Cynical ’24’

Originally published on April 18, 2010

The Fox TV series 24, now that True Blood and Dexter are between seasons, is the one event I live for each week. Every Monday night, 8 p.m. Central on Channel 8 out of New Orleans, I’m there for it, often on my feet and animated with suspense. Don’t know what I’ll do when this season ends, except maybe go back and watch the episodes I have recorded.
What I am saying is that I think 24 is a great series, full of action and adventure and unexpected turns of plot. Great story lines tied to larger world events. Dramatic, get-‘er-done-or-die-trying characters. Fantastic acting, tight editing, strong directing. And yet there is an underlying view of the perfidy of people in positions of trust that is a recurring theme that runs throughout the series.
The violence doesn’t bother me. In fact, I rather like it even when it approaches levels of the ridiculous. I for one would love to know how to run between hundreds of high-powered automatic weapons rounds totally unscathed. You just never know when such a skill might come in handy. And I not only accept but fully applaud the willingness on the part of Jack Bauer, and also Renee Walker and Chloe O’Brien, to break all the rules to get ‘er done for the cause of what is right and good.
Sure, there are plenty of absurd and – to anyone who has ever worked inside an intelligence or diplomatic operation, as I have – obvious fact errors. I mean, no, they are not going to let everyone walk around inside secure areas with, let alone talk on, their cell phones. No, the deadbeat boyfriends and wayward parole officers from Arkansas are not going to be given access to, much less allowed to wander around unescorted inside, CTU. They can read the license plate off a moving truck in Lower Slobovia, but they don’t know that one of their cohorts, right in their midst, is directing police evidence room heists or crashing their satellite feeds or is out running around doing odd things even as New York City is about to be made into a heap of glowing rump roast?
Really. Sometimes it is hard to suspend belief. And the writers and the directors and producers either are uninformed that these things don’t go down in real life or, more likely, they know but don’t let a fact get in the way of a good story.
None of these things, however, is my real issue with 24. No, I can accept all of them as the price of keeping the story moving and action flowing and not getting lost in the technicalities. That is not my issue.
My issue is a seemingly pervasive belief, revealed week in and week out on 24, that people – people with the greatest responsibility for the well being of the country, people sworn to uphold the Constitution and laws who have worked their way into the highest and most sensitive positions in the government and our intel and defense networks, in the Pentagon, and even in the White House – that these people are so willing to betray their duty, betray their honor and their oaths, betray their superiors, to betray their very country, and to pursue their own agendas. And they do so for a variety of reasons, whether for profit, out of perfidy or weakness, out of ideology or a sense of self-preservation grown malignant, or out of some misguided sense of “the good of the Nation.”
In previous seasons we had the Presidential coups and the vast conspiracies and the contractors-gone-wild threatening the country with WMD. Now we have top Pentagon brass and White House insiders deliberately disobeying direct orders of the Commander-in-Chief to carry out their own hobby shop attempt on the head of state of another country. We have a key CTU agent who is not only a dirt-bag former con who’ll stop at nothing to protect her own true identity from discovery (up to and including garroting said Arkansas parole officer and stashing his lifeless body behind a ventilation grate – hello? Where are the security cameras?) But then she is actively helping the terrorists in their quest to barbeque Manhattan in a dose of heavy radiation.
Not to mention what all this says about the folks who do the background checks.
This view extends beyond the Americans, too. We have the most trusted family insiders and security operatives of the so-called Islamic Republic (hmmm, wonder what country that might be? Erewon, anyone?) plotting against their president, planning his assassination, using his daughter first as a lover and then as an unknowing suicide bomber (she survived, CTU not so well), and then turning against one another. Is there no honor among thieves?
No, there isn’t. In fact, to the producers of 24, there does not seem to be much honor at all. Whatever honor there is – Jack Bauer breaking rules that weren’t even made yet to stop the bad guys, Renee Walker sawing off the hand of a Russian low life to get him to talk, Chloe O’Brien holding the, uh, assholes from NSA at gunpoint so she can get CTU’s IT systems back up and running, a President willing to send her own daughter to prison for having committed murder – is based on personality and an individual sense and code of honor.
While I applaud the respect for the individual and the idea that sometimes one just has to say, “What the heck,” and go for it, it speaks volumes of a broken system manned and womaned by weak and corrupt individuals ready to sell their duty to their country and their position down the East River on a Zodiac.
One of the things I liked the most about The Sopranos, another high-powered series, was the way it played with the viewer’s own sense of morality. Tony and his merry band of thieving, conniving murderers were likeable sorts, all right, but anyone paying the least attention also knew that they were utter scum with the moral compass of a sunken pirate ship. Even my spoiled rich-kid Albanian university students were astute enough to perceive that. But with 24 it’s different.
With 24, in contrast, we are left wondering about the producers’ moral compass, their sense not so much of right and wrong, but their sense of how corrupt, incompetent, and just plain inept are those in positions of power within our (and other countries’) government. There is almost boundless respect for the code of the rugged individual, especially those who do their jobs in blue jeans and open shirts with concealed weapons, but equally boundless disdain for whole cohorts of what would otherwise be trusted public servants tirelessly doing their job for country, Constitution, and honor.
As mentioned earlier, I’ve worked on the inside of this system. Maybe not at its highest levels or its most hidden corridors of power, but enough to know that almost everyone, for all their flaws, and even at times boneheadedness, is out to do their duty as best as they know how. Some truly shine as stars and heroes. Some get by. But what the Walter Kendall Myerses and Robert Hanssens and Aldrich Ameses and Jonathan Pollards, and others like them who betray their nation’s trust and their duty, highlight, is how much these people are exceptions to the rule, but in no way the rule itself.
To the producers of 24, however, it seems they are the rule and anyone who would prevail against them has to do it not only with great personal courage and at the risk of losing their position, their freedom, and life itself, but by their own personal code and willingness to break every law and rule in the book.
In the case of The Sopranos, Tony and his mobsters were evil, and one expected them to be evil, even when they appeared to be good. With 24, those we expect to be good and honorable turn out to be the basest of scoundrels. Whether of the right or (as we suspect in the genetic makeup of 24) the left, is this how many Americans have come to see their country’s leadership and its public servants? I think the evidence, as laid out weekly in those heart-pounding 60 minutes, at least as far as the writers and producers of 24 are concerned, says, “Yes.”
I don’t subscribe to that view, even as I acknowledge that I, too, have grown to mistrust government. Not that I don’t believe that corruption, in its many forms, is rampant and that both utter incompetence and misguided political motivation are all too evident, especially at the highest levels of our political system. But I don’t believe that those down in the trenches or the blockhouses, those in the secure rooms with the blinking gizmos, those in the offices where analysis quietly proceeds each day, those in the War Room or the control centers, are ready to betray their honor, their duty, their Commander-in-Chief, or their country, whether in a heartbeat or a life of heartbeats.
I still have faith that there are few thieves where such honor exists.

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Frank Yacenda is a former journalist, U.S. diplomat, and intelligence analyst who covered the Middle East, and is an occasional commentator on current affairs. © 2010, all rights reserved.