CBS brought back its once-cancelled series, Jericho, for a second season after passionate viewers lobbied for it. The show is about how a small town in Kansas deals with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange — with the clever and chilling twist that no one in Jericho has any idea what has happened because all contact with the rest of the country has become impossible.

Now, in the second season, the people of Jericho find out what happened. And guess what? We did it. On purpose. In the words of the New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante,

We soon learn that a nefarious United States government planned the attacks, using Iran and North Korea as scapegoats. A menacing red, white and blue flag, with vertical stripes, waves over Jericho now. It represents the new Allied States of America, a country led by a boyish puppet president but run by a malevolent senior statesman who has apparently ordered that all textbooks be rewritten so that the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam is recounted as a failure of will.

The Vietnam textbook thing is especially piquant. Every time I think Hollywood has exhausted its capacity for injecting anti-Americanism into every nook and cranny of the popular culture, I soon learn that the surface of its inventiveness in this regard — if in no other — has barely been scratched.