The Crossed Pond

I’ve written in the past about “War Hero” Republicans; partisan, pro-war conservatives who spend their time fantasizing about the War on Terror as some kind of macro version of a Die Hard sequel. These are the people that love the idea of torture because, to them, it’s sexy. Their’s isn’t chiefly, or at least exclusively, an ideological position, so much as a swagger, a machismo emotional shrillness. If you get them going on any given facet of the War on Terror, they love to bring it back to war. WAR, man, WAR. Everything becomes a ridiculous hypothetical as these sort of war hawks struggle to find whatever way they can of pumping up their own sense of being part of the frontlines of some massive battle of good versus evil. Everything is ultimately reducible to the question “What would Jack Bauer do”?

When I talk about this sort of thing I’m not being, I hope, too generalizing. Certainly there are all kinds of reasonable and practical cases for, say, surging in Iraq, preemptively striking against Iran, treating our prisoners and detainees as subhumans (well, I’m not sure that last one is reasonable). But if you’ve met a single War Hero Republican, and I bet you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about. These are the people that used to go on proudly, as if they had special wisdom and we were all cowardly naive little twats, about turning the Middle East into a giant pane of glass. Now, they go on, proudly, about democratizing it, but mostly as a way of getting to the aspects of democratizing it that really trip their triggers, like torturing people or bombing stuff or talking about what cowardly naive little twats the rest of us are. I also hope I’m not being too glib; I don’t view this as just some weird little function of run-of-the-mill macho bullshit that you often find in politics, particularly surrounding matters of national security, but as a significant and legitimately disturbing trend in American conservative politics. It’s not just some tick amongst supporters; as we heard in the second Republican debate when the issue of torture came up, this delusion 24 Jack Bauer delusion is largely driving policy at this point, and that’s a friggin’ scary thing.

So it’s with a special kind of cringe that I continue to read stories like this one.

Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge’s passing remark – “Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’ ” – got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

This is what we’ve been reduced to. Fictional characterization is not just supplementing the jurisprudence of a Supreme Court justice, it, but is SUPPLANTING it.

Be afraid.