momentÂs Best Show In the History of Television. Incredibly, the show isnÂt even over yet, and it is already a cult classic, with all the attendant prop fetishization and tourism industries that come with such a designation. But as we approach the final episode, thereÂs an unanswered question: What makes the show so historically important?
Critics have rightly lauded the series for, among other things, its cinematography, its dialogue, its character development and its carefully constructed plot twists. Yet, in this much-vaunted new Golden Age of TV, there are plenty of programs with great visuals, terrific conversations, nuanced personalities and enticing stories  but most never achieve the same notoriety as the life of Walter White. Similarly, ÂBreaking Bad is part crime drama, part satire of the legal system and part commentary on family dysfunction  but those narrative vectors are hardly unexplored territory in television. So what makes the story of Walter White so special?
HereÂs a theory: Maybe ÂBreaking Bad has ascended to the cult firmament because it so perfectly captures the specific pressures and ideologies that make America exceptional at the very moment the country is itself breaking bad.
The most obvious way to see that is to look at how Walter WhiteÂs move into the drug trade was first prompted, in part, by his familyÂs fear that he would die prematurely for lack of adequate health care. It is the kind of fear most people in the industrialized world have no personal connection to  but that many American television watchers no doubt do. ThatÂs because unlike other countries, Walter WhiteÂs country is exceptional for being a place where 45,000 deaths a year are related to a lack of comprehensive health insurance coverage. ThatÂs about ten 9/11′s worth of death each year because of our exceptional position as the only industrialized nation without a universal public health care system (and, sadly, Obamacare will not fix that).
WalterÂs fear of bankrupting his family is also familiar. The kind of medical bills Walter faced are hardly rare in America  they are, in fact, the countryÂs single largest cause of bankruptcy. And again, this makes America exceptional because, alas, medical bankruptcies basically do not exist in the rest of the industrialized world.
WalterÂs economic desperation is almost certainly fueled by his knowledge that a medical bankruptcy has particularly extreme consequences for an American family. He knows, for instance, that he lives in a country where his son and daughterÂs academic success and his wifeÂs retirement security will be based primarily on the size of the familyÂs bank account. He also knows that the possibility of his family getting caught in crushing poverty is particularly acute in an America with a comparatively meager social safety net. And so he becomes obsessed with coming up with a way to give his family barrel loads of cash.
[. . .]
Ultimately, all of these themes converge to raise the most harrowing questions of all  the taboo questions about whether we should really cherish the desperation, the greed and the every-man-for-himself ideologies that drive Walter White and that make American the industrialized worldÂs exception. It is the kind of question ÂWall Street asked back in 1987 when a badly broken Bud Fox dared to ask Gordon ÂGreed is Good Gekko: ÂHow much is enough? It is the same question that ÂBreaking BadÂs psychopathic murderer Todd recently posed to his neo-Nazi uncle when he asked: ÂNo matter how much you got, how do you turn your back on more?Â
In America, our culture too often offers up the same response as Gekko and Heisenberg. We too often say there is no such thing as Âenough and therefore you donÂt ever turn your back on more.
Unlike any other television show before it, ÂBreaking Bad dares to explore how such exceptional answers are at the root of so many of our problems. That alone makes the show more than just Important Television and more than merely exceptional. It makes it altogether unique.
Bolded added.
This may be the most incisive essay I've read, assembling the manifold Sources of the now-evident decay of this plundered place, since.. all the crap DeToqueville MISSED?
(I have before noted that: Muricans have no concept of the word, sufficient, but that's just more Unix-compression-affliction.)
Sirota's 'More Words' ... didn't waste a syllable.
Next.. when 'we' start seriously facing such concepts as Population/planet, Daily-Temp per #species-disappearances, Energy-use/Person-every-where ... and THEIR interconnections, along with the Death of vulture-capitalism as-we-Know-it..