Thanks, guys!

A latterday Eustace Tilly might well have dubbed the current New Yorker “Springtime for Wingers,” and a sick spring it is, too. Besides articles on the HP bugging and pretexting implosion, it has articles on Tom Monaghan, a winger billionaire, and, most interesting, the virulent FUX TV show, 24. (Funny how conservatives get all hot and bothered about porn, because people will act out, and it coarsens the culture, yadda yadda yadda, but when 24 shows torture, and then the troops go out and do what they’ve seen, as the article shows through example, they remain curiously silent. Then again, to conservatives, torture is sex.)

So, read the whole thing, if you want to know just how sick the sick fucks in our ruling class are, and how people who should be doing the right thing enable them, and rationalize the knowledge of the evil they’re perpetrating away. These are the passages that interested me:

Howard Gordon, who is the series’ “show runner,” or lead writer, told me that he concocts many of the torture scenes himself. “Honest to God, I’d call them improvisations in sadism,” he said. … He added, “The truth is, there’s a certain amount of fatigue. It’s getting hard not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over.”

Gordon, who is a “Moderate Democrat,” said that it worries him when “critics say that we’ve enabled and reflected the public’s appetite for torture. Nobody wants to be the handmaid to a relaxed policy that accepts torture as a legitimate means of interrogation.”

As I’ve said: “Moderate” means “enabler.” I can’t think of a clearer example than Gordon’s pathetic rationalizations:

He went on, “But the premise of ‘24’ is the ticking time bomb. It takes an unusual situation and turns it into the meat and potatoes of the show.” He paused. “I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality.”

Really? That’s not what the wingers believe. They believe that “we create our own reality.” And on the evidence, they’re right. Because people see 24, and then—surprise—they do it:

This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan—wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals—aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his “call” was.

In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”

The third expert at the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq. He told the show’s staff that DVDs of shows such as “24” circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq. Lagouranis said to me, “People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen.”

Kiefer Sutherland, the show’s star, is another “leftist” who enables torture:

Kiefer Sutherland is reportedly paid ten million dollars a year to play Jack Bauer. Sutherland, the grandson of Tommy Douglas, a former socialist leader in Canada, has described his own political views as anti-torture, and “leaning toward the left.” According to Danzig, Sutherland was “really upset, really intense” and stressed that he tries to tell people that the show “is just entertainment.” … In a recent television interview with Charlie Rose, his ambivalence about his character’s methods was palpable. He condemned the abuse of U.S.-held detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, as “absolutely criminal,” particularly for a country that tells others that “democracy and freedom” are the “way to go.” He also said, “You can torture someone and they’ll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear… . Torture is not a way of procuring information.” But things operate differently, he said, on television: “24,” he said, is “a fantastical show… . Torture is a dramatic device.”

The problem here is, that we have a ruling class that can’t differentiate between dramatic devices and reality—in fact, believe that their dramatic devices create reality.

And in a way, they’re quite right. Because when a soldier goes and emulates a “dramatic device” in a real torture room, surprise: Torture really happens.

All, in all, a splendid demonstration of the Overton Window in action: The creeps who are replacing our Constitutional government with authoritarian rule — the article mentions that Limbaugh, Clarence Thomas, Michael Chertoff, Karl Rove, Pony Blow, Mary Cheney, Lynn Cheney, John Yoo, and Laura Ingraham are all 24 fans — enjoy torture (when others are tortured, that is), and, using their control of FUX, moved torture from unthinkable to policy; enabled by the moderate Democrats and “lefists” who handle the creatives, they’ve managed to involve the rest of us in their sick fantasies, and turned the entire country into a Milgram experiment. Nice work all around.

Our country’s descent into the pit will be no consequences for Our Betters, of course; they have their bunkers. There will be consequences for the rest of us, of course.

NOTE This article really made me despair; I don’t know what to do to fight this evil. Somehow, influencing the Beltway 10,000 doesn’t meet the case. And especially I can’t even imagine what to do that doesn’t involve becoming like them. Readers?

UPDATE In comments, Shystee reminds me of his earlier post on 24:

How does it work? In the words of Harold Pinter, it’s a “a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Of course, people who watch 24 don’t believe Jack Bauer is a real Counter Terrorism Unit agent, but they might believe that Americans fighting the War on Terra are *like* Jack Bauer. They might believe the situations in which the US engages in torture are similar to the ones played out in the show. They might believe the Ticking Time Bomb scenario is reasonably possible.

Which turned out to be prescient.

Dammit, the problem with Shystee is that he gets it all right like, a year in advance, and then waits for the rest of us while we, poor souls, slog along day by day to come to the same realization. Sigh.