1,584 words tonight! Yay! Progress! In about 12,000 words, this will be the longest that I’ve ever made it in any novel attempt. And it only took 4 months (well, and about a year to come up with a fully matured concept for it)!
All this time I’ve been writing at my friend Steve’s house. For some crazy reason, he decided to watch four seasons of 24 in a week in order to be able to tell his film professors why he likes it. I’ve been watching the first few episodes of season 1 with him these past couple of days.
Let me just say that I’m not a fan of the show. And now that I’ve watched a few episodes, I’m only slightly against it. Before I watched the show, I’d had conversations with people about torture and other foreign policy issues with people who were fans of the show, and I was appalled at some of the positions they were taking on the subject based on what they’d seen on this TV show. That’s what turned me off at first.
The way I see it, we are at a crucial point right now where the world is facing a new kind of global warfare, and we haven’t worked out how to deal with it. I want very much for my country to hold the moral high ground–which I believe it has held in previous world-defining conflicts, such as World War II. The problem is that we don’t know how to treat foreign terrorists. In some ways, they are like criminals, and should be treated through a legal system, but in other ways, they are like foreign soldiers, and should be treated as POWs. Since they are both and neither, there isn’t a protocol in place to protect them, which means that there is enough wiggle room for hawkish extremists to act unethically. Since we don’t have the situation defined, the ethics are unclear and it’s very hard to hold our people accountable. The result is that innocent people have been and most likely are being tortured in places like Abu Ghraib and are being subject to inhumane and unethical treatment. It’s very bad.
Shows like 24, IMO, play on people’s emotions so much that they cloud the issues. When Jack Bauer breaks the law in crazy ways, you’re rooting for him. When he shoots the terrorists, you jump up in the air and shout for joy. And yet, if we let these impulses guide us in the real life, present at hand conflicts, we will make terrible mistakes and have blood all over our hands. Life isn’t Hollywood–real people make mistakes. Where Jack Bauer always comes out on top, if we make it standard policy for federal agents to act the way he does, and let Bauer’s way of handling terrorists define how we set up the new protocols in this new age of warfare, we will lose the moral high ground for generations to come. And I won’t stand for that.
But when I started watching season one, I didn’t think it was that bad. After all, these guys are domestic terrorists. We have the protocols figured out for how to deal with them (though, of course, I might be discrediting myself because it might come out sometime later that these guys are really part of some foreign terrorist network–I’ve only watched about seven or eight episodes thus far). All the other criticisms might be true and valid for the later seasons, but at least I could sit down and enjoy season one.
And I did enjoy it–until I got right around episode five. It really is some thrilling entertainment, and the writing is pretty good. The action really is awesome. However, as entertainment it has a big flaw–it’s way too melodramatic! I mean, in the first couple of episodes, there are shootouts and kidnappings and crazy stuff–and that’s only the first couple hours of the day! When you get around 6:00 am and more and more of this stuff keeps happening, you start thinking to yourself “yeah right! There’s now way that all of this could be happening in just one day!” And once believability is lost, it becomes really hard to enjoy it anymore.
So, yeah, I still don’t like 24. And I’m glad that the writers’ strike has killed the upcoming season of it. I don’t want a bunch of Hollywood propagandists to have too much power over public opinion, especially in a crucial election year like this coming one.
