Video Thrilled the Radio Star

Fighting Terror with Jack Bauer and Rush Limbaugh.

By Rohan Mascarenhas, Amherst College

Well, this is strange: Rush Limbaugh is moderating a discussion, sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, on the television series 24, and he can’t stop saying how much he loves each episode. Never mind that the show is written, set, and produced in Hollywood, that notoriously liberal lair of elitism and anti-Americanism. Rush has been addicted to it ever since he watched the first season’s DVD for 16 hours straight.

Now, addiction may come easily to Rush, but no one can fault his tastes here. Since it first aired nearly five years ago, 24 has generated critical praise, remarkable ratings, and a loyal following, with an estimated 14 million tuning in each week. The main attraction is Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack Bauer, a government agent fighting evil terrorists of all kinds — angry Serbians, radical Islamists, drug dealers — and all within the neat confines of one day.

But even though the show has fans across the ideological spectrum, from Barbra Streisand to Justice Clarence Thomas, who was sitting in the audience, I was shocked to learn that conservatives find some ideological kinship with the show’s portrayal of the war on terror. I always watched the show through a strictly non-ideological lens, since I assumed that trying to score political points by claiming a television show as liberal or conservative would just be too silly.

I was wrong. Apparently, critics have long discerned, as Adam Green of the New York Times writes, “a rightward tilt” in the show’s torture-riddled plots. Time columnist Joe Klein went so far as to write that the series is the “classic conservative fantasy — the myth of American competence and omnipotence.” And don’t get Rush started: In a lengthy monologue, he declares that 24, with its “optimism” and “pro-America” stance, is “one of the most intelligent programs on the air tackling the subject matter.” Before he introduces the cast and producers, he even gleefully notes that some of them are conservative.

It becomes clearer during the panel just what all the fuss is about. 24 was first aired only weeks after 9/11, and just as Bush administration supporters have since sought to claim the war on terror as their own, they think they have found in this show an endorsement of their policies.

In particular, they must find Jack Bauer’s notorious disregard for protocol and flagrant use of torture refreshing. This trait — that “can-do American thing,” as Howard Gordon, a producer of the show, describes it — lends itself to a thought process that ignores the law’s “technicalities” in favor of action, and always decisive action. Jack Bauer — and even President Palmer, the American president in the show’s universe, at one point — regularly uses torture to get information out of terrorist suspects and, by and large, it seems to work. The second season actually opens with a suspect being graphically tortured in South Korea; it is his confession that starts the clock as Bauer tries to track down a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. This is not a show, as The American Spectator wrote, that indulges in any “moral equivocation” — Jack Bauer is good, the bad guys bad. So, let’s wiretap phones if we have to and keep those lawyers from “Amnesty Global” distracted.

Besides being a tad petty, this analysis isn’t very convincing. As Christopher Orr of The New Republic recently pointed out, 24 offers plenty of support to the liberal perspective as well. For instance, while Bauer does torture, conservatives — especially those in the current administration — would do well to notice that he does occasionally get it wrong, as when Bauer brutalizes his girlfriend’s ex-husband only to realize that he was completely innocent. And in the later episodes of the second season, Bauer actually tries to prevent a war with a country in the Middle East, with an eager vice president backed by shady oil company executives fighting against him. (sound familiar?)

None of this really matters, and the panel seems to grasp this point. They didn’t give Rush any ammunition in his bid to reopen old wounds of the culture wars. When he asks the producers if they incorporate real-life events in the show or if it is “all made up in your head,” Bob Cochran, a co-creator, replies, “For the most part, we make it up.” Limbaugh then tries another tack, asking the actors if their participation in a “pro-America show” has ever led to problems with their friends in Hollywood. “Only jealousy,” replies Gregory Itzin, who plays President Charles Logan, alluding to the remarkable success that the show has enjoyed.

Actually, the interesting debate about 24 has nothing to do with whether it is liberal or conservative. Instead, it raises important questions about the tenuous line between fact and fiction. While more than one person on the panel notes that the show is “unrealistic,” “exaggerated,” and even “wholly at odds with all forms of reality, time, space, and physics,” James Carafano, a Heritage scholar, isn’t so sure that the American people get that. He is clearly frustrated that more Americans seem to debate 24 than the real war on terror.

As he sees it, 24 may have a “Katrina effect,” where Americans, who see Bauer’s ability to do everything, are confused and frustrated when their own government can’t seem to get anything right. Driving his point home a bit too hard, he testily tells the cast that they are “not the people who are going to save us from the terrorists,” to which Carlos Bernard, an actor on the show, rightly replies, “We never said we were!”

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism official, once said that he could gain a politician’s attention only when he played out “tabletop war games” and imagined some of the horrible scenarios that could occur if no cautionary measures were taken. 24 nicely fulfills that role, which is why I do not think it is an escapist fantasy. The 9/11 Commission chiefly blamed our government’s “failure of imagination” to see a a 9/11 type of massive attack coming. Precisely because it is so fictional, its episodes help us to imagine and see possible future threats to America.

In his introduction of the panel, Phil Truluck, the executive vice president of Heritage, jokes, “There have been no terrorist attacks in the United States since the appearance of Jack Bauer on television.” That shows how much he’s been watching the show. In his first two years alone, Jack Bauer failed to stop a break-in at a top-secret Department of Defense prison; he could not stop the offices of the Counter-Terrorism Unit from being bombed; and a nuclear bomb actually detonated in the desert outside Las Vegas, causing massive riots and racially incited assaults. This is the power of fiction, and it is felt particularly during the war on terror, where our enemies are always ill-defined, continually lurking in the background, and forever threatening to strike and ruin what would otherwise look like another normal day. In this sort of environment, fake threats are forever mixed with real ones (even by those who are responsible for protecting us), and the truth is even harder to find.

With this context in mind, scholars and critics would be wrong to see an America that obsessively watches 24 as passive and distracted. This is an America constantly on edge, with each uneventful day seeming like one closer to the next big attack. Maybe they take some comfort in being able to watch a show where attacks do happen, but that America survives them. Surely it’s better to see that on TV than in real life, but it’s also reassuring to remember that life will go on.

 
Rohan Mascarenhas is a summer 2006 intern with the Progress Report team at the Center for American Progress. He studies Political Science at Amherst College.

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