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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Grossman ends the review with this: "To us" (speak for yourself, asshole), "the events he describes already feel like they happened decades ago, but he writes as if they just happened yesterday ... 'The Clinton Wars' is neither history nor journalism nor memoir. It's just more politics." Perhaps it's naive to expect the press to react positively to an 800-page book that demonstrates that it didn't do its job. To turn that demonstration into "just more politics" is evidence of a deeply rooted cynicism that, like much cynicism, is also deeply naive.
Against this, "24," with the stature and immense dignity of Haysbert's performance, has refused cynicism, giving us a vision of a president as we would like him to be, as we would expect him to be. In last night's finale, when Palmer, having barely averted the war, addressed the Cabinet that removed him from office by saying, "Leaders are required to have patience beyond human limits," and then rebuked them by adding that war can only be waged when "the strictest standards of proof have been met," could there be any doubt that he was talking about Bush's unproven claims of Iraqi collusion with al-Qaida, and his ongoing snipe hunt for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons?
But the nightmare that has resonated most throughout this season of "24" has been of course that of Sept. 11. As befits any real thinking about that event, the show has been unpredictable and upsetting, refusing to countenance the illusions of either the right or the left. Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is called out of retirement from the government's Counter Terrorism Unit when the agency learns that Middle Eastern terrorists are going to explode a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. That, of course, is our most feared scenario, an event that would make planes flying into skyscrapers seem like a dress rehearsal. "24" played ruthlessly on our fear and on our thirst for revenge, the revenge we still have not gotten for 9/11, only to slake that thirst in a way that invites our disgust.
Pop culture has accustomed us to seeing überheroes -- Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford -- take down cartoon projections of the terrorists we fear. "24" did not allow us the comfort of revenge fantasies, shattering any illusions about what it will take to fight terrorism. In the beginning of the season, that played out as a sort of extreme pulp braggadocio, with Bauer, needing to infiltrate a militia to gain information, killing a protected government witness and then presenting his head to the men he was set to testify against. You laughed and gasped at the outrageousness of that. No one was laughing by the time Jack located Said Ali (Francesco Quinn), the terrorist whose group was behind the bomb. In order to discover the location of the bomb, Jack sets Ali in front of a live TV feed from the Middle East showing masked, armed men holding guns on Ali's family. When Ali refuses to give up the location of the bomb, his youngest son is shot before his eyes.
It turns out to be staged (Jack Bauer has to be the hero, after all), but that scarcely matters. The show does the seemingly impossible in this scene, putting us inside the agony of a man we have every reason to hate, a man we should hate, and asking us to imagine the horror of being forced to watch as your family is killed. Typical of the show's complexity, though, it does not simply allow us to be appalled either. At the same time as we are repelled by Jack's torture of Ali, we can also see the necessity of his actions.
This is territory far from the comfort zone of big action movies that ask us to cheer the warriors capable of doing the dirty job no one else will. We are not allowed the cushy moral phoniness here of believing that good guys never harm innocents, nor spared from seeing the worst of men as human beings.
The tension that has played out throughout "24" has been the tension between an America that lives up to its ideals and an America that, adapting to the new threat against us, has to narrow those ideals to survive. Torture has been the recurring motif this season, and it's not just a tool used by terrorists. At times the deepest horror of the show has been that of watching good men choose to act in ways they never dreamed of acting. President Palmer detains a journalist to keep him from going public with news of the possible nuke and thus starting a panic, and he orders one of his aides tortured for information when it becomes clear that the man colluded to bring the nuclear bomb into the country. (The revelation of these scenes is that even torture won't get a performance out of Harris Yulin.) After himself being tortured with a scalpel dipped in acid, Jack injects one of his torturers with a serum that will kill him with agonizing slowness and offers the man the mercy of a bullet if he gives him the information he needs.
If this sounds like pulp overkill, it didn't play that way. These scenes were appropriate to a time when America is having a previously unimaginable conversation about the ethics of torture. The argument "24" presented was unresolvable. It's hardly cold realpolitik to believe that torturing an informant would be worth preventing a nuclear explosion. But at the same time, "24" didn't pretend that those methods would not diminish us somehow as a nation. And it didn't shy away from the thuggish brutality that our fears could unleash. After the bomb is exploded in the desert, Americans go on a rampage against their Arab-American neighbors. A Middle Eastern agent working with Jack is beaten to death by a group of thugs, and they steal the computer chip he carries proving that the pretext for America bombing the Middle East is false. By the time Jack corners those men, they threaten to destroy the chip if he doesn't back off. You couldn't ask for a more succinct or more potent image of the consequences of American ignorance -- the fate of the republic waiting to be crushed under a yahoo's boot heel.
