March 16, 2007
More on 24 III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST I confess to having never seen 24. I don’t even know what network it’s on. And having read the descriptions of the show by Messrs. Burns and Smoler, I think I’ll take a pass, thank you. Watching people—even unspeakably bad people—being tortured does not strike me as an entertaining way to pass an evening hour. Naturally, this does not stop me from having a few comments. First, I think Pat Buchanan has about as much influence in American politics today as my cat (who has a much pleasanter persona, although the local rodent population would probably beg to differ). Buchanan reached his peak in 1992—half a generation ago—when he did his best to sabotage the reelection campaign of the first President Bush in his speech at the Republican convention that year. Today he is just a largely forgotten Looney Tune on the right and therefore of interest only to people on the left who would like to think that he’s a significant figure. He’s not. I have no doubt that the average American voter today couldn’t even tell you who he is. Second, torture. I don’t know much about it, but I’m pretty sure that Hollywood torture and real-world torture are two different things. I remember the famous scene in Goldfinger where James Bond is strapped down on a saw table, moving steadily in the direction of a rapidly spinning circular saw blade. “Do you expect me to talk?” the ever-unflappable Bond asks. “No, Mr. Bond,” says Goldfinger. “I expect you to die.” Goldfinger then decided for reasons I can’t remember not to kill him, which ultimately proved, of course, to be a big mistake. In the real world, I suspect there is less drama and more results. My guess is that there are very, very few James Bonds in the real world, i.e., everyone talks when tortured. The question is the quality of the information obtained, for the object of torture will say whatever he thinks is most likely to make the pain stop. If it’s a confession to a heinous crime that’s wanted, regardless of the truth, then confession is what is produced. If it’s truth that’s wanted, however, then truth is what is forthcoming. So torture is worthless as an instrument of justice, but very efficacious when it comes to intelligence gathering. Certainly Sir Francis Walsingham found it useful in protecting Queen Elizabeth from Catholic conspirators. And the Elizabethan Jesuits, et al., were a bunch of boy scouts compared to our enemies today, as revealed in the blood-chilling statements made the other day by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. I hate to put in a good word for torture, but if the torture of someone who is proud to have held Daniel Pearl’s severed head in his hands can save a planeload or a city of innocents, then, alas, so be it. Third, Mr. Smoler writes, “In most of 24’s seasons the terrorists are abetted, without their knowledge, by highly placed members of the American government who control sections of the national security apparatus, are represented in the cabinet, and are attempting to panic the public into supporting authoritarian rule.” This seems to me to be nothing but a paranoid fantasy of the Looney Tunes left, à la Oliver Stone. Half a century ago the conspiracy mongers tended to be on the right, with Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society finding Communists lurking behind every bureaucratic door. Today they are on the left, getting all bent out of shape about such things as the Trilateral Commission, whatever that is. Of course, conspiracies of this sort are nonexistent outside television and the movies. Conspiracies, after all, require absolute secrecy while they are hatching, and as Benjamin Franklin explained nearly three centuries ago, “three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” If there is one country in the world where democracy is secure it is the United States. The reason for that is that probably 99 percent of the population are committed democrats, and the one percent who are not are utterly marginalized, off in Pat Buchanan and Cindy Sheehan land.
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