Two offhand words in an overdue and deeply informed critique of one of our most influential television shows explain the appeal of the hawkish approach to the war on terror, an appeal that has superficially waned, for the moment. The words also reveal something about the populist conservative unconscious. The words are “wish fulfillment” and the article, by Jane Mayer, who did important work exposing extraordinary rendition, concerns the geopolitical thriller series “24,” which, of course, purports to be a gritty, realistic look at the quandaries of national defense in an age of apocalyptic terrorism. But this image, however seductive, is worse than merely being deeply fake, which it also is; it is misleading because it rests on a fantasy the show has helped construct that is the opposite of the truth. In this fantasy, we know exactly who the terrorists are; we need not cultivate granular knowledge of other communities and cultures to identify threats and build cooperative transcultural relationships with which to confront them. (That’s all so soft.) Instead, all we need are lots of technology and the guts to torture.

What an easier challenge that situation would present (which is not to say that torture would almost ever be acceptable, or should be legal). This premise, along with the adrenaline rush provided by the show’s perpetual air of crisis, suggests that conservative fear, even panic, about terrorism -- by themselves, feelings that at some level everyone has shared since 9/11 -- is closely mixed with fantasies of omnipotence. One figure involved with the show acknowledges that “[t]here’s definitely a political message to the show, which is that extreme measures are sometimes necessary for the greater good.” But a show that repeats this message ad nauseam is only pretending to be serious. Like horror movies in which the hero survives after secondary characters have been frighteningly killed off, “24” can be understood not as a way of grappling with troubling or complex questions but of reassuring the audience. The show does not seem to explore, for instance, the diverse tools needed in the fight, or the methodological advantages and the many more limitations of torture, or the consequences of using it for whether our troops and government will ever receive trust and acceptance in other countries with already-abused populations, and what effect those consequences will have on intelligence gathering. Executive producer Joel Surnow tells Mayer of his favorite bumper sticker: “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.” That’s an argument against pacifism. It’s rather less useful in accounting for results in, say, Iraq. In view of his own show’s chosen topic, terrorism, his selection of a war bumper sticker is oddly irrelevant (like the war in Iraq itself). A somewhat more relevant choice, given the show’s paranoid and torture-friendly attitudes, reveals the wishful thinking at the heart of the show: “We’re making enemies faster than we can kill them.”

Chillingly, Mayer describes the show as enormously popular among US troops in Iraq and in the administration.

(Note: Mayer's article is must reading because of how much it reveals about populist conservative attitudes. More on this in a forthcoming companion post.)