Laura watches a lot of TV. I listen to a lot of music. The doors between our spaces are usually closed to keep those two worlds at bay, but on rare occasions I wander into her space. She had so raved about the first three seasons of 24 that I started watching it with "Day 4": the one with Muslim terrorist Habib Marwan, who causes a nuclear power plant to meltdown, shoots down Air Force 1 killing the president and bringing a weak and wobbly Charles Logan to power, and launches a nuclear-armed cruise missle which fails to detonate over Los Angeles. I figured it might tell me something about the terror-deranged mind of America, but it turned out to be too absurdly sensationist for analysis. The main point I drew from the series was that it posited a future state of America where both terrorism and counterterrorism had been scaled up to industrial levels: in other words, a dystopian warning against allowing such activities to happen.

You see, "Day 4" starts with some bus bombings that are the sort of things real terrorists could do given reasonable levels of access and munitions and dedication -- none of which actually exists in anything like critical quantities in the U.S. (Cf. the ineptness of the Times Square Car Bomb or the Underpants Bomber, or the small scale of the Fort Hood shootings.) Then they veer off into fantasy, but the key thing to realize is that every major threat in 24 is made possible by the U.S. military-industrial-security complex and/or its kin elsewhere -- especially 24's favorite target, Russia. Terrorists may love the idea of shooting down Air Force 1, but in 24 it's accomplished by an American mercenary who manages to take a USAF fighter out for a "test flight." This only gets more explicit over the next few series, especially in season 7 where Jonas Hodges (Jon Voight) and his industrial partners have thoroughly infiltrated the government and are actively orchestrating something more like guerrilla warfare than mere terrorism.

Season/Day 8 ended last night in a rather pathetic whimper, but at least the season was relatively free of the familial schmaltz and bureaucratic in-fighting that had routinely substituted for ideas (and action) in the past. That left us with more action, and the action was often impressive -- especially Jack Bauer's pickup of Meredith Reed in a crowd of Russian agents, even more so Bauer's assault on Charles Logan's motorcade, but one can also cite a few notable murders, as when Dana Walsh disposed of Bill Prady (the Arkansas parole officer) and more importantly the season's most annoying subplot, or when Renee Walker ended her affair with Vladimir Laitanan.

However, they missed a few critical turns, mostly because the writers hate Jack Bauer and have been trying to dehumanize him -- death being proscribed by the business plan -- at least since his fake death in Season 4. President Dipshit (as she's been known in these parts ever since she pompously plotted her "humanitarian war" in Africa in Season 7) had a plot-turning personal meeting with Bauer where she could have said: Logan's come to me to mediate with the Russians to keep them tied up in the peace deal, but Logan insists that I lock you down; we know the Russians are guilty in this, and I don't trust Logan for a moment, but I need to keep this quiet until the peace deal is signed, otherwise we're giving in to subversion and terrorism; so what I need is for you, Jack Bauer, to go rogue and investigate this and report back only to me. They might have worked out some details for faking the lock down, turning Bauer loose, and giving him limited support away from Jason Pillar's purview, and she might have gone further and gave him one of those immunity agreements they pass out like candy -- in effect, she could have given him a legit license to kill, justifying it because she couldn't have known who else could be trusted. Instead, she placed her fate in Logan's hands, and we then saw Logan tighten the screws one by one until she broke. But why makes no sense: Logan seems to be driven by nothing more than vanity, and Pillar, who at first looms like the agent of a vast conspiracy fronted by Logan -- don't forget, he's done that before -- ultimately appears as nothing more than an ass-kisser. Bringing in Suvarov raises the stakes, but strains credulity: why is Russia so dead set on scuttling a peace deal ostensibly between the U.S. and I.R.K., when the real Russia is perfectly satisfied to feign neutrality in such matters (e.g., U.S./Iran)? And how (let alone why) was Suvarov the one who decided to kill Renee Walker, when we saw Pavel Tokarev propose the killing to a rather indifferent Mikhail Novakovich?

While I'm relieved that Bauer didn't assassinate Suvarov, which would have created an international embarrassment if not a cassus belli for Armageddon, I'm disappointed that he backed off from a much more interesting opportunity: he could have shot Logan in Suvarov's presence. Doing so would have punished the guilty party -- Bauer had direct evidence that Logan had been in communication with Tokarev, whereas he only had Logan's word that Suvarov was responsible. And it would have made an indelible impression on Suvarov, underscoring both that he was vulnerable to Bauer and had been reprieved -- as Bauer likes to say, "if I'd wanted you dead you'd be dead already." Moreover, it would have saved us Logan's murder of Pillar and botched suicide attempt -- how'd he manage that? -- not to mention Chloe O'Brien shooting Bauer and all that.

The whole Peace Agreement is splattered with incredulity: as to the size and importance of the deal, as to its international participation (especially the critical role of Russia). And what does it mean when Dipshit backs out of the deal? Bauer's line that you can't have peace based on lies is ass backwards: you start with peace, then build trust and openness on top of it. Dipshit's moral nadir was the moment she used nuclear blackmail on I.R.K.'s Dalia Hassan to force her to sign the treaty: given that such a threat could endlessly be reiterated, this shows you what kind of "partner for peace" Dipshit, and the U.S., really is. If the Peace Agreement was fundamentally just, the only step forward would have been to sign it, even if that was for some or all parties just a matter of appearances.

Jack Bauer has had a powerful death wish for the last few years, so powerful in the last few hours that only the prospects of a movie deal kept him breathing. He dives into one suicide mission after another, gets stabbed -- twice if memory serves -- and shot by Chloe O'Brien as a way of wheedling out of getting shot by someone serious (or, more likely, him shooting a bunch of U.S. agents). Incapacitating Bauer for the last half-hour took all the remaining air out of the show. That left the ending to President Dipshit, whose warped sense of morality left her with only one way to take responsibility -- quit and go to jail with her estranged daughter -- an act so selfish that she insisted that Bauer submit to punishment as well. Again, she could have used to moment to make amends to Bauer by pardoning him, and Bauer was hardly the only one she owed something to -- debts that she would never be able to pay once she was locked away in jail. She talked a lot about peace, but didn't practice it or believe in it. She was all pompous poise, and too dimwitted to see anyone or anything around her.

The first few series I came to hate the real time format. In real life things happen more slowly, and it takes time to sort out reactions and consequences. But by constraining the story to the present, they never even ventured suggestions as to where such terror and corruption came from, or what anyone might have learned from the events. What we got instead was a series of slasher videos wrapped up in a blanket of cynical but otherwise confused politics. It was horrible, and sometimes fun, the latter only because it was sheer fantasy.

Trolling through Andrew Sullivan's blog today -- something I don't do all that often -- and found a few items of some interest:

• Blaming America First: First up to attack Obama for getting insulted by Netanyahu are Senators McCain and Lieberman. After the jump, Eric Cantor chimes in, calling the suggestion that Israel should stop its illegal settlement building "beyond irresponsible."
• Chart of the Day: Top (black) line is national health expenditures as percentage of GDP, from 5.2% in 1960 to 17.7% today. Peeling off are projections had previous health care reform plans been passed -- one each for Nixon, Carter, and Clinton. Also shown is the OECD median, which tracks the slope of the reform plots. One thing that's worth noting is that the growth rate was slower for terms of presidents who tried (and failed) to implement reforms, and much faster under presidents (Reagan and the Bushes) who made no effort at all.
• From the Annals of Chutzpah: Quotes Karl Rove on Biden-Netanyahu and other foreign policy matters (he cites Honduras), where he depicts Obama as: "a cowboy president try[ing] to act in an extra-constitutional way to violate a fundamental principle in the Constitution, all without having done their homework in advance."
• Why Beijing and Washington Don't See Eye to Eye on Security: Quotes Evan A Feigenbaum: Why Is U.S.-China Strategic Coordination So Hard?, specifically on how China doesn't feel threatened by situations that scare us silly -- specifically mentioned: Iran, Pakistan, North Korea. I'll add two more reasons: one is that China is less judgmental (and therefore less hypocritical) of other countries; another is that China doesn't have soldiers scattered all over the world. In both respects, the US would be better off learning to chill out, and letting broadly representative international organizations like the WTO and the World Court take over the task of scolding countries that stray from norms. On the other hand, China can get awfully sensitive where its borders are concerned, as we've seen recently in their flap over the Dalai Lama, or with Taiwan.
• The Sanctions Debate: Quotes Lara Friedman: Getting over the sanctions delusion, on why US sanctions hardly ever work -- they punish people without power for the supposed sins of those who have power. Needless to say, further sanctions against Iran fit that same pattern. On the other hand, this argument doesn't mean that sanctions aren't appropriate in cases where they appear to support, and are in turn welcomed and supported by, masses who are oppressed by those in power. South Africa is the classic case where sanctions worked. These arguments don't disqualify Israel as another case. On the other hand, I suspect that the turning point won't be implementing sanctions; it should be sufficient just to tilt the US and Europe against propping up Israel's colonial occupation. The US was very late on South Africa, and never officially implemented any sort of sanctions, but the Afrikaner elites moved quickly once the wind changed. As for Iran, sanctions seem to be a stall tactic for lack of any willingness to actually try to bridge differences.
• Goldblog Splutters: Starts with a series of maps on Palestinian land loss: the first showing actual land ownership split between Palestinians and Jews in 1946; the second the UN Partition Plan split; the third the armistice lines from 1949-67; the fourth only the parts with more/less limited Palestinian Authority are shown. The maps don't quite track the same thing, but the sense of loss is matched in reality. The actual population split in 1946 was about 32% Jewish, but most Jews lived in cities, and the major Zionist effort to purchase lands and establish kibbutzim had run into a wall at about 7% of the total land in Mandatory Palestine. Presumably there are still some splotches of Palestinian-owned land in Israel, especially in the West Galilee which saw relatively few expulsions during the 1948-49 war. The PA has also picked up some former settlement areas in Gaza since 2000. On the other hand, Palestinian control of "Palestinian land" in 2000 was weak under the PA and significantly weakened since 2000 as Sharon and his followers worked to undermine the Oslo accords and with them any vestige of Palestinian sovereignty. Sullivan picked up these maps from Juan Cole and used them in an earlier post, which Jeffrey Goldberg attacked.
• The Much-Delayed Response to Goldblog: An earlier rebuttal of an earlier Jeffrey Goldberg attack.

More pieces here and there on Israel, including a link to a relatively sane one by Goldberg arguing that Obama's plan is to realign Israel's government to produce a more moderate Kadima-Likud coalition instead of the current ultraright Likud-Beiteinu-Shas alignment -- my guess is that the government would fail first, and that Netanyahu is unwilling to join any coalition that would give Obama the satisfaction of even a lame solution. Also lots of pieces on the Vatican's sex crime cover-ups.

One of my favorite websites, Paul Woodward's War in Context, has a new look and feel, and I don't like it. In particular, it shares one idiosyncrasy with the recent facelift to Mondo Weiss which I hated so much I pretty much stopped reading the website: only the two (or in War in Context's case three) most recent posts are provided complete. After that, the next dozen or so are provided in short synopses in two columns, each requiring a separate click to get to. The two sites have other similarities. This makes me think they're built with the same toolkit. War in Context identifies its toolkit as "Thesis WordPress Theme" and provides a link to the source. I can't make much sense out of their website, but it looks like some sort of proprietary software scheme, which is one more reason to be annoyed. The hype for the software makes some utilitarian claims, but the effect is to throw up more obstacles between the content and the reader. Lots of websites use obfuscation to cover up a lack of content, which is irritating but can easily be disposed of. What's sad is when such things happen to sites that do have something to say.

I haven't had much to say about Israel lately. Part of this is "same old, same old": the Goldstone report merely confirmed the obvious about Israel's criminal siege of Gaza; the Obama focus on curtailing settlements has been inept and, I think, misses the point; on the other hand, Netanyahu's far right regime continues to make enemies and revulse friends, with Turkey an interesting example; and the Iran focus continues to be a distraction, which is exactly the way Netanyahu wanted to play Obama. But another part is that I've pretty much given up on what used to be my best source for intelligence on Israel, Mondoweiss, and that I blame on a website redesign that limits posts to 80-100 words after which you have to click to read further. The theory there most likely has to do with forcing page hits up, but in my case it's having the opposite effect.

One reason I mention this is that Salon has a redesign to make it look more like, well, a bunch of websites I don't recall because I never look at them -- Daily Beast, Huffington Post, stuff like that. The visual clutter on their home page is worse than the norm, but the thing that's most annoying is that they've propagated the design to their blogs. I've lately been keeping How the World Works, War Room, and Glenn Greenwald open in tabs, but their usefulness is declining: not only are the posts getting chopped up to force extra clicks, the number of active posts is being cut back (except for Greenwald).

I suppose advertising has something to do with this, but I don't see a lot of advertising on either site, and increasingly advertising only counts for something if you actually click it. But as likely as not the root cause is bureaucratic self-deception. The easy way to prove that a given site or feature is popular is hit counts, so they start to turn into a fetish. And like most arbitrary measures, if you can't beat 'em, scam 'em. Something like this happened at MSN to drive the redesign of Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide, breaking up a column that we normally run on one page at robertchristgau.com into more than a dozen separate clicks. (User guide hint: look for the Next links.) I have no idea whether that redesign resulted in more page hits, let alone whether more page hits were a good thing for the publisher. It certainly meant more work for everyone else.

The other driving force is likely to be the designer mafia, who need frequent redesigns for career practice. Sometimes I think I should put more effort into design than I do, but in the end I'd rather put the work into content. The design of robertchristgau.com hasn't changed since the prototype I threw together in an hour or two back in September 2001. It certainly could be improved, but I've never had a complaint from Christgau, who appreciates that it leaves the focus clearly on his writing, and doesn't feel compelled to change for change's sake. Don't recall when I put my current design in -- the blog dates back to Jan. 2005, at which point I adapted a somewhat older design that I had started using (and still haven't propagated throughout the whole website). In principle, I'm not opposed to putting some effort into website design. I just think it should enhance the content -- not bury it, nor substitute for it, which has been happening way too often.

Alex Koppelman: Liberal blogs vs. the Obama administration. Title isn't real accurate here: it's more like the Obama administration vs. the liberal blogs. I suppose it's natural that the Democratic Party establishment would have looked at liberal (maybe even leftist) blogs during the Bush era as useful propaganda instruments, and that now that the Democrats are in power they still do -- and so they'd like to impose a little partisan discipline, like the Republicans did so effectively (and are still doing in a very disciplined way today, albeit with diminishing credibility). Part of the problem is that liberals, leftists, and free thinkers in general, tend to be contrary -- indeed have become accustomed to as much given the rightward political drift of the last 30-60 years -- but also it's often hard to reconcile the principles that got us here with the triangulations of the Obama administration. I could give you a dozen quick examples that bug me -- e.g., the new defense budget is significantly up (contrary to what Republicans are saying) and it's up specifically in areas which make the US military more likely to engage in operations around the globe, as opposed to pure waste like the F-22 program. On the other hand, there is usually some nuance to Obama's moves, often something that's merely suggested but not publicly committed to -- e.g., Obama on Israel is thus far terrible, but he's put some serious and practical people on the case, rather than surrendering the issue to someone like Dennis Ross (let alone Elliott Abrams).

But Republicans have always had an advantage with their bloggers and propagandists: they've kept them on the payroll. A big part of what this piece cites also has to do with money:

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent reported that some big liberal bloggers -- like FiredogLake's Jane Hamsher, DailyKos' Markos Moulitsas, Crooks and Liars' John Amato and AMERICAblog's John Aravosis -- are upset that progressive organizations expect free publicity, but won't spend ad dollars on the blogs. Their complaint (and it's a valid one) is that this stance isn't exactly forward-looking: The bloggers need the ad money in order to keep at it, and without that cash, there'll be nowhere for liberal groups like MoveOn.org to get the pro bono PR they're after.

Obviously, their problem isn't my problem, but the problem is a general one. I haven't tried to make a living off this blog, but some good people do, and their efforts need to be supported somehow. Philip Weiss makes a big point of this, and he proved to be the single most useful resource anywhere on the recent Gaza atrocity. The demise of Cursor.org has made it much more difficult to find out what's going on. I sure wish Billmon could afford to quit his day job and return to the Whiskey Bar full time. Of course, the problem is structural: the right can always depend on special interest groups because they see nothing wrong with doing their bidding. The left tries to balance off against established power, to check the excesses of special interests, and to promote the general welfare. While in theory virtually everyone stands to benefit from the left's efforts, in practice few people feel enough of a stake to finance those efforts, and many who wish they could just don't have the cash -- or given the extent to which established organizations dominate political life, see the left as a good, practical investment.

The plight of the liberal/left blogs is an example of a more general trend. A bigger example is the ongoing collapse of the newspaper industry. We live in this bizarre system where we've come to expect unbiased information about the world to be paid for by advertising -- the most blatant form of bias ever -- and responsibly managed by rich establishment corporations. That it has ever worked at all is a tribute to the fact that even the rich and powerful needed accurate information, but the mismatch between what people want from a newspaper and what sponsors are willing to pay for has gnawed away at the moral foundation of newspapers practically forever. When they die now it becomes obvious that we're not losing much -- mostly because we've gradually lost it.

There is an obvious way out of this, which is to provide public support for organizations to provide free information to the public. We're a long ways from the consensus to make this happen: such a system would have to be policy-neutral, which is contrary to every established interest, including whatever political part is in power at the moment; it would hasten the destruction of existing media, at least those based on advertising business models; it would alter the balance of power, e.g. between consumers and vendors. But this is the way technology is trending, and free information groups are sprouting up all over -- inadequately funded, to be sure, but the entry costs are so low that anyone can get started for little more than the willingness to put some time into it. Public funding would add to this trend, providing better support and tools and bandwidth, letting people to graduate from part-time to full-time, from amateur to professional status.

Laura Miller: Goodbye, "Galactica" I hardly watch any TV these days, but got roped into this somewhere in the second or third season, and found it entrancing enough I went back to the DVDs for the necessary refresher course. I did watch a lot of TV when I was a teenager -- sheesh, it's not like we knew any better where I came from -- so I do have some vague recollection of the original TV series, with Lorne Greene way out of his depth and a lot of badly modelled war sequences. Alien bashing was happy hunting in the early stretches here, too, but gradually it faded into a small part of everyday life. I never paid much attention to the mythopoetic overtones -- all the prophecies and shared dream sequences and the like, which were clearly artifices of fiction meant to provide some plot that everyday life lacks. That the finale managed to tie all those loose strings up into a nice, neat ball was less a matter of truth or luck than the writers' will to keep their story straight -- as they put it in Slumdog Millionaire, it was written.

Miller laments this neatness, but I actually found it gratifying, and the whole finale -- indeed, the whole final season -- immensely satisfying. So what if in the end you wind up with another crackpot human creation story. That, of course, is also one of the charms of the The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe -- I loved the movie there, especially for the immense wonder of the graphic construction of the earth. Both cases amount to a form of creationism even further removed from the Bible than Darwin. It's fiction, but at least it's true to itself -- unlike, I dare say, the Bible -- and it's clean and clear enough you can play with the model. Whereas most TV puts your brain out to pasture, this show has been a constant treat to the cerebellum. I doubt that this is really the end of it, but it's nice to see how neatly a piece of fiction can be wrapped up. Verity to real life isn't necessarily a good thing.

Laura Miller: Finale wrap-up: "Big Love" Also watched this series, billed as "America's favorite polygamist drama," as if there was another one. This seemed like the season where they finally jumped the shark, but in the end they scrambled to give Bill Hendrickson at least one episode where some of the things he plotted to do worked out -- a little taste of "Father Knows Best," even though he's really pretty far out on the limb. The thing that really shifted this year was that Barb fell into a deep vat of religious nonsense: obsessing over the future size of the family, with attendant worries about the other wives' fertility; freaking out over her excommunication from the LDS church. She had previously seem to hold reservations not just about the fundamentalist compound but the whole concept, but this year she emerged as the true believer -- and belief you don't share and can't really conceive of quickly turns annoying and creepy. The motivations of the other two (or for that matter three) wives were relatively practical and tangible. Bill, too, seems to be moving off the deep end. His whole fixation on an ultimately fraudulent letter that he saw as legitimizing his polygamy helped to transform him from money-grubbing businessman to ideologist proclaiming his own prophethood. I'm not sure that the former wasn't overdue some come-uppance, but the latter is very likely to bring his downfall, and I can't expect much sympathy when it does.

I figured the original premise of the series was raising the question whether polygamy could be incorporated into an otherwise normal, respectable even, American lifestyle. In that scenario, Juniper Creek was history -- something the Hendricksons set out to overcome. Three years in, however, Juniper Creek has won out, mostly for its prurient entertainment value, turning this more and more into a freak show, not to mention a sit-com. That says nothing much about America, but speaks volumes about show biz.

As I started to lose interest midway through the season, I started speculating on an alternate universe version of the same show. Let's start with the most famous polygamist in the world today: Osama bin Laden. He's tended to marry relatively educated, sophisticated wives, which puts him closer to the Hendricksons than to Juniper Creek -- admittedly, his business downturn has done the opposite, but it may just be a matter of time before Bill Hendrickson is on the lam from the law. Both combine piety, arrogance, and a reckless disregard for the law. Even while the bin Laden version of Big Love remains a faraway concept, it may be amusing to identify the analogies.

Also watching 24, which is currently about three-fourths of the day done. As you know, 24 takes place in an alternate universe, vaguely resembling what the United States would be like if terrorism became a common practice in the corporate world, like bribery and cover-ups. In such a world, it's not surprising that politics should be so routinely infiltrated -- that politicians should be so perversely motivated is another matter altogether. (There seems to be a right-left tradeoff here: the right gets to portray politicians as fools, and the left gets to root evil in the shadowy corporate world.) The show obsesses over torture because the world has been synthetically deranged to form test cases for the efficacy of torture. (Propagandistic as it is, it's hard to find cases where torture actually works except when Jack Bauer is pushing the buttons.)

Half of this season was stuck in a rut trying to figure out why anyone on any side gave a shit about Africa -- except maybe the lady president as humanitarian warmonger, a species of stupidity that is almost plausible on this show. The Africans managed to impress with their technical expertise, an effect somewhat spoiled by a midday shift in villains that at least fits with the degree of government intrusion. Still, Starkwood's motivations remain murky -- patriotism is, as everyone knows, the last refuge of scoundrels -- but they may be a fair measure of the distance between 24 and reality.

One thing you can always count on with 24 is that you can hire mercenaries to kill everyone from presidents down, and they can be granted immunity from prosecution to set up the next hour of the show. I keep wondering what the background is: why are there so many jaded mercenaries, and what happened to this country to produce them? Surely something more profound than the political kickbacks from Halliburton and Blackwater. Of course, answers to such questions are beyond the attention span of the show's format. They recklessly push action to a dangerous extent, all to frequently blowing up their story line along with a gaggle of expendable actors. I got hooked on the show not for what it tells me about ourselves but for the sheer perversity of its internal logic.

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?