blog24, Iraq, the Freedom Tower, and the problem with fantasy
Jane Meyer’s recent New Yorker piece about 24 — my only appointment televison series on broadcast TV — was interesting. Not for its inevitable tsk-tsking about the show’s depiction of U.S. counter-terrorism operatives torturing people, but because of the U.S. intelligence officers Meyer quoted concerning the uselessness of torture in real life. Our military personnel evidently watch 24 and then imagine that they can actually be Jack Baueresque heroes — that breaking terrorists’ fingers and sticking shivs in their knees will save the day. The worst case is that when wishful fantasy shapes real-world actions, the result is both failure and a loss of the moral high ground. Which is a pretty fair descrption of our Iraqi misadventure.
When we rush ahead hellbent to enact a large fantasy, and the real world fails to cooperate, we not only don’t achieve the dream but find ourselves in a worse place than we started — we don’t really want to keep slogging forward, but we’re unable to see any good way to back out. The construction of the so-called Freedom Tower at Ground Zero is an example of the same kind of post-9/11 patriotic huzzah-ism. It will be an unecessarily huge, unecessarily ugly high-rise, its height, 1,776 feet, meant to satisfy our America, Fuck Yeah impulse.
One of the many reasons I liked Eliot Spitzer as a New York gubernatorial candidate was his professed skepticism about the Freedom Tower. But now that he’s governor, he’s decided that we can’t really afford to rethink the whole project. He’s unethusiastic, yeah, but it’s under construction, so…well…hell, get on with it; he gave his approval this week. “This should not be interpreted to mean that this is the project I would have designed at its initiation,” he told the Times. “But where we are today, this is clearly the best and the wisest alternative.” The governor of New Jersey said pretty much the same thing: “Maybe we would have done it differently if you could roll it all the way back to another day, but we live in the world we live in.”
Substitute “the Iraq war” for “the Freedom Tower” and most people would sigh and nod. And then maybe turn on 24.
[...] The conventional wisdom among U.S. military and intelligence experts, as it’s been reported since the beginning of the Iraq war, is that torture is ineffective – that seriously hurting and terrifying people doesn’t make them give up useful secrets, the M.O. of Jack Bauer and his colleagues on 24 notwithstanding. That was the gist of Jane Mayer’s piece about 24 in The New Yorker two months ago, which I wrote about here. [...]
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