I have a couple brief observations on Fox television show 24. I don't watch much TV -- the active list right now is 24, Battlestar Gallactica, and Rome. Laura's raved about 24 since its beginning. I finally relented and tuned in two years ago, figuring it has something to do with cultural attitudes toward politics and terrorism, and that might be interesting even if more likely appalling. That's about what it is, at least based on the two seasons plus four hours I've seen.

For folks even more out of touch than me, the set up is that each season consists of 24 episodes, which map to real time in one long day: one hour episode equals one hour real time, with 20 minutes or so knocked out of each hour for commercial breaks. Each day/season starts off with the first of a cascading series of terrorist attacks, and follows agent Jack Bauer and the CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) as they eventually thwart the attacks almost exactly 24 hours later. Aside from CTU, the other center of activity is the White House, where Presidents and conniving subordinates hysterically overreact, often making things worse, sometimes deliberately.

There are two basic things to understand about the world of 24. The first is that the one-day-real-time format forces gross distortions on the storyline. I don't know whether it is the cause or effect of having a super-packed action series, but it severely limits the potential for any kind of development. This may have less to do with the real time mapping than the fact that episodes are reliably packed into one hour chunks, often ending with a partial resolution as well as a dangling thread to be picked up next hour/episode. So not only have they reduced some pretty cataclysmic events to a single day, they've chopped them up into 24 single-hour packages. There is an upside to this in terms of action dynamics -- nothing gets stretched out dramatically, as always seems to happen with movies -- but it means they keep having to think of more things to promote more action. So their format itself forces a major distortion on the real world of terrorism: they have to vastly amplify the skills of terrorists in order to fill up 24 whole hours. In fact, terrorists almost by definition are incapable of implementing the sort of cascaded events that 24 depends on. Moreover, even if they could do it, there's no reason they would or should.

But even if we can somehow bracket the format-induced distortions, there is something very strange about the world of 24. This is shown first by the existence of CTU itself, by its methods, and by its relationship to the White House. 24 takes place in a world that sort of looks like ours, but is really quite different. The main difference is that terrorists in 24 are everywhere, in vast numbers, operating with a high degree of professional skill. In fact, many of them are strictly professional mercenaries. It's possible, for instance, for terrorists to hire a former USAF pilot to steal a stealth aircraft to shoot down the President's plane. It's possible to hire CTU double-agents to spy and sabotage. It's possible for terrorists to ally with US military contractors, and it's not always clear whether the shots are being called from the within the US government or by its alleged enemies. The curious thing about this overstatement of the world of terrorism is that it is a logical, albeit somewhat paranoid, projection of trends in existence today: the privatization of the "war on terror" and the lack of controls over covert operations. 24 is science fiction is that it shows us a world based on assumptions that are not true now, but it is also political critique in that it shows us how unchecked trends in our own world could turn out.

There are other aspects of the show that map roughly onto current concerns, although one should be careful and not expect much one way or another. The most conspicuous is CTU's fondness for torture, which Jack Bauer has quite a knack for, and everyone else gets no value out of whatsoever. It's unlikely that the Bush administration actually uses torture in anything like this way, but it's not exactly out of the question, and certainly not off the wish list. So it may be one of those projections from our current political malfeasance, or it may just be an artifact of the format: the dire need to move things along as fast as possible, which requires the equally fast discovery of clues. (Torture also adds to the violence quota, something the producers no doubt appreciate.)

Another trendline comes from the politicians, who repeatedly have to act rashly on ridiculously incomplete and often fallacious info -- to call this "intelligence" would be an act of torture not even Bauer could stomach -- and as such almost invariably make things worse. (I missed the first President Palmer, who presumably was more skillful, or maybe just luckier.) This again has more to do with the format's needs than political reality. Even Bush, who seems uniquely disposed to wrecklessness based on ignorance, would balk at some of the shit these guys have to swat back.

Still, even more profound than what happens on each of these season-days is the big slice of time that separates them. We barely know anything that happens then, which isn't such a big thing as far as the show is concerned. People do come and go, but nothing really changes, so every season starts from the same premise, the same fantasy world. But what's more important is that nobody ever learns anything from what happens. The first season I watched left me wondering what all those people would make of the day in the coming days, weeks, months. But of course they never made anything out of it, because they weren't on camera. And the next round took off so fast there was barely time to figure out who was who. After my second year, it mattered less to me, because I started realizing there was nothing real going on anyway.

Still, there's no reason why we can't learn something: terrorism is a rare event, the acts of people with limited power who feel deep grievances they can't find any better way to deal with; they can be marginalized by providing other means for such grievances, and by providing a more decent, more equitable model for the world. This follows from the fact that terrorism is most often a reaction against the violence and injustice of the state. But then if anyone did learn lessons like that 24 would lose its reason for existence. So no good educating the likes of us.

One thing I meant to write yesterday in the comment on Tim Dickenson's "War Over Peace" essay was that the war over peace -- that is, the assault against the very idea of peace -- cranked up almost immediately on Sept. 11, 2001. And this was done by liberals as well as conservatives, even by people I knew and generally considered dependable allies. At the time I remember cautioning people that they shouldn't be hard on pacifists because sooner or later we were going to need them. The worst of this is probably over, but still we read people attacking the antiwar movement in their frustration and disappointment over the vile fruits of war. Gary Kamiya's, in his Salon review of George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, writes:

Packer's support for the war is inseparable from his critique of the antiwar movement, and contemporary liberalism in general. He dismisses antiwar protests as naive: "The protesters saw themselves as defending Iraqis from the terrible fate that the United States was prepared to inflict on them. Why would Iraqis want war? The movement's assumptions were based on moral innocence -- on an ability to imagine the horror in which Iraqis lived, and a desire for all good things to go together, for total vindication. War is evil; therefore, the prevention of war must be good."

Packer has many blind spots here, but the most telling is that he thinks this is only about Iraq -- that both prowar and antiwar forces are performing some kind of equations based on Iraqi suffering caused vs. prevented by a US intervention. This ignores the obvious need to factor in Iraqi responses to US invasion and occupation -- you can argue that the anti-US resistance didn't have to make matters worse, but that's a bit like arguing that a rape victim would be better off relaxing and enjoying it. But even more central is the fact that this is an American war -- it's about us, how we view the world, and how we treat others. It shouldn't have taken a lot of introspection to recognize that we are unfit to judge matters of life and death in Iraq, or that trying to do so would compromise us further. Not that war judges -- it's far to indiscriminate for that. To characterize war as evil is to simplify unconscionably. War is far worse than evil -- it not only intends harm, it generates destruction beyond our intentions, it invites retribution. Those who opt for war play god, becoming the ultimate blasphemers. The truly naive are the ones who don't see this -- more invidious still are the ones who see it in general but think they can make it work. You don't have to be an inveterate America-hater to recognize that we're not good judges of what's best for others. Indeed, our cult of self-interest confounds our own domestic affairs so frequently that it's a shame to inflict it on anyone else.

Kamiya picks at Packer's position while trying to preserve his own illusions about what war's good for:

Packer is not completely wrong about the moral innocence, and political naiveté, of much of the antiwar movement. But his characterization of it is surprisingly reductive. In his haste to reject liberal realist arguments as "cautious" and "soft-headed," Packer never engages with the robust body of morally engaged liberals and leftists who opposed both Saddam and the war on powerful realist grounds. . . . A corollary is that he fails to grasp the importance of historical context. About Arab or Muslim grievances, in particular the U.S. support for despotic Arab regimes and the crucial Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he has almost nothing to say.

The truth is that many opponents of the war knew perfectly well how dreadful Saddam was, but opposed the war not out of moral innocence but because it was too risky for the United States and for the Iraqi people, because it was illegal, and because it was being waged by George W. Bush.

And also because war is evil. Yes, sometimes wars must be fought. The battle for the freedom of humankind against the Axis, the humanitarian interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia, the self-defensive strike against the Taliban -- those were all justified wars. But Kosovo is not Iraq, and Saddam Hussein was no Hitler. The pages of the newspapers for the last two and a half years prove it: War itself is a terrible thing, and making war is almost always a sign of total failure.

Actually, I chopped that last sentence off while he was ahead: war is failure. As for war sometimes being necessary, the further back you go in time the fewer peaceable options you find, and the stronger martial traditions become. But in the past fifty years no nation has built its economy on plunder, and few have engaged in any sort of war, even by proxy. (That this has gone unnoticed by most in the US says much about how exceptionally belligerent we have become.) Meanwhile, we've built a standard of living, unprecedented in human history, that depends on peace. (True for the US as well: we haven't suffered a war on our own turf for more than a century, and built our economic dominance during WWII when much of Europe and Asia were destroyed.) The fad idea that war can be humanitarian is only held by the overarmed, and only maintained by ignoring much evidence to the contrary.

Kamiya's examples aren't very convincing. The interventions in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan came after prolonged hostilities -- in the latter case, over 25 years of active external promotion of local warring factions, much sponsored by the US and USSR in their global tryst, whereas Yugoslavia bears similar scars somewhat more obliquely. And both nations limp along with crippled economies and continued strife, so much so that it's hard to see just where the benefits from being on the wrong end of US bombing runs are. As for Hitler and/or Saddam Hussein, the less said the better. The real question here isn't how evil the enemy is, but what can be done about it. The US was in a relatively good position at the start of WWII -- attacked by Japan, whose allies Germany and Italy were already engaged in a war to conquer most or all of Europe, we provided a unique combination of innocence and clout to end those wars in rather quick fashion. But even there the long-term psychic damage was considerable, with our triumph egging us into the long "cold war" that followed, that set the stage for further tragic wars (including Yugoslavia and Afghanistan). Conversely, in Iraq we have no such innocence, and not enough clout to quell even a small scale uprising. The result has been a war that compounds itself into further wars, with no real prospect of a resolution.

Most people have some trigger point where they resolve to fight back. For isolationist America in 1941 that point was tripped by Pearl Harbor. Anyone who calls that "the good war" has a pretty selective memory, but the conclusion of that war presented us with two optional paths. One was to build a fair-minded international framework of laws and institutions to prevent further wars from happening. The other was to use America's tremendous economic and political power to police an international Pax Americana. Both paths were approached, but with typical faith in self-interest, the Pax Americana approach prevailed. Post WWII struggles pitted capitalism vs. communism, imperialism vs. national liberation, and ultimately rich vs. poor. As this progressed, the US became hopelessly corrupt, ultimately succumbing to George W. Bush, the very face of corruption. Along the way, those international laws and institutions either fell under America's thumb or were rendered dysfunctional. The result is that we don't have what it takes to prevent the failure of war -- a result so dire that liberals like Packer, and sometimes Kamiya, have turned to the US war machine for hope. That they've become disenchanted is hardly surprising. They'd be monsters otherwise.

Maybe someone should have stood up to Saddam Hussein long before the US did. But to do so you first need to build a framework that can do so without making matters worse. The US alone cannot do so, and given its history since WWII the US has become so punch drunk it should not even try. The US cannot escape the self-interests of its rulers, and the world cannot forget the dirty deals the US made along the way. Anyone who seriously wants to grapple with the many wrongs around the world needs to hold his fire and rebuild first. And that system needs to develop positive results, to help achieve a fairer world, not just to punish wrongdoers. That will be hard. But the easy temptation to sick the US war machine on people you dislike doesn't work at all. The US may once have been a beacon of freedom and progress for the world, but increasingly we are seen as arrogant, self-righteous, malevolent agents of exploitation and dominance. Before we can right ourselves we must first stop wronging others. And that means we have to swear off war.

Tim Dickinson has a piece in Rolling Stone called "The War Over Peace," where he asks the question: "While vets march against the war and gold-star mothers mourn their sons killed in action, leftists rant about global colonialism. Is the anti-war movement too fractured to be effective?" He then spends the whole article dumping on the left for tainting the antiwar movement. In a highlight box, he declares, "Bashing Bush is hardly a blueprint for bringing the troops home quickly." Evidently we're not supposed to acknowledge that Bush was the one who put them there, and that Bush is the one who keeps them there. Dickinson quotes one antiwar veteran complaing that groups like ANSWER "hijacked" the antiwar protest, then quotes Todd Gitlin on how ANSWER spells "easy marginalization."

The truth is that the left got to the antiwar movement before anyone else. And the reason that happened is that the left had already made the connections to see how badly the war would turn out. ANSWER's edge was that they had already organized to oppose neoliberal globalization, so they were ready when the Iraq war leaped to the top of their priority list. Same thing can be said for the pacifists (not the same as the left), who again got the the right connections before the wheels fell off. One really should credit both groups for their prescience and at least consider what else they have to offer. But more often than not, even those who came around to oppose the war insist on reasserting their anti-left, anti-pacifist prejudices.

The net effect of this carping about the peace movement is to turn the tables, accepting some or all of war movement's premises. Dickinson illustrates this when he writes:

President Bush and his men certainly aren't worried about the opposition. "There is no real anti-war movement," Karl Rove reportedly declared before the September rally. "No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally." Rove knows that beyond its simplistic sloganeering about "Out now," the peace movement has failed to develop a pragmatic exit strategy -- one that mainstream Democrats can embrace without being blasted as part of Cut and Run. Opponents of the war have to do more than pillory the president's policy -- they must bring a serious alternative to the table.

The first faulty assumption here is the notion that only "serious politicians" count. If that were true Bush's people could afford to be blasé about public opinion on the war, but most evidence suggests that they suffer from periodic panic attacks, especially as polls show a majority of voters concluding that the whole war was a big, stupid mistake. Even if the war defenders score points attacking the antiwar movement as leftist and/or pacifist, the erosion of popular support for the war tracks the war itself, not the spin.

The second faulty assumption is the assertion that lack of "a pragmatic exit strategy" disqualifies the antiwar movement from serious consideration. This weasel wording seeks to obscure the real issue, which is that the war defenders have no exit strategy (pragmatic or otherwise). "Out Now" may not be an optimal solution, but it's a clear alternative to their "Out Never" -- perhaps the point of disagreement would be clearer if we just said "Out!" But there are two main problems with trying to articulate an alternate strategy: one is that we don't have the power to implement it; the other is that it divides the movement, since war opponents range from pacifists and isolationists to internationalists and flat-out anti-imperialist revolution symps. To do as Dickinson suggests and purge the antiwar movement of its non-mainstream elements doesn't cut our numbers so much as it deflects the focus away from where it should be: the war, and the people who led us into it and keep us there.

The unwillingness of the Democrats to oppose the war just shows how effective people like Rove have been at shaping the mainstream political dialogue in America. The only conclusion we can draw from that fact is that the political system in America, as practiced by both parties, is based not on popular will but on the ability of the partisan elites to manipulate elections. As such, one thing the antiwar movement does is to show up the undemocratic nature of the system. That doesn't guarantee change, but it focuses attention, and we know from experience that without attention change will never come.

We should thank God for the antiwar movement. Without it, we would be lost.

The Sept. 12 issue of The New Yorker dedicated its cover and "Talk of the Town" section to New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, but what I found most interesting was the letters section. The first two letters were in response to an earlier piece on small/dead government guru Grover Norquist:

While reading John Cassidy's Profile of Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, I had to wonder: What has Norquist's conservative activism got him? ("The Ringleader," August 1st.) The Cato Institute has called George W. Bush "the biggest spending president in decades." Observers have resorted to using the term "big-government conservatism" to describe what the Bush Administration and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate are doing now that they have sweeping control of the government. (And we are not by any means just alking about defense-related increases -- there is also new spending in areas like the Department of Education, and new health entitlements of the sort that conservatives used to call "liberal spending.") The only thing Norquist has got from the Administration is tax cuts -- well, sort of. Since President Bush is growing the government at the same time that he is cutting into its current and future revenues, we are really getting deferred tax hikes. By some reckonings, Bush's deficit will amount to an annual four-thousand-dollar bill for each American household -- a bill that we are being forced to put on the national credit card, to be paid later, with interest. Instead of trying to, in Norquist's words, take big government and "drown it in the bathtub," Bush has presided over an astounding flood of government. And Grover Norquist doesn't seem to realize that he's been had.
Peter Hamlin
Middlebury, Vt.

If Grover Norquist's vision of drowning the federal government in the bathtub ever succeeds, he will be left with the gated community that is the logical extension of his aspirations. Private schools, private roads, privatized Social Security, private enclaves -- all guarded by heavily armed vigilantes to keep out those who can't afford them. America will cease to be a great nation, because to be truly great a modern nation must grapple with the greater good -- a messy concept that too many conservatives seem willing to entertain only in a Biblican context. Quality education, meaningful health care, a cleaner environment, constructive world engagement, and cultural advancement require an active, responsible federal government and a committed civil service. All that costs money, which means that we have to pay taxes. Our focus should be on improving government, not eliminating it.
Michael Lahr
Arlington, Va.

These are good points, but they leave the basic question unanswered, which is why? I don't know about Norquist, but the key issue for some Republican ideologues isn't the size of government so much as their wish to break the poor, and for that matter the middle class, of the habit of looking toward government to help solve their problems. Starving the government beast is one way to do this, but more effective still is to render government incompetent. Bush may have failed the straightforward task of shrinking government, but he's done a bang-up job of making it incompetent -- or at least making it useless to all but his political backers. For Bush, this is a multi-pronged attack, but the main thrusts are: 1) put political agents in charge everywhere, especially to maximize the patronage potential of the government; 2) undermine the civil service system and the unions; 3) muck up all regulatory processes; 4) start a few wars to suck up resources; 5) pile extra security responsibilities on top of all other government functions; 6) cut taxes on the rich, driving the government ever deeper in debt; 7) push as much unfunded work as possible onto state and local governments. In this framework, greater debt does double duty: it provides discretionary rationale for rejecting spending now, and it makes future spending more prohibitive. The resulting government will, for most people, become so useless that they won't mind drowning it in a bathtub. It may not be as clean and principled an outcome as Norquist might prefer, but the differences are more tactical than strategic.

Still, there may well be a growing split between the principled ideological conservatives and the Bush politicos in that the latter are much more concerned with the preservation and extension of their power than any principles they might espouse. The latter discovered that controlling government's purse strings is a dandy way to further their political prospects by rewarding their core constituencies. The latter turn out to include plenty of companies and organizations who have no real beef with government spending as long as they get theirs first. But note that none of the above -- not the anti-government ideologues nor the spoils grabbers, and least of all the politicos -- have shown the least bit of support for the traditional reason behind a balanced budget (the need for long-term stability of the dollar) let alone any concern that a functional, competent government might be a useful thing to have.

This all comes into stark relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, where the disaster is of such magnitude that even a competent and sound federal government effort is going to be stretched beyond our imagination. Had ideologues like Norquist succeeded New Orleans would have to be written off as a lost cause, leaving a half million people stranded, a giant hole in the economy, and a massive blow to America's self-conception as any sort of power at all. Even Bush understands that's not a politically acceptable position, so the administration has struggled to regain its political footing the only way it knows -- by throwing money down. In the short-term that's no big deal -- adds to the debt, but that just burdens future governments. The real problem is that they now have to acknowledge that there's a part of the government that people expect to work. That's a tough one for those who believe in the government of the corrupt for the corrupt. They couldn't quite get away with failing to reconstruct anything in Iraq; do you think people won't notice the same failure here?

Ever since Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980, America has been in denial, and the Republicans have capitalized on that denial by feeding people fantasies. That worked because until lately it's never really been tested. First Reagan then Bush put together improbable coalitions of the rich and the foolish, and now that coalition is starting to show signs of fracture. Polls show that Bush is losing support among fringe groups like libertarians and racists. The more serious question is whether, or when, the rich will abandon him. The rich have more to lose than anyone -- do tax cuts matter so much that they're willing to countenance such thoroughgoing corruption and incompetence?

The third letter in The New Yorker is relevant at this point:

James Surowiecki, in his discussion of the latest surge of plans for aid to Africa, notes the backlash of economic objections (The Financial Page, July 25th). But what we need to acknowledge, if we are ever really going to help Africa, are the twin basic obstacles that the continent faces. The first is population pressure, which is already at labor-surplus levels, and will surely expand, as birth rates remain very high. The second is the weakness of aid plans in providing jobs for the swelling population, which is promised mainly immediate humanitarian relief. These conditions clearly call for family planning -- such as exists in India and, most intensively, in China. But this remedy is resisted so stubbornly by politically conservative fundamentalists in America that neither the aid planners nor the critics will touch it (a kind of "third rail of economic development"). The countries of Africa are still left to drown in overpopulation.

This is, of course, just one more example of where Bush's coalition of the rich and the ignorant leads to dysfunction -- where the insatiable demands of the anti-abortion diehards lead to greater impoverishment in the not-really-developing world, antipathy to America and its businesses, and worldwide strife. All for a few votes, to rig some tax cuts, to bankrupt the nation. In such lose-lose scenarios, how can the losers claim to be surprised?

The Aug. 11, 2005 issue of The New York Review of Books has an exceptional number of articles/reviews of political interest:

• Peter W. Galbraith: Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic. This is how it works when an anti-democrat like Bush tries to bring democracy to Iraq: you get a state dominated by Islamic clergy with close political and religious ties to "Axis of Evil" charter member Iran. These topics have been covered elsewhere, notably by Juan Cole, so there isn't much new here. One thing I don't understand about the western media in Iraq is that, if they can't get out of their hotels to cover Iraq, why don't they at least try to cover the supposedly secure Green Zone? They pick up stories planted by the U.S. spin squad -- the latest accuses Iran of smuggling shaped explosives (anti-tank weapons) to the Sunni-Islamist resistance, which makes absolutely no sense. But they're unable or unwilling to dig under the surface and figure out what the Americans are really up to. One of the biggest questions in Iraq these days is what the real relationship is between the U.S. and Iraq's so-called sovereign government. But since Bremer skipped out of town, the U.S. has taken a low political profile (although the U.S. military seems to still be unhampered in their program to wreck the place).

• John Gray: The World Is Round. A review of the Thomas Friedman book. Gray's big point is that Friedman is guilty of crass Marxian technological determinism. That sort of Marx-baiting seems unfair to Friedman, and Marx too for that matter. At this stage in history, it seems to be that if you can't put Marx in context, you're better off leaving well enough alone. Friedman has plenty of his own problems without trying to nail him to an ideological framework. For one thing, he's an idiot. Why anyone should think otherwise is beyond me.

• Christopher de Bellaigue: New Man in Iran. A profile of Iran's new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the elections that brought him to power.

• Tim Flannery: Endgame. A review of six books on environment issues, with a survey by Harvey Blatt (America's Environmental Report Card: Are We Making the Grade?) and a more pointedly anti-Bush tract by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy) the most prominent. The synopsis from the Blatt book is most useful and rather scary. This is probably the best piece in the issue.

• Brian Urquhart: The New American Century? A review of a book by Richard N. Haass, The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course. Haass is a veteran foreign policy bureaucrat with credentials of having worked under every President from Carter through the latest Bush. His assessment of what the U.S. could and should be doing differently makes for a devastating critique of what Bush is actually doing. Haass, of course, is still wrapped up in the idea that the U.S. is somehow indispensible to the proper function of the world -- a previous book was called The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War. Such ideas will continue to be seductive as long as they are flogged by the likes of Bush (and Bolton, whose subterranean U.N. Ambassador appointment should be considered in view of someone like Haass as an alternative option), but they actually carry a comparable dose of arrogance. There are two basic ideas about elites: one is that reasonable elites are the sane path to reform because they have the interest -- preserving their elite status -- and the power to effect truly necessary reform; the other is that elites aren't reasonable or flexible, and reforms can only be made by moving them out of the way. I sympathize with the former position, mostly because I dislike bloodshed and prefer rational to political argument. But there's little evidence that elites are more rational or less political than anyone else, and their tendency to view reform as a zero-sum loss ensures that most will lean conservative until they fall.

• Tim Judah: The Waiting Game in the Balkans. A report from another festering trouble spot. It's hard to keep up with them all.

• Max Rodenbeck: The Truth About Jihad. A review of five books on political Islam with or without terrorists, including one I've read and recommend: Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. I found this piece annoying at first, but eventually it began to pay off, especially in this quote (discounting the Marxian babble): "Modern jihadists have also borrowed the classic revolutionary idea that the most effective way to rouse the cowed masses is to goad their masters into acting rashly, so revealing the supposedly true, exploitative nature of their relationship. Terrorism forces 'bourgeois' society to strip off its mask, bare its fangs, and thus alert the proletariat -- or in this case the Muslim Ummah or nation -- to the real peril facing it." This is a key point, which we seem to be utterly incapable of grasping: the real purpose of Al-Qaeda's attacks on "the far enemy" is to provoke us into rash and stupid acts. The quote goes on with an amusing example: "In this light, it is interesting that extensive references to Menachem Begin's 1951 autobiography, The Revolt, were found among the computer files captured at an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul. As leader of the paramilitary Irgun group in the 1940s, the future Israeli prime minister advocated using terror to jump-start politics."

• Caroline Moorehead: Letter from Darfur. Another trouble spot I know little about, nor care much about, in large part because the U.S. has little to do with it, and therefore it has little to do with us. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are reflected in the U.S. -- in many ways they are reflections of domestic politics here, and they have significant repercussions here. The Israel conflict is another case where the U.S. is heavily involved and invested, and this takes a real toll here: in particular, our attachment to Israel reduces our ability to tell right from wrong, and that loss of judgment hurts us in every aspect of our political lives. Darfur, on the other hand, is just a remote tragedy (one of many in Africa). I wish we had nothing better to do than help out there, but responsibility begins at home, and we have our own problems to sort out first. Until we do, we wouldn't be much help anyway.

• Michael Kinsley/Mark Danner: The Memo, the Press, and the War: An Exchange. On the Downing Street memos, which Kinsley dismisses as non-news, and Danner regards as significant. They are non-news in the sense that many of us already believed that the Bush administration had lied coming and going to promote its war in Iraq, and that the so-called intelligence on Iraq had been systematically sifted, sorted, and selected to serve those narrow political aims, at considerable expense to the truth. What matters about the Downing Street memos is that they don't disprove this view -- they actually deepen the story. I don't know what to think about Kinsley: I think his "big babies" hypothesis has a lot of truth to it, but his career as a professional liberal talking head never generated much value -- I've thought on occasion that casting him as the voice of liberalism was a dirty trick. Haven't read much by him lately.

I'm a little too busy to do even a news rundown at this point, especially with the Israel news which mostly reminds me that I'm having trouble getting back to my big essay on that conflict. Also backlogged are a couple of movies and many books.

I've been meaning to write something about this past season of the TV show 24 ever since I got roped into watching it. It would be a gross exaggeration to pretend that this series represents anyone's current thinking on terrorism, much less that it's likely to have any real lasting cultural, much less political, impact. For one thing, it's ridiculous. And it's not ridiculous is any useful or even particularly amusing way, as in satire. It's ridiculous in the sense that its deep assumptions about its subject have no connection to the real world. This is, of course, true about much fiction, and for all I know it may also be true about most contemporary television programming, but that's beside the point. The ridiculous in popular art is rarely a problem in general, because most of the time we have enough grounding to sort out what is real and what is ridiculous. But when it comes to terrorism most people are at a disadvantage, because what they believe to be the reality of terrorism is as ridiculous as 24.

The show is based on the schema that a team of terrorists can execute a complete series of terror plots, normally building to a climax, over a 24-hour period, and that a team of counterrorists can respond to those events quickly enough to thwart at least the climax event. This schema is in many ways a side-effect of a core concept, which is that the action takes place in real time (with dead spots conveniently spaced for commercials, of course). Real time is an intimation of reality, but by forcing everything to fit in real time everything reduces to action, suspense, momentum. The model isn't derived from literature, where writers usually strive to tie their threads together to attain a coherent story; rather, 24 is a mere video game, where the good guy (Jack Bauer) chases the bad guy (Marwan Habib) through a fast-paced gauntlet, which many side-characters suddenly smashing and vanishing on the sidelines while the rest look completely dumbfounded. In the end the viewer is dumbfounded as well, but the producers are hoping that the sense of exhaustion will predominate. 24 hours is, after all, a long goddam day.

The most obvious problem with all of this is that terrorists never work that way. Terror events occur all of a sudden, then they're done. To suggest the menace of scale, terrorists try to coordinate multiple events, but serializing them takes risks and requires resources often beyond their abilities. 24 tries to get beyond this limit by allocating stupendous resources to the terrorists -- way beyond anything that has ever been hinted at in an alien environment such as the U.S. -- and even there the serialization is their undoing. (So-called terrorists in Iraq can afford to attack frequently because they operate on their own home turf.) But the only way 24 can fill up 24 hours of terror is by vastly inflating the terrorists' resources while at the same time not giving them enough brains to manage their risks.

On the other hand, in order to keep the game going the counterterrorists also have to be allocated ridiculously superior powers -- the list is too long to get into, but my favorite is the ability to get to or from any point in greater Los Angeles in 20 minutes tops. The biggest timesaver is no doubt CTU's ability to decrypt entire hard disks in seconds then instanly identify the one critical clue that keeps them in the game. Even more remarkable is how Jack Bauer is able to get viable information in seconds from suspects he has just shot. But lest these super powers tip the odds excessively in favor of the counterterrorists they also have some exceptional handicaps: in particular, the whole management structure from three presidents down to CTU management are vain, credulous, scheming morons. (The whole Chinese consulate thread is Exhibit A here.)

Like I said, the problem with all this isn't just that it's ridiculous. The problem is that these ridiculous things reflect misconceptions that most of us have about terrorism, counterterrorism and the government. We assume, for instance, that terrorists are much more numerous, powerful, well funded, deeply ensconced, and above all nihilistic than they are. We assume that the counterterrorists' tactics, especially torture but also pervasive surveillance and massive databases, are effective means of fighting terror. But we also assume that noble public servants like Jack Bauer are kept from doing their jobs by incompetent and perfidious politicians and bureaucrats and interfering do-gooders like the "Amnesty Global" lawyer who springs one suspect. The politicians are so fickle that Bauer, after saving his country, has to fake his own death and go underground in order to avoid extradition to China.

Other threads resonate less because they don't register with our cultivated paranoias. Foremost among these is the fact that nearly all of Marwan's schemes involved hijacking dubious technology that the government bought and paid for. Wouldn't the threat of terrorism be much reduced if we didn't have those nuclear plants subject to cyber attack? Or those nuclear bombs circulating through rural Iowa? And what about the thread of the big defense contractor that employed Marwan and covered up for him? Doesn't that say something about our greed-is-good economic ideology? There's also an interesting lesson here on management philosophy: time and again we see managers, both politicians and bureaucrats, whose main qualification for the job seems to be that they can make firm decisions based on a near-absolute lack of valid information. We might also take a look at the effects of nepotism and fucking around on the job here since the writers bothered to put so much of it into the show: is this a case of cultivating clan loyalties, or is it just that everyone here is so estranged from normal life that the only people they can relate to are each other?

The problem with heavy questions is that they take time to sort out. More often than not, I found myself wondering how characters would come to understand what had happened on this fateful day over the following weeks and months. That we'll never know because nobody involved with 24 cares about understanding -- all they crave is action. And in 24 that's all they ever get.

My wife talked me into watching the TV show 24 this year. She's into shows like that, while I almost never watch TV. I figured a fantasy show about terrorism might be worth a comment or two, but I've been holding out to see how the plot twisted. However, after last night's show, with its climactic and rather disastrous kidnap at a Chinese consulate, I had two quick thoughts:

1. The plot turn seems to be toward a superpower confrontation, but in real life don't Americans kill Chinese diplomats all the time and get away with it. What makes this any different?

2. Why didn't this President Palmer guy ask to interview the terror suspect at the Chinese consulate, with the Chinese present, instead of insisting that the Chinese turn him over? That would have been a reasonable request given the circumstances, and would have been a positive trust-building step with China, especially given that the current theory was that the suspect wasn't working for China. The obvious reason was that the U.S. wanted to torture the suspect, but the kidnapping also goes to show that in times of crisis the U.S. goes it alone.

At the end of the episode, superman Jack Bauer shows us he can do math, letting one die to possibly save many, but the stress is finally getting to him. Or perhaps the doubt, as this seems to be his first big mistake? Or maybe he's just so clever, setting the foundation for reconciling with his girlfriend after he's killed her husband right in front of her?