24 as ham-handed political theater.
I clearly have been paying too much attention to inside-baseball political maneuvering, semantics, and framing. I couldn’t help watching 24 and thinking about what the uberwingnuts behind the camera and the Conservative boobs in front of the tube will take away and employ as talking points.It’s impossible to not regard 24 as a pop culture phenomenon and political allegory. I want to just disregard it as mindless entertainment, but given that radio pundits like Limbaugh and Supreme Court Justice Scalia cite it as an influence, as well as it being a negative influence in the military regarding torture (previously), but in this media hungry world where TV is the only source of information, I just don’t think it is possible.
In the first two hours, I see a reframing of Dubya’s reason for his Excellent Adventure in Iraq as proxy for the cultural genocide in the fictional African country of Sangala, continuing the justification for torture, the alphabet soup confusion amongst the various Federal agencies in trying to avert the ticking timebomb, and the threat of hacker boogiemen inside the single firewall that protects the Federal computer network.
The only point of ‘redemption’ was the line by Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer about the American people’s right to know what is being done in their name. Surnow and the other wingnut pornographers are not likely to provide a fair and balanced take.
