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Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: Iraq, Jane Mayer, newyorker.com, politics, radio
From yesterday’s Rush Limbaugh Show transcript. Limbaugh responds to a caller (link to the Jane Mayer story in original; there’s a video of Mayer talking about her story, with clips from 24, on newyorker.com):
You talk about credibility. Why does Bush have no credibility? It goes beyond Bush having no credibility. The great danger here is that the military doesn’t have credibility. As an institution, it is in the process of being destroyed by the left, by the Democrats, and by the Drive-By Media. Even to this day… There was an article in New Yorker magazine by Jane Mayer, and I spoke to Jane Mayer for this story because I was asked to. It’s a story about torture in the TV show “24”. There are a whole bunch of different approaches that Jane Mayer takes, but basically she went out and she found people in the US military who are saying, “‘24’, stop the torture, because you’re making US soldiers think it’s okay to do!” I could not believe this when I read this stuff. As an aside, I told my friends at “24”, “Don’t do this. This is a woman that tried to destroy Clarence Thomas with Jill Abramson, who’s the DC bureau chief of the New York Times,” but it was too late.
We’ve gotten to the point now where a television show is being used to destroy the US military, folks! A television show! We’ve had Abu Ghraib. We’ve had Club Gitmo. There is an all-out assault on the US military. Forget the president. We now are living in a world where I don’t know what percentage of the population of this country thinks the US military is indeed the focus of evil in the modern world. Now, many of the American left have always thought that and they’ve despised the military, and they have done everything they can to discredit it over the years, but it has just gotten magnified and worse — and now the US military is nothing but a bunch of rapists, predators, murderers!
Comments
I love “24,” even though I’m a total “leftie” and anti-torture, and pro-human rights. The reason is that it’s a great show. A great, escapist, fictional, suspense thriller. One watches it wishing things were so simple, perhaps, but knowing they aren’t. If there are people in the military who imitate the torture tactics in “24,” or if there are, indeed, as has been said, people who believe the show’s popularity is a “consensus” in favor of torture, these people need psychiatric examination. These must be people who don’t know the difference between fiction and reality. They do not belong in the military or in government! My problem with Jane Mayer is she treats these people as if they were perfectly sane, rational people. No, they’re not. They need to be plucked out of positions of power and action if they really allow a TV show to influence their perceptions of reality to that extent. Her article should rather have been about the scandal of allowing such individuals to remain in place.
I don’t know — I think there’s something to the idea that issues like torture emerge in the pop-culture zeitgeist. We’ll know when Bauer waterboards someone, I guess.
My biggest complaint with ‘24’ (other than the writing) is their taking that cool Secret Service guy from the West Wing and never giving him a line of dialogue that isn’t a duty cliche.
I kind of liked Mayer’s approach, to sort of tacitly accept the fact that “fictions” have real consequences in the world. This is a rather out of fashion argument (in other cases, like pornography, general TV violence, video games, etc) but the argument is very seriously considered by Mayer, and by the organization Human Rights First.
Human Rights First arranged the military with entertainment industry meetings and they have “recommendations to creators of popular culture who are writing scenes about interrogation.” This “Primetime Torture Project” of their’s is based on the assumption that “fictions” have effects and by changing the fictions one might have real effects on the world.
I totally agree that 24, as fiction, or part of the “pop-culture zeitgest,” reflects real issues, or that these issues “emerge” in fiction . The obverse, that the fiction can produce real effects in the world, is, for me, a more controversial claim (you know, all those studies people are always doing, or not doing) and an interesting one to investigate, or maybe reinvestigate, now.
The New Yorker is not the only media that has publicized the US torture policies and practices of this war. I’m always shocked at how much US citizens know about our gov’t but how little we do.
I guess, in the end, there’s no doubt in my mind that fictions (like 24) have mediated national sentiment about torture, convincing citizens that it’s justified or necessary and that, even knowing what we do, we are not required to do anything about it.
Tho’ of course, I would say that its not so much 24 as the long history of the bad cop that has produced this complacency.
I’m a little curious (in a good way), about Human Rights First’s role in publicizing this issue; did they alert TNY? The AP? The 2/11 Yahoo-AP story didn’t mention TNY …
So, I guess if we continue having women presidents in TV shows, that’ll lead to Hillary Clinton winning 2008? Or the black president in 24 might leat to Obama winning? The media must then be trying to persuade us simultaneously to be inured to violence, elect women presidents, and allow people to be tortured with our blessing, while eating MacDonald’s nonstop, be anorexic, and drive like madmen in SUVs? In fact, there are zillions of so-called “messages” being propelled at us through the TV screen, and we are not all being brainwashed into carrying them out (thank goodness). There are only a minority of people impressionable enough to allow TV to change their behavior. Most people watch (and enjoy) things they would never, ever engage in. It’s the people who think the popularity of the show implies approval of torture who should be fired or put under psychiatric examination. They’re hearing voices, alright. (Like the Son of Sam. Who, in their right mind, listens to a dog? Dogs never give good advice. Neither do TV ratings, or the chorus in Greek tragedies.)
Great headline, by the way. I didn’t get it until just now.