Monday, January 10, 2005
(8:40 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
24
I recently became a fan of 24 by watching a couple of the old seasons on DVD. I fully intend to watch the whole season this time, although watching it an hour at a time, with a gap of a week between episodes, seems really agonizing. Last night, though, while watching the season premiere, Anthony pointed out that the politics of the show go against everything we stand for.Leftists are either dangerously naive or outright evil. For instance, in the first hour of the new season, the secretary of defense is kidnapped by terrorists after breaking his stated schedule to attempt to convince his hippie son not to spout his "6th grade Michael Moore views" at an environmentalist protest at a missile factory. There is some indication that the son is somehow complicit with the kidnapping; in any case, the commericals indicate he will be tortured. In season 3, a terrorist who is attempting to release a deadly virus that could rapidly kill millions of people is not an Islamic fundamentalist or a white supremacist -- he is basically a Chomskyite. His goal is the withdrawal of US military forces to within US borders, because he believes that the US military's role in the world has been overwhelmingly negative and destructive. All of this seems to me to have an "inoculating" effect -- people who hear such views for the first time on 24 are less likely to be convinced when they hear them later.
Torture is not only necessary, but absolutely routine. In the second episode of the new season (the first two were played back-to-back), Jack Bauer breaks into an interrogation room to "break" a suspect by shooting him in the kneecap and threatening to shoot him in the other kneecap. Torture always ultimately ends up working on the terrorists, but somehow the American agents are always able to endure it -- Bauer's partner in season 3 gets shot in the hand, then has gasoline poured on it, and he still won't talk, and they tell me that Bauer himself endures some hefty torture.
This one may be a stretch, but I see a parallel between the idea that Bauer is finally the only man you can trust to fight the terrorists and the idea that only Bush "really understands" the War on Terror. Career bureaucrats are consistently shown to be idiotic in their adherence to the rules; only by breaking the rules and listening to the intuitive reasoning of the superhero Jack Bauer can we expect any results. The War on Terror is won not through expert opinion or even through reasoned deliberation, but by gutsy moves that are always a hair's-breadth from causing a horrible disaster.
That said, I still love the show.
