People* have been wondering if I want to add any more to my current column–which argues that 24 is not the right-wing tool some critics say it is–in the light of last night’s episode, where a suitcase nuke blew up in suburban L.A. Some detractors–or at least those that ABC News coaxed knee-jerk reactions from–say the blast went too far in whipping up public fears, calling the show "propaganda" without "any redeeming value."
I’d seen the episode before writing the column, of course, but that would have been an atomic spoiler before the fact, so here’s my take. First: dude, it was just Tarzana. [Ed.– I’m told the bomb actually went off in Valencia. I don’t have the DVD at hand, but either way, if the Apple Pan is still standing, that’s a minor terrorist attack in my book.] Second, seriously, have none of these people watched the show before? Nuclear threats are as common as commercial breaks on 24: the nuclear-warhead threat in season 2, the nuclear-power plant meltdown followed by nuke-tipped cruise-missile threat in season 4. Each has played in different ways and involved different villains: in season 4, radical Muslims were at work, but in season 2, as I’ve noted before, the culprit was American government members and military, working in cahoots with Big Oil to gin up a Mideast invasion using false evidence linking Arab states to a WMD plot, at the exact time that we were readying to invade Iraq. Yeah, that’s classic right-wing propaganda there.
Finally, and most important: yes, the idea of the "smoking gun mushroom cloud" is a signature line of Dick Cheney’s. But to say that televising an A-blast is conservative (pace Lyndon Johnson) is not just wrong, it’s insulting–to liberals. It assumes that liberals don’t worry about terrorism, don’t care about nuclear proliferation and loose nukes, and don’t think that WMDs are a serious threat. That’s nonsense–if anything, Democrats and liberals have constantly criticized the Bush administration for not doing enough to secure Soviet nuclear material just like the suitcase bomb that detonated on Fox last night: the administration was earning failing grades from the 9/11 Commission on securing WMDs while Democratic voices like Gary Hart have berated them to do more about proliferation. (If a bombing like 24’s happened tomorrow, after all, on whose watch would the nuke have gotten loose?) Conservatives would love Americans to believe that they’re the only ones who care about WMD terrorism–why liberals would spread that bogus idea is beyond me.
Whew! Ultimately, when you argue with people trying to read sinister political intent into a big, loud, ridiculous TV show, you end up sounding as looney as they do. 24 isn’t partisan, it’s just paranoid, and sustaining its paranoid suspense means there have to be a lot of threats, extreme, surprising and from all sides. But as the silly hubbub over 24’s "propaganda" shows, no party has a monopoly on paranoia.
* for which read, "my editors, who can practically taste the traffic the post would generate"