Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4

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Bauer Power: 24 and the Making of an American / Mike Dillon

Abstract: This essay explores how 24 represents torture as an encounter between the imagined nation of “America” and the stateless and nebulous characteristic of “terrorism.” Torturing of terror suspects became public knowledge following the Abu Ghraib scandal and reports of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay Prison. This and other scandals of Bush administration have interacted with the work of 24’s fictional Counter Terrorist Unit in complex ways. The show’s protagonist, Jack Bauer, can be seen as a source of a new model of discipline and national identity.

Keywords: 24, Torture, Bush Doctrine, Entertainment, Counterterrorism, Biopower

“There has not been a terrorist attack in the United States since Jack Bauer first appeared on television.” – www.jackbauerfacts.com

JACK BAUER JUSTICE

<1> In November, 2006, conservative commentator Laura Ingraham argued on Fox News‘ The O‘Reilly Factor that the popularity of the hit series 24 (also on Fox) was sufficient evidence that the average American approved using torture on terror suspects if it assured victory in the War on Terror. American audiences‘ love of 24 and its protagonist, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) of the fictitious Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU), she asserted, was "as close to a national referendum that it‘s okay to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we‘re gonna get" (YouTube.com). As hyperbolic right-wing reverence of the program‘s wildly implausible counter-terrorism scenarios goes, this was hardly an isolated instance; other prominent conservatives – including former Fox host John Gibson, former CNN and Fox host Glenn Beck – have similarly invoked 24‘s frequent representations of "justifiable" torture as indicative of the need for an aggressive foreign policy that cannot, must not, waver in saving American lives. Conservative economist Stephen Moore has insisted that "Jack Bauer justice" is both what the country demands and what policymakers should implement.[1]

<2> This essay explores these purported right-wing underpinnings of 24 by surveying the existing academic literature on the program‘s linkages to controversial policies pertaining to torture. One of 24‘s producers, Joel Surnow, has described himself as a "right-wing nut job" who "shares his show‘s hard-line perspective" (Mayer) and there are anecdotal reports that George W. Bush is an admirer of the series (Starpulse.com). These factors narrow the gap between a piece of televised entertainment that generates its suspense by perpetuating the astronomically improbable "ticking bomb" narrative and the real-life legislation and dismissals of civil rights that have resulted from this paranoia.[2] Conversations around 24 are characterized by a complicated slippage between mass entertainment, the newsstream, and policymaking that is central to the public and academic discussions of media pertaining to the so-called "War on Terror."

<3> Exploring such representations in entertainment fiction need not necessarily resemble the outlandishness of Ingraham‘s bizarre correlations, which assume a very straightforward link between the entertainment a public chooses to popularize and its attitudes toward policy. Such a viewpoint cannot account for 24‘s widespread popularity across the political spectrum – its fan base reportedly includes Bill Clinton (Hollywood.com); it has also attracted outspoken liberals like Janeane Garofalo to its cast (in Season 7). Further, the global popularity of 24, particularly in the United Kingdom, is a particular sticking point: surely those non-American audiences who disapprove of the war in Iraq are not cheering for Jack Bauer because they view his actions as analogous to the Bush Doctrine. 24‘s global success, then, raises fascinating questions about the hegemonic influence of American entertainment; these have been explored by comprehensive works like Global Hollywood 2 that attempt to "acknowledge the policy, distributional, promotional and exhibitory protocols of the screen" that make possible Hollywood‘s dominant presence worldwide (43). The simple truth is that 24 is also undeniably entertaining: it exploits the "cliffhanger" gimmick to great narrative effect and delivers on Hollywood‘s reputation for glossy production value. Its watchability as an action-drama further complicates pinpointing its precise appeal to non-Americans. It also points to the small-mindedness of the right-wing chatter insisting on interpreting 24 as a validation of torture.

<4> This essay is narrower in scope, however. Its purpose is to explore how 24 represents torture as an encounter in which the imagined nation called "America" and the stateless and nebulous characteristic of "terrorism" come into contact. The issue of torture is one of the most contentious topics surrounding the Bush Administration‘s handling of the War on Terror in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The torturing of terror suspects became public knowledge following the Abu Ghraib scandal and reports of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay Prison. Later reconfigured around the particular technique of "waterboarding," debates about torture‘s efficacy and justifiability have waned of late, swallowed up first by successive news cycles chronicling the numerous scandals of Bush administration. And in the midst of economic calamity, the Obama administration has thus far refused to consider seriously any investigation of former Bush officials for what, by objective juridical standards, were war crimes.[3]

<5> Polling data has, with some consistency, indicated that a majority of Americans do not favor the blanket use torture as a method of interrogation. [4] Yet between Emmy-winning programs like 24 and the robust box office performances of films like Saw (Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Roth, 2006) – what critic David Edelstein has dubbed "torture porn" – popular television and film‘s representations of torture and mutilation have doubtlessly increased in numbers and in profile in the last decade.[5] In the ten years now since 9/11, film and media studies have scrutinized such torture narratives in connection to the White House‘s aggressive and unapologetic defense of the theory and practice of justifiable torture (their euphemism: "enhanced interrogation"). Boasting a broader fan base and acclaim from critics who have generally been hostile to the likes of Hostel, 24 has proven a seminal popular text in studying the interstices of entertainment media and American policies toward torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite detention.[6] Its success as a television series also far surpasses the timid box office performances of Hollywood melodramas that address the issue of torture, such as Rendition (Hood, 2007) and Unthinkable (Jordan, 2010), and of others that focus on the War on Terror generally, such as In the Valley of Elah (Haggis, 2007), Lions for Lambs (Redford, 2007), and Body of Lies (Scott, 2008).

<6> The remarkable popularity of 24 features prominently in investigations of how ultra-violent entertainment is contextualized in the cultural imagination vis-à-vis the unpleasant realities of war and terror generally and the issue of torture specifically. If scholars and cultural critics are to read 24 as reflective of a particular cultural moment, what relationship does this program assume between fictitious representations and real-world policymaking? What worldview does the 24 brand affirm when Bauer successfully foils both foreign and domestic terrorism?  I take a separate approach from the majority of critical works pertaining to the program‘s representations of torture, which invariably place their attention on the portrayal of Bauer as a masterful interrogator. In doing so, these works have, with almost unanimous consistency, overlooked a pivotal element of the program‘s engagement with the topic of torture.

<7> My argument turns this analysis around to consider instead the ineffectiveness of torture when enacted on Bauer himself at multiple points in the series. This conceit allows the series to represent power as something articulated through one‘s own indestructibility, not through pain dealt to others. This distinction becomes important in projecting an imagined nation (in Benedict Anderson‘s formulation) of a United States that retains moral superiority in the War on Terror. Bauer‘s ability to withstand torture becomes one of the program‘s key methods of distinguishing "America" from enemy entities that always prove less resistant to physical pain. This, I argue, helps to establish categorical distinctions between good and evil, moral superiority and inferiority, that mirror neoconservative discourses around the moral stakes of torture. Jack Bauer‘s body is an integral object for understanding the life-affirming and life-denying valuations that underwrite 24.

<8> While the specific issue examined in this essay is limited to torture, I will note momentarily that making Bauer‘s body the central object of analysis may open several new approaches pertaining to 24‘s myriad other controversial or otherwise paradoxical elements. For instance, the program‘s supposedly progressive attributes (it depicted an African-American president long before the 2008 election of Barack Obama; later, the series would feature a female president) sit uneasily with its regressive caricatures of Muslims, which have famously drawn complaints. [7] In viewing 24 as primarily Bauer‘s story, one might consider how the heterogeneous social identities that populate the world of 24 coalesce around a body that, after all, is white, male, and heterosexual. Such approaches might take a cue from Rey Chow‘s theories of the "ascendancy of whiteness" (also discussed in Puar 24-32), about how multiculturalism is mediated and managed in ways that privilege European, heteronormative subjectivities. Other studies, such as Elizabeth Goldberg‘s survey of the representations of state violence in historical films, similarly link representations of torture to the sidestepping of Third World historical perspectives in favor of "a white, Western protagonist [toward whom] audience identification is directed throughout the film" (248).

<9> My initial premise of reorienting studies of 24 toward Bauer‘s body may likewise find direct application to discussions of neoliberal governmentality and the glorification of security apparatuses already being taken up in existing studies of 24 (McPherson; Monohan). Bauer performs a dual role as both a representative of state power and an occasional rogue agent who refuses to be "disciplined," in the Foucaultian sense; this raises pertinent questions regarding the governing and management of bodies at the intersection of neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities – astutely outlined by Wendy Brown in the essay "American Nightmare" – that characterizes the current imperial moment of the United States. Each of these topics is a potentially fruitful area that my specific analysis below touches upon only in marginal or peripheral ways.

"CORRECT" FORMS OF TORTURE

<10> I will first survey the preexisting literature and commentary on 24 and the issue of torture. The program‘s overtly provocative depictions of torture scenarios to propel its season narratives arguably remain the most widely discussed component of this already politically over-determined series; this has overshadowed other relevant topics of discussion, such as its depictions of race, gender, state power, and surveillance technologies. This commentary, in brief, addresses Bauer‘s remarkable effectiveness in obtaining information through torture, despite the insistence of experts that torture, in actuality, does not produce reliable intelligence (e.g., Carle; Soufan).

<11>  While his actions are frequently presented as both ethically and legally dubious, Bauer is seldom wrong in determining the "correct" subjects to torture. Unless interrupted, he always manages to extract the necessary information with, as Isabel Pinedo puts it, almost "surgical" precision ( "Entertaining Torture"). That is, Bauer is efficient and exact, never torturing more than necessary and ceasing abuse immediately when he intuits he has collected the required information. In a highly publicized incident in 2006, Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan pleaded 24‘s creators to reduce the volume of these inaccurately depicted torture sequences (a contemporaneous study by the Parents Television Council counted 67 such sequences in the program‘s first five seasons [Mayer]). Failing that, Finnegan requested that each episode depicting torture be accompanied by disclaimers noting that effective interrogations, in real life, do not occur over the course of several intense minutes, but over days, even weeks or months, before progress is reported with a subject. No such disclaimers ever appeared on the program.

<12> Incendiary statements aired on right-wing media outlets have reinforced the criticism that torture on 24 evokes the fantasy of brutal and righteous punishment of America‘s would-be enemies without severe moral or legal repercussions because of the resulting circumvention of attacks on the homeland. This allegation may be best supported by sentiments expressed by Bauer‘s onetime girlfriend Audrey Raines (Kim Raver) at the end of a typically eventful 24-hour day: "We both know that you belong here, Jack, at CTU, doing what you do best. And thank God there are people like you who can deal with that world" (episode 4.24). At the height of the program‘s controversy, Jane Mayer noted how, despite its constant featuring of torture techniques at the service of its suspense narrative, "the show never engages in a serious dialogue on the subject. Nobody argues that torture doesn‘t work, or that it undermines America‘s foreign-policy strategy. Instead, the doubters tend to be softhearted dupes."

<13> Bauer-as-American is best equipped to handle "that world," and his ruthlessness as a counter-terror agent and particularly as an interrogator becomes the lens by which the contrast between life-affirming and life-destroying ideologies come into focus on 24. Further, 24‘s implicit fantasy of a readily identifiable, definable notion of America (the "in here" that exists in opposition to the equally homogenous "out there") is something I wish to explore in greater depth in this essay. Viewers of 24 unambiguously understand the stakes of failure (usually a nuclear catastrophe); the program‘s very format and presentation of these stakes encourage the viewer‘s desire to see results-oriented torture as glamorous, heroic, and life-saving, rather than barbaric and life-destroying. Edelstein, in his inquiry into the popularity of torture porn, echoes this dilemma, wondering whether our post-9/11 anxieties have made us the avid consumers of torture-for-entertainment and therefore culpable for its widespread acceptance. "Fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn't it?" he asks.

<14> In a sense, to evaluate the Bush-era political climate is to address precisely such issues of sympathy and morality for victims of torture. From the start, the abuses at Abu Ghraib provoked outrage not only over the moral failings of the participating soldiers (and, upon investigation, the administrative apparatus that sanctioned their behavior) but in particular over the cavalier actions of the soldiers who smile, wink, and thumbs-up their way through many of the photographs seen by the pubic. Still others, such as conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, dismissed even the suggestion of a scandal, citing the soldiers‘ actions at Abu Ghraib as amounting only to pent-up soldiers needing to "blow off steam" and treating the abuses as moments of levity akin to a fraternity prank (quoted in Meyer).

<15> The question of empathy, then, becomes central to assessments of who can be tortured, to what effect, and what response it elicits. Judith Butler‘s work has been particularly effective in extracting from the discourses around torture questions of how we define humanness itself amid the legal gray zones that have sprung up during the War on Terror. In comparing "which humans we regard as entitled to legal protection, and which humans we abandon to a domain unprotected by law" (2007: 954), Butler investigates the moral dimensions of such discussions in an attempt to understand what types of bodies are to be granted the status of "human." 24‘s absorption into the conservative rhetoric of justifiable torture potentially offers one of the ways at getting at these distinctions. This is not to validate the claim that, as 24 goes, so goes American public opinion; it is instead to argue that the particular attraction the program garners among the war‘s advocates evinces a philosophy of how to maintain distinctions between ally and enemy, good and evil, in a war whose declared enemy ( "Terror") is nondescript and whose scale encompasses the globe totally.

<16> Taking it as a given that 24 draws (sometimes uncomfortably) from topical Bush-era headlines for its narrative inspiration, the existing scholarship has probed the ways in which 24‘s representations and ideological presumptions about torture reflect a current zeitgeist, perhaps even a bloodlust. [8] My aim is to understand which characters the program is trying to solicit sympathy toward and what national characteristics are being pegged to those sympathies. Alternatively, what national identities are implicated in how the program presents the moral stakes and circumstances of "acceptable" torture?

<17> Productive interpretations can be drawn from 24‘s construction of its hero‘s indestructible body. This approach, in itself, is an established area of scholarship, and past works have examined action heroes of previous generations to determine the cultural climates they reflected in their day. Susan Jeffords, for instance, agues that heroes of 1980s Hollywood allowed viewers to "experience personal power by identifying with an individual hero‘s victory over fictional antagonists and national power" (28) through the "hard bodies" of action heroes "that enveloped strength, labor, determination, loyalty, and courage" (24). Contemporary iterations of such analysis have hypothesized similar connections between Bauer and our post-9/11 American landscape, notably Tara McPherson‘s reading of Bauer as symptomatic of a crisis in masculinity in the digital age (2007). Analyses like these reject understanding Bauer as a boilerplate action figure, but as a representative of a particular cultural moment.

<18> 24 suggests that the volatile times in which we live require a particular type of hero to rise to the challenges posed by the program‘s most consistent narrative motif: having to make difficult, perhaps morally reprehensible decisions when faced with the choice between fighting for justice or relenting to the evils that threaten civilization (wherein "civilization" invariably refers to American-style democracy). Drawing heavily from Giorgio Agamben‘s oft-cited formulations on the "state of exception," many of the analyses of 24 cite its glamorization of Bauer‘s instinctive, not contemplative, action and circumvention of slow-moving legal protocols.

Decisiveness is valued, not reflection. The temporal pressures of second-by-second insecurities mandate and naturalize frontier mentalities of shooting first and asking questions later. In this light, governmental agencies and (inter)national laws are feminized bureaucracies and conventions, respectively, out of touch with the field and as such insufficiently adapted for the rapid responses necessitated by absolute dangers. (Monohan 114)

The fast-paced nature of the program, in other words, propagates the belief that those who would pause to consider "social problems and root causes of human insecurity are too soft in their approach, too systemic in their demands, and too time-intensive to even warrant mention" (116). Others add that the viewer‘s acceptance of such a dynamics is justified in large part by Bauer‘s identification as hero (Sutherland and Swan). It is through these combined rubrics that Bauer is assumed by 24‘s critics to symbolize the fantasies of American exceptionalism that motivated the Bush administration and its neoconservative base.

<19> Further, similar analyses connect 24‘s political subtexts to the conventions of recognizable genres. While the action genre is a logical area of concern for some (Pinedo, "Tortured Logic"), the dominant trend in such studies draws links to the Western and its frontier mythologies (Hermes 167-168; Delany 193). This line of argument is particularly evocative of Joan Mellen‘s framework for understanding the changing nature of Western masculinity in its 1960s incarnations. For instance, in Tom Doniphon, John Wayne‘s character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962), Mellen identifies a strongman who forcibly vanquishes injustice amidst a community that would prefer to compromise with and capitulate to it; she goes on to argue that this characterization signals a nostalgia for the man of action who does not hesitate to uphold his convictions in the face of societal pressures (258-261). One might extend this reading to Jack Bauer, the surrogate strongman who promises a return to American myths that delineate "right" from "wrong." Perhaps 24 suggests that such a strongman is once again necessary in a period when such delineations have been muddied and complicated by the shapeless geopolitical patterns of transnational terror.[9]

<20> Linking this discussion to the conventions of the Western is useful because it allows me to consider 24 in tandem with older generic models that similarly speak to American cultural myths about notions of right and wrong (or, alternatively, of civilization and lawlessness) being made legible through acts of violence. Lee Clark Mitchell argues that the pleasurable gaze audiences adopt toward masculine figures in the Western is, in fact, constructed precisely around depictions of violence endured by the hero. The Western consistently tears down the hero only to later have him rise, victorious. In Mitchell‘s reading,

Western heroes are knocked down, made supine, then variously tortured so that they can recover from harm in order to rise again. Or rather, the process of beating occurs so that we can see men recover, regaining their strength and resources in the process of once again making themselves into men. The paradox lies in the fact that we watch them become what they already are, as we exult in the culturally encoded confirmation of a man again becoming a man. (185)

<21> In Mitchell‘s view, these distortions of the body – the breakdown that precedes the inevitable reaffirmation – result in the contradictory trope of making masculine a form of masculinity that appears unchanging; the hero must regain a masculinity that he never lost to begin with, presupposing a fixed, historically essential masculine identity that "always exists before the effects of cultural processes are seen" (186). While this essay is not a gender analysis and therefore sidesteps viewing Bauer‘s body as a necessarily "masculine" one, this interplay between the violent disruption and subsequent redemption of the body is relevant if Bauer is to be viewed by audiences as emblematic of unassailable American values. 24 produces a comparable paradox in Bauer‘s transformation into "what [he] already is" (177), a relentless warrior and patriot who fights for a system of American values that effaces the processes of its own mythmaking. The America being fought for on 24 remains unchanging despite the disruption of terrorism and homogenous in its fantasies of restoring order to a world of chaos and difference. This perspective is allegorically in line with the Bush administration‘s neoconservative agenda.

THE INDESTRUCTIBLE AMERICAN

<22> Starting with this notion that the disruptive/redemptive sequence of violent action can be applied to the continuous character of a culture, much can be drawn from shifting the discussion of torture more explicitly onto the body of Bauer. This body now becomes the focal point for addressing 24‘s imaginary construction of American power and of its resulting fantasies of justifiable violence against America‘s enemies. Apart from the occasional cursory mention, it remains a curiously unexamined aspect of 24 and of torture: periodically throughout the series, Bauer is abducted, often by the very terror suspects he pursues during a given season‘s crisis. He is then subjected to brutal forms of torture for the specific information he has already gathered about an impending terror plot or the general knowledge he possesses about confidential government secrets. In every instance, however, Bauer is rescued or an ingenious escape is managed before the tortures succeed in extracting information from him.

<23> Given the narrative‘s breakneck pace, Bauer is never the worse for wear after surviving torture and is quickly thrust back into the action. The most notable case of this occurs between seasons five and six. In the concluding sequence of Season Five, Bauer is captured by agents of the Chinese government who have been hunting him ever since he led a botched raid on the Los Angeles Chinese Consulate (4.20). Bauer is forcibly shipped off to a prison in China and tortured for valuable state secrets continuously for two years. At the start of Season Six, Bauer is released as part of a deal between the Chinese and the American president, who requires Bauer‘s assistance in fighting a new crop of terrorists (6.1). Upon Bauer‘s official handover to CTU agents, the Head of Security at LA‘s Chinese Consulate (Tzi Ma), who orchestrated Bauer‘s abduction and incarceration, reveals that he was utterly unsuccessful in breaking Bauer: "Please convey to your president that Mr. Bauer never broke his silence. He hasn‘t spoken a word in nearly two years". [10] The beleaguered, physically and psychically damaged Bauer jumps back into action after a change of clothes and a quick shave.

<24> Bauer‘s resistance to methods of torture increases as the series progresses. [11] His most graphic on-screen torture during Season Two (2.19-20), during which he is stripped, cut, seared, and sent into cardiac arrest, carries the distinction of being an unusual instance of Bauer‘s injuries impeding his progress throughout the remainder of the season. When the narrative requires, Bauer can be seen clutching at his damaged heart, wheezing and wincing. Bauer rarely does so in subsequent storylines, and by season eight, his body no longer appears to register pain in any recognizable way. In a far more compressed variation of what Mitchell calls the process of "violation and recovery" (183), Bauer‘s travails from previous episodes are quickly dismissed and never again reference. [12] Even the seemingly trivial plot contrivance that Bauer is never seen eating, napping, or visiting the men‘s room adds to the physical burdens of his heroic suffering, giving him superhuman or machine-like qualities.

<25> These details are seldom the focus of the literature on Bauer‘s above-noted effectiveness as an interrogator. I posit, however, that this resilience is a crucial factor for the program‘s moral justifications of torture. Bauer‘s indestructibility is not merely a dramatic conceit that permeates 24‘s unending series of crises. It acts as a primary vehicle for the program‘s post-9/11 ideological suppositions because it serves to establish a hierarchical relationship between the morally superior American body and the "breakable" enemy body. This, in effect, results from how the series reduces complex geopolitical matters to symbolic encounters in the interrogation room.

<26> Any inquiry into the political effects of torture must begin with Elaine Scarry‘s celebrated study The Body in Pain (1985), which addresses the political meanings that can be extracted from the basic difficulties of articulating physical pain. Torture is an act "that permits one person's body to be translated into another person's voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime's fiction of power" (18). Scarry separates starkly the pain being experienced from the meanings generated for and extracted by the torturer who produces that pain, establishing a binary between torturer and tortured that is wholly antagonistic.

<27> Such a binary is certainly redundant, as an interrogator does not usually torture someone on "his side." But the externalization of physical pain in the form of a human torturer provides a useful understanding of these relationship dynamics. They are inherent in scenes of torture on 24 and help to chart out who is deemed worthy of the viewers‘ sympathies in their fictitious narrative contexts. As Scarry notes:

Even though [pain] occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as "not oneself," "not me," as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of. This internal physical experience is in torture accompanied by its external political equivalent, the presence in the space outside the body of a self-proclaimed "enemy," someone who in becoming the enemy becomes the human embodiment of aversiveness; he ceases to have any psychological characteristics or content other than that he is, like physical pain, "not me," "against me." (52)

<28> In keeping with this quotation, the periodic torture of Bauer serves an important narrative function by identifying the villains of 24 in transparent, expedient terms. While 24‘s frequent twists and double-crosses complicate easy identification of "good" and "bad" guys, the one certainty the viewer can rely on is that Bauer himself is unambiguously the hero. This establishes an important standard by which villainy and torture are linked. The torturing of Bauer effectively announces the antagonistic intentions of the perpetrating character, and this, as I demonstrate below, carries important implications about the moral positioning of the torturer versus the tortured. Further, this externalization is, for Scarry, an analog of war, in that the capacity to destroy another‘s body simultaneously symbolizes the destruction of the culture or civilization that body represents. In torture, "the human body opens itself and allows ‘the nation‘ to be registered there in the wound," making that act of torture an occasion by which the otherness of that abused body and its national, ethnic, or cultural heritage is made apparent and breakable (112). Torture, then, is an act of designating an enemy culture or ideology for the purpose of discrediting or delegitimizing it.

<29> Of course, we are operating here with notions of "nation" and "culture" that, in actuality, are imprecise; one might argue that 24 most reveals its conservative leanings in the way it imposes a singularity of purpose onto Bauer that in no way reflects the heterogeneity of the American social and political body. David Campbell writes of national identity as being "performative," shaped and determined by perceived dangers believed to threaten the national polity. By simplifying the nation‘s interactions with multiple historical processes that produce said threats, "the constitution of identity is achieved through the inscription of boundaries that serve to demarcate an ‘inside‘ from an ‘outside,‘ a ‘self‘ from an ‘other,‘ a ‘domestic‘ from a ‘foreign‘" (9). In this sense, it becomes problematic to view torture in 24 as any responsible foundation for discussing weighty political matters: it supposes divisions between a unified American nation and the "evils" of terrorism that are simply too clean.

<30> The broad and philosophical terms in which Scarry addresses the subject matter, then, serve as the starting point for examining American torture as a phenomenon that does not exist independent of historical and cultural context.[13] Resisting looking at torture as historically invariable, several contemporary scholars consider how encounters in the interrogation room are informed by structures of power and media particular to their historical moment. In addition to the above-cited work by Butler, these studies have framed American torture – usually by focusing on the Abu Ghraib scandal – within a variety of discourses, such as queer subjectivity (Puar), art history (Eisenman), photography (Sontag), and, notably, pornography (Danto; Bourke; Gurstein; etc.), to name a few; these approaches also overlap significantly, even among the authors listed here. However, one theme common to this range of scholarship is the assumption that national or cultural identities (of torturers and victims alike) are made evident through the act of torture, not presupposed prior to it. In other words, the "enemy combatant" and his corollary, the "American terror-fighter," are the product of the narratives and structures that activate such distinctions.

<31> One of the more compelling of such arguments is Anne McClintock‘s assessment that the contradictions of American imperialism in the War on Terror (notably its paradoxical rhetoric of peace and commitment to indefinite war) can be best explained as a "paranoid" mode of governance, which requires an enemy to justify itself. Faced with an ideological enemy that is not readily identifiable, the question becomes "how to embody the invisible enemy and be visibly seen to punish it" (95, emphasis in original). In making the bodies of prisoners "legible" as enemy bodies, American forces convince themselves that the enemies‘ status as prisoners is automatically aligned with their collective, threatening stance against the United States. This, in turn, legitimizes the expansion of the war effort, the occupation of the Middle East, and particularly the broadening of surveillance technologies, a chief manifestation of America geopolitical paranoia wherein "the power to see [becomes] equated with the power to dominate" (94, emphasis in original).[14]

<32> The view among conservative commentators is that 24 "gets torture right," presumably because only guilty people would possess information worth torturing for. In the circular logic identified by McClintock, it is assumed that such prisoners are being tortured because they are our enemy; hence, they must be our enemy if we are torturing them. In addition, 24 propagates the fantasy that thwarting terrorism is just a matter of finding the correct person to torture. But what if we were to reverse this dynamic, given that the torture undergone by Bauer is the most frequent and often the most graphic in the series? If Bauer‘s torture is the most "visible" on the program, what does it legitimize? If the torture of an enemy serves to validate the enemy‘s status, Bauer‘s torture appears to achieve the opposite effect. Through torture, Bauer‘s patriotism is amplified, his indestructibility made manifest through acts of torture that allow him to become, in Mitchell‘s formulation, "what he already is."

<33> 24 relies frequently on torture as its means of defining the so-called "Americanness" of Bauer. This, I believe, exemplifies the contradictory premise of a War on Terror that rhetorically invokes a conflict with identifiable "sides" even though global terror has proven far less accommodating of traditional notions of political boundaries.[15] Torture on 24 serves to establish an important binary between good and evil that appears to be informed by neoconservative moral rationalities (Brown 696-7). This, combined with the obvious allusions Bauer‘s enemies are to a range of Bush-era bogeymen, has consequences on the motivations for the torture being committed. One of 24‘s characteristic incongruities with the real-life effects of torture is its justification of some instances of torture and not others. Henry Shue describes a difference between interrogational and terroristic torture – the former is enacted for the express purpose of extracting information and the latter is "overshadowed by the goal of the intimidation of people other than the victim," rendering irrelevant whatever intelligence the victim may or may not possess (53). The key distinction between the two, he notes, lies in the integrity and discretion of the torturer, who determines whether the victim‘s compliance will result in the cessation of the torture. When the victim is offered no possibility of escape through compliance, torture spirals into an uglier and unjustifiable realm, as it did at Abu Ghraib, wherein the offenses were transparently about humiliation, not interrogation.

<34> One might characterize the controversies surrounding 24 as primarily concerning the program‘s fast and loose oscillation between its depictions of interrogational versus terroristic torture. When Bauer is the torturer, his actions are legitimized by the hypothetical costs of failing to extract information about, say, an impending bomb blast or assassination attempt. In the terms stated above, to grant Bauer this legitimacy is to assert the superiority and primacy of the torturer‘s world, while diminishing that of the tortured, whose world is destroyed by the acts of torture that discredit the ideologies his body comes to represent. Torture on 24, time and again, "[objectifies] the fact that [the torturer] has a world" and legitimizes through "feigned urgency the critical importance of that world, a world whose asserted magnitude is confirmed by the cruelty it is able to motivate and justify" (Scarry 36). Hence 24 goes about the impossible task of depicting torture to justify American moral leadership – a leadership that must be maintained if we are to narrate the War on Terror as a story that begins with the American world being victimized on September 11, 2001 (Butler 2002).

<35> In contrast, the discredited world or worldview of the program‘s villains is never granted the same degree of urgency or authenticity. When Bauer is tortured, the purpose might be to retrieve information (typical question posed to him: "How much do you know about us?"), but viewers understand that Bauer‘s compliance will likely result in his death – once the terrorists "have no more use for him," as such plot conventions go – and thus no one will be left to foil the terror plot underway. Bauer‘s torturing of suspects never results from terroristic or anti-American intentions and his methods spill over into unrestrained sadism only when that sadism is part of a ruse designed to compel the suspect‘s cooperation, like when he threatens to murder a terrorist‘s innocent family members (2.12; 3.23; 8.11). The sole exception to this occurs late in season eight, when Bauer viciously and callously tortures his girlfriend‘s assassin (8.21). Yet this development is still accompanied by the viewers‘ knowledge that the man possesses information vital to Bauer‘s objectives. In other words, Bauer‘s need to torture the man to complete his mission is never in question, merely whether he goes too far in his particular techniques. 24 asks viewers to accept that Bauer is always performing interrogational torture, but is the victim of terroristic torture, thus putting forth a dangerous philosophy of political violence: when America tortures, it is interrogational and necessary, but when "they" torture, it is terrorism.

<36> The circumstances under which Bauer‘s victimization produces imaginary dichotomies of acceptable versus unacceptable torture are only part of what is fascinating about the incongruities between real-life torture and its representations on 24. The fiction exemplified by Bauer (and a crucial divergence from Scarry‘s thesis) is that he does not experience the effects of torture in any conventional sense because his tormentors never manage to translate his pain into their power. Even when Bauer is faced with impossible odds and subjected to unthinkable forms of abuse, audiences are never truly in doubt of his chances of survival (especially mid-season); in these sequences, power and control actually belong to Bauer, the tortured, all along. Bauer‘s retention of self-cognizance during torture is usually pragmatic to the requirements of the narrative. At times, torture is a diversion or delay tactic – Bauer must suffer to allow others, elsewhere, to achieve a particular objective; at others, torture is an interruption – Bauer becomes delayed and his enemies evade him, prolonging the crisis storyline. Or, torture becomes a means of inadvertent infiltration – once Bauer manages to escapes his restraints, he finds himself conveniently inside the secret headquarters of his enemies. Each circumstance necessarily focuses on Bauer‘s identity as the narrative‘s hero.

BAUER POWER

<37> More pertinent to this discussion are the ideological considerations of interpreting Bauer‘s uncanny tenacity as some type of allegorical embodiment of American resolve in the face of terror. His routine abductions bring him face to face with those determined to do America harm, and those encounters become occasions for Bauer to assert the superior worldview of the United States in clear terms. This is seen, for instance, in his exchange below with Marwan (Arnold Vosloo), the chief villain of season four. Marwan has already been foiled twice by Bauer and CTU – his first plot, a live Internet broadcast of the execution of the Secretary of Defense (William Devane; 4.1-5); his second, a remote-initiated meltdown of the nation‘s nuclear power plants (4.8) – and yet he remains confident that the mass chaos created by his actions was enough to consider his mission a success. Bauer, beaten, on his knees, and handcuffed, begs to differ:

Bauer: Whatever you‘ve planned next is going to fail, just like everything else you‘ve tried today.

Marwan: Fail? Almost 40 dead in a train crash, many more near the San Gabriel Island nuclear plant.

Bauer: That wasn‘t really your plan, was it?  We managed to stop the other 103 power plants from melting down. That‘s what America will remember, that we stopped you.

Marwan: No. They‘ll remember the image of Secretary of Defense Heller held hostage on your own soil, and it will burn in their psyches. This country will forever be afraid to let their leaders appear in public.

Bauer: For all the hatred that you have for this country, you don‘t understand it very well. Whatever you throw at us, I promise you that‘ll never happen. (4.15; emphasis mine)

<38> Bauer‘s statements may be viewed as inspiring in large part because he expresses faith in an ideal notion of American resilience while under terrible duress himself. In its association of Bauer‘s heroism with America‘s leadership position in a war against terrorism, 24 suggests that Bauer‘s refusal to cooperate under the pressures of torture is analogous to an infallible, indestructible American social body. Much like how the shock and trauma of the 9/11 attacks simultaneously gave rise to remarkable public sentiments of unity and national belonging, Bauer‘s pain doubles as his main expression of patriotism. In the world of 24, Bauer cannot fail because America cannot fail.

<39> As noted above, however, to prop up such patriotism as the exclusive purview of an American hero (or, rather, the "correct" kind of American hero, given the many ostensible American nationals in the series who fail in this regard), is to take for granted that a national identity is made coherent in relation to a belief in dangers "located in an external and anarchic environment" (Campbell 8). For Leerom Medovoi, the processes by which such beliefs propel new dividing lines after 9/11 (the milieu of 24) can be traced to Michel Foucault‘s conceptualization of race war and its applications in the global war on terror. For Foucault, "the narrative of race war is most fundamentally concerned with two peoples, divided by language, religion, place of origin, or some other formative collective experience who are nonetheless caught up in a history of mutual struggle" and whose struggles in turn produce counter-historical narratives of power (Medovoi 59).[16] Medovoi asks what kind of traditionally defined "external" enemy poses a threat to a world in which boundaries have become so porous (70-1). His conclusion is that the War on Terror represents a contemporary political rationality suitable to managing the "mutual struggles" now divided along cultural fault lines as a result of the unification of the world‘s cultures through market liberalism – a dynamic Samuel Huntington has famously called a "clash of civilizations."

<40> Medovoi‘s claim here is that the War on Terror functions as a military remedy against "beliefs, meanings, and practices of any sort that threaten or resist … incorporation into a global liberal society" (74). It signals the adoption of a new form of race war in which "Terrorist" becomes an abstract category of abnormality that must exist in order to assert the primacy of "normal" global governance.

Terrorism becomes, like murder or rape, the naming of a deviant type against which society must be defended. This is the sense in which the external racial enemy has been folded back into a biopolitical project of the traditionally domestic sort: the surveillance, policing, and punishing of a race of ‘abnormals‘ who exist in advance of their criminal acts, and who thus should be detected, identified, and neutralized preemptively, before they actualize the potential social threat that they pose. (72)

In essence, the threat of terrorism has been weaved into the biopolitical management of populations that, in a market-integrated world, has become global in its reach (71).

<41> It would be redundant at this stage to draw simplistic correlations between 24‘s villains and how their existence justifies a frenzy of torture and surveillance technologies featured on the program. What is of interest, however, is the impossibility of pinpointing consistent characteristics among Bauer/America‘s many foes, a wide assortment of nationals (including treacherous Americans). Divisions between protagonists and antagonists are more customarily consigned to the amorphous realm of ideological and cultural difference, but even this varies wildly; while grouped summarily under the heading of "terrorist" or "extremist," enemies on 24 plot out different attacks with different aims for different reasons. I posit, then, that Bauer himself becomes the common denominator: whatever the ideological or national origin of or explanation for their terroristic actions, the villains of 24 are united in their inability to break Bauer. Amidst the persistently shifting loyalties among the program‘s characters, this particular trait remains constant.

<42> What I have chosen to call "Bauer Power" therefore refers not merely to Bauer‘s enduring body and patriotic resolve but also to a process of distinguishing and ordering social and political actors in the age of terror. This near-homonym of biopower – Foucault‘s theory of "the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being" (2003: 239) – makes Bauer‘s tortured body the focal point of the spectators‘ identification with the logic of a race war predicated on American exceptionalism.  Foucault asserts that biopolitics is accompanied by, and the modern state cannot function without, the mechanisms of race war that maintain the sovereign‘s right to kill by implementing categorical distinctions between "what must live and what must die" (254). Noting the genocidal nationalisms that dominated the twentieth century, Foucault identifies a modern rationality consisting of the denial of life for some as a direct means of affirming it for others. Bauer‘s contention that America will never yield despite "whatever you throw at us" assumes, first and foremost, a delineation between the "you" and the "us," legitimating a particular wartime biopolitics in which the stewardship of global stability rests in the hands of the United States.

<43> Bauer‘s body, under terroristic torture – that is, torture that categorically must be the province of those who oppose global peace – becomes a site onto which the battle lines of a new race war can be made comprehendible. It does so, however, in a way that always asserts the primacy of an imagined, unified America that is unilaterally committed to defending itself against terrorism.[17] Through its articulation in a body that is paradoxically rendered vulnerable yet is impossible to destroy, Bauer Power is the power to make different: to make visible the "enemy" through his association with terroristic torture; to assert moral supremacy over that enemy through a resistance to pain; and to assure that American exceptionalism remains stable and continuous despite the horrors of terrorism and the world-destroying violence of torture.

<44> This must be seen in tandem with the knowledge that Bauer himself virtually never fails when he is himself the torturer. This, ultimately, is the fantastic premise that underwrites 24, the contradictory notion that not only does torture provide reliable information, but only from those who are too weak in their resolve to resist that torture. By making Bauer both interrogator par excellence as well as resistant to those very tactics he would himself employ, the program promotes the moral supremacy and political primacy of American heroism each time a would-be terrorist caves to the pressures of physical and psychological torture. For Scarry, victims of torture are forced to accept their eventual confession or divulging of information as an act of self-betrayal, something they succumb to when the pain becomes too much to bear (46-47). In 24, only the weak-willed or those informed by inferior ideologies are capable of such self-betrayal; Bauer is not. Having Bauer remain in a position of power as both torturer and tortured allows 24 effectively to have its cake and eat it, too. One might say the divisions that Medovoi identifies in his account of a new, global race war are reduced to a matter of which side can withstand more physical pain.

<45> In putting it in these terms, I cannot help but recall the commonplace portrayal of George Bush as the anti-intellectual president who always deferred to his "gut feelings" when making decisions (Suskind; Wolffe; Harris and Allen; etc.). More importantly, reducing the complex dynamics of torture to a matter of the inherently superior "values" of American life allows a myth of American global leadership to remain intact, thereby excusing the violence of torture and war as a necessary step in attaining the peace we all presumably desire. America need not apologize for a war that is synonymous with the preservation of American ideals. The same might be said for Bauer‘s ability to deflect any psychological trauma that might result from the (let‘s call it what it is) sociopathic behavior that he commits regularly in the name of "doing the right thing." Season Seven, with its stark emphasis on Bauer‘s psychological and spiritual redemption – this follows his self-imposed exile to Africa, depicted in the TV movie 24: Redemption – begins with him being questioned about his past uses of torture at a senate committee hearing. Bauer makes it explicit that he does not regret his actions.

Bauer: For a combat soldier, the difference between success and failure is your ability to adapt to your enemy. The people that I deal with, they don‘t care about your rules. All they care about is a result. My job is to stop them from accomplishing their objectives. I simply adapted. In answer to your question, am I above the law? No, sir. I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide what price I should pay. But please, do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions that I have made because, sir, the truth is, I don‘t. (7.1)

<46> Throughout season seven, this characterization is further reinforced by the introduction of FBI agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching), Bauer‘s partner for much of the season and briefly his lover in season eight, before she is abruptly killed. Walker‘s hesitations about resorting to torture represent a (notably gendered) reversal of Bauer‘s belief that the ends always justify the means. Yet her important contribution to the program as Bauer‘s moral counterweight does little to complicate 24‘s continual return to the trope of torture. Season Seven concludes by implying that Walker tortures the ringleader of several enemy conspiracies now under her custody (7.24); her return in Season Eight is accompanied by the revelation that she suffered a subsequent mental collapse and retired from the Bureau (8.4). But the philosophical quandaries posed by Walker‘s character arc do little to introduce a more nuanced approach to the moral dilemma of torture. The effect is quite the opposite, to reassert how fortunate the nation is for having people like Bauer "who can deal with that world" when others fail.

<47> That Bauer is so configured as a masterful practitioner of results-oriented torture, yet one who never succumbs to the effects of such techniques, makes him a central object in the hierarchies of power represented in 24: those associated with the powers of preserving (life/democracy/civilization) are not merely those who directly wield violence upon enemy bodies, but those who are most able to resist and withstand such violence. Bauer is unable to betray his country because he will not give in to the pain of torture; his enemies, however, must give in because doing so reinforces the inherent inferiority of their convictions. It is this component of the series that Slavoj Žižek refers to as "the lie of 24," that a figure like Bauer can be such an effective torturer, but can simultaneously be a loving father and sympathetic do-gooder. It is because he also carries these positive qualities that the need to torture on 24 becomes transfigured as part of Bauer‘s personal tragedy, not of those who suffer at the hands of his authorized and unauthorized interrogations. Torturing others is the burden he must shoulder to protect his country, just as war is a necessary evil to root out terrorism.

CONCLUSION

<48>  The exceptional circumstances and "feigned urgencies" featured regularly on 24 invite its viewers to align their sympathies based on issues of torture: Jack Bauer, despite the shaky moral and legal grounds on which he operates, remains irreproachable because he does it right and makes it certain that "they" will do it wrong. It is also within the biopolitical race war and its coinciding designations of the categories "alive" and "dead" that the dramas of interrogational and terroristic torture play out on the program. Bauer‘s resistance to the electrical wires, blades, fists, and other devices deployed against him allows him to convert the world-destroying traumas of torture into a manifestation of American exceptionalism.  This remains true regardless of whether he is the torturer or the tortured; in the delineation Scarry offers between a weapon and a tool (172-176), with its respective powers to destroy and create, Bauer‘s body is always alternating registers.

<49>  24‘s representations of Bauer as both torturer and, more significantly, as tortured, illustrate the importance these torture sequences have in placing the program‘s key players (and their real-life political referents) within broader spectrums of life and death. This becomes of particular political importance in the race war, generating claims for the need to destroy some lives in a campaign to protect others. The prevalence of torture in 24, then, provokes a series of questions: whose extraordinary physical suffering is permitted to convey what meaning, and to whom? Whose torture, in Butler‘s terms, is "grievable?" (2004: xiv) Whose pain, even death, is rendered a necessary evil for the maintenance of American democracy, and whose, to put it in the more esoteric context of the 24 universe, is deemed worthy of the "silent clock?" Each time Bauer is tortured, the implicit conflation of his body‘s indestructibility with its Americanness brings into focus the comparative nature of his enemies‘ bodies and justifies their social and literal deaths by excluding them from a narrow American vision of a peaceful global society.

Notes

[1] Moore made this statement while appearing as a panel guest on the October 20, 2006, episode of HBO‘s Real Time with Bill Maher; his comments elicited loud boos from Maher‘s overwhelmingly left-leaning audience.  

[2] The phrase "ticking bomb" is invoked most frequently in reference to Alan M. Dershowitz‘s contention that such exceptional circumstances may provide a limited legal justification for authorized uses of torture.

[3] Those who allege war crimes typically cite the Bush Administration‘s violation of international laws pertaining to torture and the treatment of prisoners during armed conflicts. The most regularly cited of such regulations are outlined in the third and fourth Geneva Conventions, which call for the humane treatment of captured enemy combatants, and of the protection of civilians, respectively.

[4] For instance, a Pew Research Center poll taken in 2009 – timed to survey issues pertaining to the transition between Bush and Obama administrations – shows public opinion divided almost neatly between those who disapprove of torture and those who approve under rare or extraordinary circumstances. A contemporaneous Washington Post/ABC News poll found a clear majority of those who disapprove using torture (Cohen). Glenn Greenwald has criticized the nature of the question posed to participants in the latter poll, which is "phrased in the most pro-torture manner possible [and] grounded in the ludicrous, 24-clichéd ‘ticking time bomb‘ excuse."

[5] Numerous recent television programs have featured storylines or sequences concerning torture, its efficacy, its morality, etc., either as a regular feature of the show or in specific episodes. Examples include Lost (ABC, 2004-2010) and Battlestar Galactica (Syfy, 2003-2009). Some additional films in the so-called torture porn subgenre include Wolf Creek (Mclean, 2005), Captivity (Joffé, 2007), Martyrs (Laugier, 2008), and I Spit on Your Grave (Monroe, 2010).

[6] This is not to say that people have not used the moniker "torture porn" to describe 24. This is typically done to suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that the Fox program appeals to the basest forms of sensationalism pertaining to the terror-related fears and fantasies of viewers.

[7] In response to complaints from Arab-American groups about the portrayals of Muslim terrorists on the program, Kiefer Sutherland was featured, as himself, in a PSA in support of the American Muslim community. The PSA first accompanied the original broadcast of episode 4.8.

[8] It is worth noting, however, that despite its ripped-from-the-headlines topicality, the program does not actually depict waterboarding until as late as episodes 8.19 and 8.20.

[9] Interestingly, in the program‘s final season, the true culprits behind the day‘s terror schemes turn out to be agents in the Russian government. In this way, 24 concludes its run with an invocation of the geopolitical anxieties of the Cold War period.

[10] Bauer‘s torture by the Chinese is not depicted in the main series. This is instead depicted briefly in a short film promoting season six. The Chinese, frustrated by their lack of success in compelling Bauer to identify a suspected American agent within the Chinese government, stages a prison raid in a scheme to deceive Bauer into thinking he has been rescued. The purpose of the ruse is to trick Bauer into exposing the undercover American agent, which he inadvertently does before being thrown back in his cell.

[11] Bauer‘s growing invincibility runs parallel to his growing ruthlessness in taking immediate action when necessary. This is most evinced by his increased willingness to kill his enemies in flagrant acts of revenge: his Season Three execution of CTU traitor Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke; 3.14) is presented with some ambiguity (was she really reaching for that gun?). However, his later executions of the similarly treacherous Christopher Henderson (Peter Weller; 5.23) and Dana Walsh (Katee Sackhoff; 8.20) are, plainly, murders. The latter episodes of Season Eight feature an enraged Bauer on an unrestrained killing spree, prompted by the assassination of his girlfriend (8.17). Bauer‘s final act of torture against the assassin (8.21) features some of the most brutal and censor-provoking violence of the series.

[12] One exception to this is Season Seven, during which Bauer is exposed to a degenerative nerve virus, resulting in the gradual loss of his memory and motor skills (7.15-24). This is not the result of torture, however.

[13] One noteworthy limitation to Scarry‘s suppositions here is that they assume a "war" is engaged by two nations or civilizations in a contest for supremacy. Such definitions have a dubious applicability in era of global terror, which is not conventionally characterized by conflicts between nation-states.

[14] In this sense, much can be said about 24‘s narrative structure, which jumps between multiple simultaneous events (often through the use of a split screen); this technique is effective in generating suspense by unambiguously establishing the existence of real, sometimes multiple, terror plots underway. The degree of omniscience given to the audience is significant in light of a post-9/11 political climate that has proven an acute "lack of omniscience" among the American public about unknowable foreign dangers and domestic governmental malfeasance (Scarry 2004: 284).

[15] It should be noted that Bauer is by no means the only American national, or even the only protagonist, to undergo torture in the series: investigations on 24 typically feature multiple red herrings involving the torture of various minor characters. These occasionally even include Bauer‘s own CTU colleagues, who (sometimes mistakenly) fall under suspicion of espionage or collusion with terrorists. Nor are 24‘s myriad villains necessarily coded as "other," as there are frequent revelations of Americans colluding with or financing the terrorists; the most notable example of this is in Season Five, when the man responsible for authorizing acts of domestic terrorism turns out to be the President of the United States (Gregory Itzin).

[16] Foucault defines "race" as "a partisan divide within the populace" (Medovoi 59) and is therefore not discussing "race war" in terms of our contemporary biological or scientific understanding of racial divisions.

[17] This dynamic is likewise echoed in 24‘s nuclear crises and the real fears of terrorists acquiring WMD that they allegorize. Foucault identifies nuclear weaponry as being paradoxical in their facilitation of the sovereign‘s traditional right to kill, but now possessing the possibility of eradiating life itself (2003: 252). In 24, however, a nuclear blast is a "survivable crisis" (Herbert 87) that only signals an occasion to celebrate American resilience further.

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