Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Danger! Show May Contain Traces Of Conservatism

I too find myself wondering when exactly an absence of functioning genitals became a qualification for working for the Telegraph - although Ross actually put it differently.

Then again, I'm still wondering about the same thing as last time this came up. As I understand the left's position, a single TV program can cause professional soldiers to start torturing all and sundry, but there's no connection between the approximately 8 billion shows that feature absurdly hip and attractive people indulging in consequence-free drug abuse, criminality and sexual bulimia, and any of our nation's social pathologies. Perish the thought.

You know, it really gives the lie to the media's claims to be balanced when the merest hint of a right-wing slant to a mainstream show has the left forming lynch mobs. After all, it's not as if '24' is even particularly conservative. Au contrair, in so far as the terrorists always turn out to be working for a secret cabal of Kansas corn barons, or whatever, pretty much every season flirts with Trutherism to a greater or lesser extent. More to the point, as Ace explains, the show's metacontext is a distinctly left-wing one:
What is the basic plotline of every season?

America, essentially in a reactive posture against terrorism, catches wind of a terrorist plot at the last possible moment, usually almost precisely 24 hours before the Big Bang and often indadvertantly (i.e., not through proactive means and certainly not via military adveturism).

There is no need of messy invasions or pre-emptive unilateral military actions; America always gets lucky, just in time, and finds out it's about to be hit.

At this point law enforcement personnel move with incredible speed and unerring instict to thwart the plot by using, by and large, conventional law-enforcement techniques such as wiretapping, bugging, tailing, and simply reading files, and are always able to stop terrorism without ever leaving American soil (or, indeed, moving 30 miles beyond Los Angeles), and all without violating the national sovereigty of a single tyrannical foreign hellhole.

Indeed, every 24 episode could close with the declaration, No kite-flying children were harmed in the making of this production.

Isn't this the way terrorism is supposed to be fought in the collective fantasia of leftists?

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