Policy platforms, care of fictional characters

Now here’s a whole bucket of really depressing insight. We’ve always known that the architects of the Bush administration have a bit of a hard time distinguishing reality from fantasy, but citing 24’s torture-happy Jack Bauer when talking about interrogation policies is just waaaaayyyy over the damn line.

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show “reflects real life.”

John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the so-called torture memos—simultaneously redefining both the laws of torture and logic—cites Bauer in his book War by Other Means. “What if, as the popular Fox television program ‘24′ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?” Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer, shows a gift for this casual toggling between television and the Constitution. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Scalia said. “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”

That’s right. There are people who actually take the show 24 so seriously that it’s a reference point for what to do in reality. When confronted with conflicting voices, the military who says torture doesn’t work and Jack Fucking Bauer who says that it does, the administration decided that the made-up guy was the more reliable. Fantastic.

It’s just a shame they went for that and, not, say, Batman. After all, old Batman’s whole thing is that he does what he can to capture the bad guy and then turns them over to law enforcement, rather than punishing the criminal himself. Just a shame the right doesn’t call Batman a role model for political ideology.

Oh wait, they do. For anyone who hasn’t seen The Dark Knight, part of the story involves using cell phones to spy on the entirety of Gotham City to find The Joker, as well as creating a sonar map to track their movements. Most rational people would see this as a somewhat improbable but rather nifty idea in Fiction Land, but conservatives are using this to pump Bush’s spying program.

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

I must admit I sat here for a while pondering why in the world these people on the right are turning to movie and television characters as defense and/or inspiration for their ideas, but then it struck me: because they never, ever work that way in the real world.

Nevermind that the odds of being able to just sit there, listening in on 30 million phones (according to The Dark Knight’s count of Gotham’s citizens) and within a few minutes figuring out which voice is your targets, is astronomical, let alone doing it with the tenfold as many Americans. Nevermind the obvious 4th amendment violations. Nevermind the breach of privacy and the perpetual feeling of invasion that citizens would have upon knowing that they are never away from the government’s eyes and ears. Nevermind that this has happened before and we saw why and how it goes wrong. Batman did it, and people like Batman, so that means it’s good.

That’s a little tidbit, from me to you. A bona fide piece of Hanlon advice, free of charge. If, for whatever reason, you’re reduced to spotlighting something you saw on television or read in a comic book as justification for whatever stance you have on an issue, there’s a pretty damn good chance you need to re-evaluate things.