Daddy

I find it apt that 24, the only show I know of that uses sado-masochism as its central plot device, is shot in the San Fernando Valley.

I don't watch 24. After a couple of episodes I realized I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to watch it (the idea that our government has computer networks that actually talk to one another is laughable, never mind a black president and...Kiefer Sutherland), but Jane Meyers' study of it for The New Yorker confirmed pretty much everything I thought of the show after those couple of hours I spent watching it.

You can stop on almost every paragraph to find a reason to see the show as a scary window on post-9/11 America -- it's assumption, above, that American intelligence forces are competent; that time bombs are ticking all over the place; that Americans are willing to suspend the civil rights of others at the drop of a hat; that torture is an effective technique for eliciting information; that our forces in Iraq should use torture against Iraqis -- but this is perhaps my favorite part:

During three decades as a journeyman screenwriter, Surnow grew increasingly conservative. He “hated welfare,” which he saw as government handouts. Liberal courts also angered him. He loved Ronald Reagan’s “strength” and disdained Jimmy Carter’s “belief that people would be nice to us just because we were humane. That never works.” He said of Reagan, “I can hardly think of him without breaking into tears. I just felt Ronald Reagan was the father that this country needed. . . . He made me feel good that I was in his family.”

Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.” Last year, he contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.”

Although he is a supporter of President Bush—he told me that “America is in its glory days”—Surnow is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted. An “isolationist” with “no faith in nation-building,” he thinks that “we could have been out of this thing three years ago.” After deposing Saddam Hussein, he argued, America should have “just handed it to the Baathists and . . . put in some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line but who’s not going to be aggressive to us.” In his view, America “is sort of the parent of the world, so we have to be stern but fair to people who are rebellious to us. We don’t spoil them. That’s not to say you abuse them, either. But you have to know who the adult in the room is.”

This is one whacked world view. That the country needs "a father figure (let alone Ronald Reagan in that role...jeebus)" and America, in turn, should act as a stern father to the world's misbehaving children is quite breathtaking. It's that kind of thinking that helped create the George W. Bush myth of the tough-talking hombre who was going to make everything "right" after the planes flew into the World Trade Center and helped to artificially bolster his popularity even as it was obvious he and his hires were incompetent ideologues intent on fulfilling George W's dream of outdoing his father. It was this kind of myth-making that permitted the Republican Party to cynically foist this man-child on the country. It's weird and it's pathetic.