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SUPERHERO FOLLOW-UPS.
Folks have brought up a couple points on this article that are worth addressing:
• It's true that Captain America is not strictly superhuman. He just drank a serum that now lets him bench 1,100 pounds, master every fighting style known to humans, be the world's greatest combat tactitian, and fling an indestructible shield such that it deflects bullets before hitting multiple people and returning to Cap's hand. In other words, Marvel treats Cap as superhuman, and just about never lets him lose. But Superman could kick -- or possibly heat-ray -- the hell out of him in a boxing ring.
• Relatedly, Superman can be kind of a dick.
• On Jack Bauer, Winer writes, "The first season was written before 9/11 and one of the things that seemed compelling to me about it was that he was not a superhero. He could be manipulated by any number of people due to his human vulnerabilities. His wife and friends were killed, and one had the notion that he too could be killed if the show wanted to go in a different direction. Seven years later, the country has suffered through 9/11 and the Bush presidency, and Jack Bauer has become a torturing, unkillable cartoon. If we're making superhero/foreign policy analogies, I'd say JB started out as an America(n) aware of his vulnerability and his humanity and became and America(n) who faces fear by grasping for an exceptionalism and a right to break laws when that exceptionalism and that right don't really exist." Nbliss adds, "I always like to say that Jack Bauer's superpower is torture." Much like John Yoo.
• Cyrus makes the point, "talking about America as one single entity is too reductive. America is a nation of about 300 million people, who make up at the very least two cultural and ideological factions, and probably dozens. In the months immediately following 9/11, there was near-unanimity on a Jack Bauer foreign policy, but judging by polling shortly before the war, people only supported the war on condition that it would be a Superman's war rather than a Jack Bauer's. After the war there was a "rally round the flag" effect, but that faded well before its effects manifested in elections and stuff. The faction(s) now in power in America have a Jack Bauer mentality, definitely. America as a whole, though, the hypothetical median American, had a Jack Bauer mentality in late 2001 and through 2002, but not before or since."
I think that's correct. Fundamentally, the executive controls foreign policy, and the foreign policy conversation. So long as Bush wanted to sell a militaristic unilateralism, he had the ability. So long as he wants to keep us in Iraq and Democrats don't have 60 votes or the support to cut funding, he can do that, too. It's not a function of philosophy so much as sheer power.
COMMENTS (9)
I think you all have the Jack Bauer mentality only partially correct. In the end, Jack knows what he's doing is illegal and immoral. The neocon foreign policy doesn't. Additionally, Jack is willing to submit himself for torture, or more to the point, to the law, once his work is done. Sure, he's justified his actions in the moment, but is always willing to take responsibility for them. According to themselves,
Neocons are responsible for nothing, and almost every time blame their own faults on liberals.
Posted by: Adrock | April 9, 2008 4:50 PM
Shorter Adrock: comparing neocons to amoral jingoistic killers with no qualms about torture is unfair to amoral jingoistic killers with no qualms about torture. (I kid, I kid. And I hope my description of 24 isn't too unfair; I've never watched the show myself and I have nothing against Kiefer Sutherland.)
Posted by: Cyrus | April 9, 2008 5:02 PM
Fundamentally, the executive controls foreign policy, and the foreign policy conversation. So long as Bush wanted to sell a militaristic unilateralism, he had the ability.
Um ... no. The media are the gatekeepers to the conversation and hence they control it. Bush was only able to sell what he sold because the media, for whatever reasons (*), allowed him to do so.
If the media asked Bush some tough questions about the war rather than convincing everyone that all good Americans should stand by their fearless leader, the war wouldn't have happened.
* fear of being seen as "liberal" or unpatriotic, wanting to please their corporate masters, actual support of neo-feudal militarism ... who knows ...
Posted by: DAS | April 9, 2008 5:13 PM
I have a question about Jack Bauer. I never watch the show, and so posts like this represent the only time I think about it. If Bauer is a superhero, is it significant that he is a German-American? Real superheroes don't have ethnicities. Superman isn't Italian, Wonder Woman isn't Irish. Someone, somewhere, chose that name for him. Bauer is about as close to "Smith" as you can get in German. I don't think it's important or offensive, but if we're a country of 300 million people with a great many factions, which ones does he represent? The red states? Blond people? German-Americans? Lefthanders? He doesn't represent guys named Lopez or Chang. It's a can of worms.
Posted by: Martin | April 9, 2008 5:16 PM
One fascinating thing about conservative man-love for Jack Bauer is what it says about their childish aspirations. To be the hero in a Tom Clancy techno-thriller, you've got to be very smart and have worked really hard to develop those brains. To be John Rambo, you've got to work incredibly hard to develop your physical strength and skill. But conservatives don't worship Bauer because he's smart and knowledgeable or because he's some sort of physical superman who can kick the asses of three people at once. They love Jack Bauer because to be that sort of "hero" you just have to have the willingness to electrocute someone in the balls. It's the ultimate lazy adolescent's idea of "heroism".
Mike
Posted by: MBunge | April 9, 2008 5:16 PM
In reference to Mike's post, the conservative tumescence over Bauer is because the world of 24 is exactly how they think the world exists: Constant, ridiculous threats from obviously evil ethnic stereotypes. "Of course torture is wrong," they say, "but if this particular scenario happened, wouldn't you have to do it? Wouldn't you have to! If you don't THEY win!" The show's glorification of Bauer's actions combined with the show 's popularity to them is a validation of those viewpoints. It is also a convenient shorthand, emotional appeal argument anytime torture comes up.
Posted by: Nbliss | April 9, 2008 5:56 PM
I basically agree that Superman and Captain America do embody a type of vernacular internationalist vision. The thing is they were created a long time ago by a generational cohort that no longer exists. Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster: all products of working class Jewish left-liberalism, of a type that lined up behind FDR or those to the left of FDR. But that was a long time ago and I think it's worth pointing out that the most popular superheroes of the last generation have all been unilaterailist vigalantes: The Punisher, Wolverine (part of the X-men but inclined to work alone), and the "dark knight" version of Batman.
As much as I want to believe that liberal internationalism can make a come-back, it seems to have lost its cultural foothold.
You should read Darwyn Cooke's graphic novel New Frontier, which is basically uses the classic DC characters (Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern) to trace the political trajectory of America from FDR to JFK.
Posted by: Jeet Heer | April 10, 2008 12:05 AM
Yeah, but you said Captain America could conquer the world. I mean, there's another hero with bulletproof skin, the strength to knock down walls, and can shoot explosive projectiles from his head. It's called a tank a America has thousands of them. Obviously, though, it hasn't managed to to take over the world just yet.
Posted by: Fordig | April 10, 2008 9:04 AM
Tanks don't fly.
Posted by: Nbliss | April 10, 2008 1:16 PM