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Is there anything Jack Bauer can’t survive? Is there any person that Jack Bauer can’t convince with his earnest eyes and sincere words …or his deadly accuracy with a weapon? I used to love 24, but lately Jack has become so invincible that 24 has become more humorous than suspenseful (although the take over of CTU almost reminded me of the urgency I felt during season one). And then there is the torture earlier in the season. I had some serious issues with how heavily 24 leaned on the long torture scenes to keep the audience – what – afraid, disgusted, and anxious? For me, my TV watching line is drawn at gratuitous torture. (I actually stopped watching 24 for a while — ditto for Lost — because I find graphic torture scenes repugnant, especially when torture is used as a vehicle for entertainment.) And I do believe that people become habituated — their fear of a thing is reduced — the more they are exposed to it. Quite frankly I don’t think we should desensitize ourselves to the act, or even the idea, of torture. We should be afraid of torture, of what it is and of what it means to be a torturer.

Along these lines, I found the GOP candidates response to the torture question at the University of South Carolina illuminating. Not surprisingly, McCain was the only one who was anti-torture. Sometimes it nice to know that experience — not just some lame ass ideology spun out in a life buffered from contact with poverty, violence, and war — really does help shape ideas – and sometimes for the good. Mitt Romney did his usual slight of the hand words trick, “not torture but enhanced interrogation techniques.” WTF?! Oh, you mean like torture, but not quite as gruesome as the stuff our Fox super hero Jack Bauer does on 24?

So is Jack Bauer really a hero after all? Ready yourself for a snippet of a serious over the top rant. This from Station Charon :

Here is an ugly little secret for the deep-seated television addicts in our attention deficit democracy - Jack Bauer is also an ultra violent latter day Nazi with a savage psychopathic mean streak and a king-sized hard-on for torture. Torture has become one of a growing number of previously unthinkable and utterly abominable acts that can now be wrapped in an American flag as some type of a sick endorsement of what constitutes super patriotism under the pathologically amoral regime that is the Bushreich…

When we peer into that flickering glass Jack Bauer is us and our voyeuristic Pavlov’s Dogs type of involuntary salivating at depictions of wanton cruelty that appropriately belong in a Schutzstaffel training manual is a damning condemnation of a rotting society that has through our decadent ignorance, callous indifference and general meanness become a pox on the rest of the planet.

Like I said, I draw the line at torture. Still, I am just about to download the season finale. Aargh…

So which superhero are you? (It turns out I am Wonder Woman, not surprising. At least that is when I am not busy being my super villain alter ego Mystique.)