First of all, let's get out of the way that I'm something of a cultural studies geek anyway, so this is how I think.
But, while the politics of 24 (the TV show) is itself not a terribly substantive topic, it seems to me, there is an obvious cultural meme that the show is exploiting, banking on, and more to the point, perpetuating, that is a bit disturbing. That's not what I want to talk about though, I'm just throwing that out as a given.
What is, or might be, more disturbing is the ideological stream behind it (if you can call it ideological)--in many ways a stream behind the Iraq War as well and much of what we might call the Bush Republicanism philosophy of national security (if you can call it a philosophy). I don't think 24 is the center of it, in a causal sense, but at the very least we can say it's begun to function as something of a divining rod. 24 is instructive not in that it detects the presence of a certain mentality, but that it reveals the startling breadth and scope of that mentality, and most importantly, it's vehemence.
There is a great article in the most recent New Yorker by Jane Mayer which gives a very good accounting of the politics behind 24, and its creator. The title of the article is "Whatever it Takes", the expressed motto of both Jack Bauer and the guys behind him.
One bit caught my eye:
This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind "24." Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. [...]
Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. "I’d like them to stop," Finnegan said of the show’s producers. "They should do a show where torture backfires."
The article goes on from there to describe, in detail, the harm that those men are seeing as a result of, if not 24, than the mentality behind and perpetuated by it. The whole article is worth reading.
Compare that to the following, also worth-reading article from the Washington Post.
[Homeland Security Chief Michael] Chertoff was the featured speaker at a morning forum sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that normally sticks to real, if less sexy, topics such as tax policy and entitlement programs. Heritage’s Phillip Truluck conceded in introductory remarks that the event at the Ronald Reagan Building was "very unusual" for the conservative organization.
He was probably right, considering that the panel discussion after Chertoff’s remarks included two national security scholars, "24″ co-creators Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, and the actors who play the show’s Nixonish president (Gregory Itzin) and CTU agents Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) and Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub).
The discussion was hosted by Rush Limbaugh, who breached the art-vs.-life divide early by planting a big kiss on the woman he introduced to a knowing audience simply as "Chloe."
All this, plus special guest Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who sat in the front row of the packed amphitheater.
Among other things, Limbaugh asked the show’s creators and stars whether they’re snubbed by "Hollywood liberals" for making a "pro-America show."
That contrast tells you almost all you need to know about the politics of torture in America right now.
Of course, what's disquieting about this is that the contrast seems to be focused on a TV show, a machismo whiz-bang formula action thriller at that. You literally have the current Director of Homeland Security, America's most influential conservative mouthpiece of the last 50 years, and a sitting Supreme Court justice, attending what amounts to a fan-con for the show, rah-rahing all the way, while America's leading active US military interrogators and the Dean of West Point go out of their way to try to talk down the 24 crew from ruining America.
This is, mind you, all centered around a TV show! What the hell is going on?
My thoughts in trying to answer that are somewhat convoluted still, but part of what has always struck me about the torture issue is that it has never seemed all that substantive, coming from the pro-torture folks. Facts, principles, laws, consequences, or even EFFECTIVENESS IN COMBATING TERRORISM don't matter one whit. Either the pro-torture folks flat our refuse to address these issues, or they concoct some kind of weird conspiratorial whoo-rah reality that they can't even support anecdotally, never mind with any kind of solid evidence or theory (indicative: "Oh sure, the military brass, experts, and primary interrogators all say it doesn't work and is horribly corrosive to both US interests AND intelligence, but really, they're just saying that. Behind the scenes, everybody loves torture. The CIA's been doing it for years. Why would the CIA be doing it if it weren't effective? Torture has always been practically US policy, and it works. I can prove this because what about the ticking time bomb scenario and come on you're just clueless to what's really going on.")
It has almost never been a real debate about policy and morality (with some exceptions), certainly not legality, but rather seems to be driven mostly by a weird emotional/character current, something akin to "America: Fuck Yeah!".
Well, perhaps the connection with 24 is closer than we might think. It is, after all, a fictionalized representation of how the world works. Almost a desperate/vigorous fictionalization. It is also a show that prides itself on mood, grit, and warped character above any kind of intellectual framework (You could never imagine Jack Bauer in an episode of The West Wing, for instance; they exist in completely separate universes, nevermind worldviews). 24 doesn't care one whit about morals (even the moral code they might be attributed as having (an "America, Fuck Yeah!" sort) is hopelessly convoluted), practicality (indeed, it almost prides itself on getting further and further away from reality and moving closer and closer to the plain ridiculous), or even...well, thought. It is an exercise in emotion over fear.
Which is fine.
For a bad TV show.
But it relates to a sense of a certain kind of pro-war Republican that I've had since 2001, and haven't been able to shake, and that I don't think I'm alone in sharing.
Digby:
One of the things thats driven me nuts over the past few years is this reflexive portrayal of the GWOT as the most dangerous and challenging in world history. They have from the beginning behaved in a way that I think history will see as panicked and overwrought. As a nation we behaved with much more calm and deliberation when we were much more seriously threatened in the past. These last few years were not our finest.
...
The doughy pantload generation of wingnuts, on the other hand [as opposed to the Cold Warrior neocons], thinks it's some sort of game and they are the star players. They yearned to be "part" of something momentous --- but from a distance, like you are when you are watching movies about war and heroism and identify with the main characters. No need to give up your Milk Duds just to enjoy a good bloodbath. They are writing an exciting plotline that has Islamic terrorism somehow so uniquely dangerous that it has surpassed WWII and the cold war and is more like something out of science fiction: "Star Wars" or "War of the Worlds." To these people, naitonal security is cheap pulp fiction.
...
No thanks to the rabid right which has been lobbying for a nuclear meltdown (and global domination, let's face it) since the end of WWII. It is a worldview that has almost nothing to do with actual events or facts on the ground. It reached its zenith with Bush, but they will never go away. They are fearful, insecure people whose temperament and ideology create a need for them to believe that they are warrior heroes in spite of all evidence to the contrary. They are the last people on earth who should be leading a powerful nation in a time of great challenge. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.
There is some context to those bits that bears reading, but you get the idea.
It's easy to dismiss that, I think, because it's invective and itself dismissive and it ignores a lot of other pro-war (even pro-torture) Republicans whose views are, if stupid, genuine (not that the 24 crowd's aren't, per se), and based on some kind of intellectual framework slash competing worldview (although, again, a stupid and exceedingly vile and dangerous one). Digby there is painting with a very wide, stereotyping, condescending brush.
But doesn't he have a point?
Don't you (and I) know a helluva lot of the 28% Bushites that kinda fit that bill...more than casually?
Is that, perhaps, what 24 gets at?
When a huge swath of not just shit-kicking red state voters, but conservative talk show hosts, cabinet secretaries, supreme court justices, vice presidents, start pointing to 24 as an excitingly pro-American show, isn't there something going on there that is perhaps even MORE worrying than a legal brief of national security necessity and a constitutional interpretation of the law and morality?
Because, really...how can you argue with that?
The title of that Heritage Panel, by the way, was "24 and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?"
Some people I've talked to about this try to say that 24, while it may be a corrosive, dangerous, counter-productive, and violently off-kilter worldview, is still just entertainment, and as such, exists for the sake of catharsis. But I think 24 actually fuels its opposite, which is maybe the core of my problem with it.
Aristotle defined catharsis as leading to "the human soul that is purged of its excessive passions." That’s its whole point, he would argue–-to ultimately balance back out emotions that are initially out of whack (specifically fear, paranoia, anger). Read the New Yorker article I linked, particularly around the bits I quoted wherein the Dean of West Point and guys that have literally done tends of thousands of interrogations, and what they say this kind of thirst for recasting things in a 24 light has been leading to. They even take it farther than I would (I’m not one to blame much directly on a TV program, but rather (if at all) on the underlying memes and currents that are behind it, and that it exacerbates (or challenges)). The point is that 24 is not acting as a purge, in the Aristotelean sense. Quite the opposite.
I don’t want to sound like Tipper Gore, here. What interests me about 24 is less the show itself, and more the kind of mindsets we’re seeing that it appears to sit in the center of. Not just cathartic "ah wouldn’t that be nice" fantasies from red state fans, but "we argue this as a model for the way things ought to be and the way we want to make them" promises from officials at the highest level of government. There are significant numbers of people for whom the conceptual model contained in and expressed by 24 is not fantasy or drama (in the classical sense of it), but a new vision of reality, one that plays into and encapsulates the vision of reality that had already been coalescing around certain segments of the Republican party, the ones that desperately want to cast not a TV show, but the foreign and domestic policy of the world’s most powerful nation, in the light of what is essentially a frighteningly violent, aggressive, paranoid, angry, security-porn-laden fantasy.
This bad TV show, in other words, isn't just an expression of a fantasy that certain fans wish was a reality, but a celebration of a fantasy that certain fans, including our Vice President, believe is reality. That, to me, is scary as fuck.
It’s scary not that this mindset/worldview exists on a TV show, but that it exists as the organizing principle of our current government and many of her most vehement supporters, who are bleeding it through to American legislative, constitutional, and judicial philosophy.
If you want it even starker, here is a quote in that New Yorker article from Cyrus Nowrasteh, the guy who wrote and produced "The Path to 9/11", one of the executive producer of 24's best friends (they run a conservative film festival together, among other things). I think the quote is as indicative of the 24 War Hero Republican point of view as anything:
"Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business. It's a deep, dark, ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business--even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy."
The only problem is, Jack Bauer does NOT fulfill that fantasy. A large chunk (and the currently dominant chunk) of the ruling party of the executive for the United States of America is keying into that fantasy, defining themselves by it, and THEY are offering to fulfill it. Even worse, perhaps, is that a significant chunk of Republican voters (and a handful of others) are DEMANDING that it be fulfilled.
The ticking time bomb, I'm afraid, isn't in the head of a terrorist tied to a chair in the basement of the Los Angeles bureau of the Counter Terrorist Unit, but in the heads of a significant swath of Republican voters, eggheads, and leaders.
Cross-posted at http://thecrossedpond.com/
