What Would Jack Bauer Do?
Fox’s hit drama normalizes torture, magnifies terror, and leaves conservatives asking why George W. Bush can’t be more like 24’s hero.
......When we are lazy, he is up all night. Where we cut and run from adversity, he cuts and runs right through his enemies. And a nation of cubicle-dwellers, daily harassed by the bureaucratic minutia of their hum-drum jobs, can’t help being attracted to a man who barks at his superiors, “We don’t have time for this!” as he takes on the ultimate job of keeping his country and his family safe. In The Weekly Standard, Martha Bayles rhapsodized, “When imagining a nuclear bomb about to explode in L.A., or a weaponized virus about to be released in eleven major cities, we welcome Jack’s Odyssean alertness, courage, and cunning.” One could add to this list Jack’s indomitable patriotism—his willingness to suffer any fate rather than see his nation harmed. To Bayles’s credit, she voices what she believes to be the mixed feelings of Americans about his methods: “it is harder to swallow his readiness to torture. For most of its history, American entertainment has depicted torture as pure evil. So it is jarring to see it routinely ordered, even inflicted, by the good guys.”
But for so many, even in the conservative movement, it is exactly Jack Bauer’s brutal tactics that make him worth admiring. After the premiere of the fifth season, National Review’s John J. Miller relished the “best line”: “You are gonna tell me what I want to know. It’s just a question of how much you want it to hurt.”
In 24, the war on terror is an omni-present ticking clock, pitting our legitimate security needs against the most cherished tenets of our civilization. The stress one hour of this imposes on Jack Bauer alone makes good drama, but its extension to all America, for an indefinite time, is a farce. The devotion to 24 and its protagonist demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility. As escapism, 24 is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting.
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