The New Yorker has an interesting article on the politics of the ‘24’ series creator, as well as on some of the issues surrounding ‘24’.
What is truly interesting about ‘24’ is how it hides its liberal agenda under the presence of Jack Bauer. I’ve seen the show every week since the beginning of the series and can personally attest to how the show brandishes its “conservatism” by focusing on Bauer’s heroics. Everyone is so caught up in Bauer’s no-nonsense approach, that they forget to notice what is going on in the background.
The presidency is portrayed as incompetent and indecisive; CTU is a complete organizational mess where personnel violate security protocols to get their jobs done; personal problems abound, getting in the way of the successful execution of any tasks. And there is a subtle but oh-so-present “America-as-cause-and-enabler” of all these problems woven into the fabric of the show.
Take, for example, this season.
1) The entire American national security apparatus has somehow been reduced to depending on one superhero, Jack Bauer.
2) Intelligence is completely incompetent, falsely identifying one Muslim as the true terrorist when it was actually another Muslim.
3) Jack Bauer sides with the “good” Muslim to go after the “bad” Muslim with the suitcase nukes.
4) The “good” Muslim is actually a vicious terrorist with 20 years of murders and bombings to his credit. He is here in the States to “negotiate” for peace in the midst of America experiencing a wave of suicide bombing in its major cities. It is never explained how his influence would have any impact on rogue splinter cells.
5) Played by Alexander Siddiq, the “good” Muslim is portrayed as a slim, well-dressed “european-looking” type wrestling with his faith, just like in Greengrass’s “United 93’.
6) So important is this “good” Muslim to tracking down the terrorists, that Jack Bauer kills one of his own agents to prevent the agent from executing him. The agent was a soldier in Desert Storm whose special forces unit was ambushed by the “good” Muslim’s goons. His team was tortured and killed so Jack Bauer had to kill him to prevent the agent from executing the “good” Muslim.
7) To no avail, the suitcase nuke goes off in Valencia and it kills 12,000 people…
9) Meanwhile, Jack Bauer discovers that the nuclear weapon set off in Valencia was assigned to be decommissioned by his father’s company, run by both Bauer’s dad and Bauer’s brother. After torturing his own brother, Bauer discovers that the brother was trying to hide the company’s involvement in this mess, presumably because the company did not properly vet one its contractors, an Irish weapons dealer named McCarthy whose job it is to find people to reprogram the nuclear triggers for the four remaining devices. We are led to believe that the brother is a rogue and incompetent element, but both the brother and the father are involved in a conspiracy against the government. Bauer’s father then has the brother killed to prevent him from revealing anything more at CTU, since the brother had Bauer sent to China to get rid of him and was instrumental in the murder of other CTU agents in the previous season.
10) There is a subplot involving the president’s sister, who is a civil rights lawyer representing a CAIR-like organization and is romantically involved with the Somali Muslim who heads the organization. She is arrested for deleting personnel files held by the organization in defiance of the DHS requirements and her actions drag the Somali into a detention camp. The Somali discovers a plot among the inmates and offers to spy on them for DHS, but, it turns out, that they were “spectators” accessing a pro-terror website, not conspirators. This occurs while listening to the grating lectures about civil liberties from the civil rights lawyer/sister of the president.
11) As an aside, when the prospect of using nuclear weapons against “the usual suspects” comes up, the argument is given by an Admiral portrayed by an actor who is a dead-ringer for James Baker.
12) As another aside, one of the analysts at CTU is a “Republican” Muslim whose work is impacted by security protocols attached to all Muslim workers in the government. The head of the department allows the Muslim to use the head’s own user accout so her work can be expedited (in computer security work, this is an absolute no-no.)
There’s the season so far. The greatest threat that American cities face (nuclear terrorism) is reduced to a conspiracy between “extremist” elements on all sides fighting against the liberal elements who want to preserve our way of life by engineering an American suicide pact.
It would actually be a good idea to watch next Monday’s episode to see how this liberal train-wreck pans out.
Congratulations: one of your readers is the second person to notice the leftist subtext of the series “24.”
Here is my post, written on the evening the first two-hour episode in the new series aired. The title may offend. I intend to update it when I get a chance with the following observations:
One of the central heroes asserted in the last episode that we are alienating the community upon which we depend to fight terrorism. I predict that in the next episode we may see Jack help construct a mosque as mea culpa. Also, some of the most Serious Villains are … American businessmen. Jack nearly kills his brother, who apparently richly deserved it. When he fails to complete the job, Pater does it for him, but for less noble reasons!! Fratricide, patricide—it’s all in a day’s work for your typical, dysfunctional, American family, as Hollywood sees it.
These are some of the updates planned for the post I sent along.