Monday, July 5, 2010

TerrorUSisTHEM

Trying to capture one’s past is always a futile effort because once the time is gone… As the wise time traveling philosopher Kurt Vonnegut used to say and says again…”So it goes.” After catching an NPR interview about the final season of the television show “24”, I finally decided to partake in the real time set drama I somehow missed over the past nine years. I am on the first season, shot in 2001 and am watching the main character “Jack Bauer”, or the mentally unshakeable star of 1986’s mullet-vampire period piece “The Lost Boys” Kiefer Sutherland, attempt to figure out what this bullshit is. So far I have nailed the nail biting suspense scenes before they happen. Slap on the back for me. All I have to do is ask myself, “What is the worst possible outcome while still preserving a continuing story,” and there it is…If you are hiding a phone from a captor, the phone is going to run out of battery and compromise you, if someone you don’t know is coming to save you, they are not coming to save you, they are coming to kill you. Nine years later and I relish in being a guy who writes. To watch a television show shot in 2001, I have to send myself back in time, to a sixteen year old kid who was waiting to see what happened. The worst case scenario was becoming the drive for the United Sates in Jack Bauer’s freshman year as a television star. As we explore the character, we explore mainstream opinion of the time, which I find to be much different than the opinion of today. There are many writers on a television show, they sit on panels and discuss outcomes, discuss popular opinion and manipulate your senses until ten writers figure out how to make you want more. So it is fantasy! Not real, created by people who have a magnificent ability to narrate their wildest dreams. Compared to myself and a fair number of my closest friends, Kiefer Sutherland has more than likely never been shot at, nor has he had anything more serious than a pile of money to deal with for, who knows how long? But in America, who knows what how? Maybe there was a divorce, maybe his father beat him in ways mine never did, maybe I’ll do some more research at the lab here and get back to you. Either way, compared to some poor Iraqi born within the past seven years, I’ll put money that Mr. Sutherland has done alright for a lifetime and good for him because he is a hell of an actor.
These days, America is not the shining beacon of hope it was when my immigrant relatives crossed Ellis Island. That is of course, unless you are a hungry, poor and tired Mexican crossing the border again because fascist Arizona doctrine really separated you from your wife and kids. This would be a foreign concept to Mr. Sutherland and not to Mr. Bauer, who is a fairy tale. In the first season Jack protects the first black presidential candidate. The more I watch what ten writers write the more I understand that our 2010 time has become prophecy. The white racists are going to make Obama look like a fool. They will twist his character until he ceases to be the future and we can say hello again to real politics. The 1990’s of my youth are a distant memory, some clouded vision returns to me, something about an intern sitting on a President’s face and there was an impeachment hearing. The next President marched off to an illegal war, and no impeachment hearing.
Nine years ago becomes today and we have gone too far forward to make it out clean. Two wars and many good dead men the majority of the American public knows nothing about and cares not to research. So where are we in the land of Jack Bauer? Ten writers could have never predicted naked Muslim prisoner piles of Abu Ghraib. I had this dream the other night, a cold sweat drenched, violent winner of my emotions. We had drilled into the center of the earth on accident and it rained oil.

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