Dirty Harry, Meet Jack Bauer

Jonah Goldberg made a great point recently when he compared the Dirty Harry and Death Wish movies with the series "24." He was talking about the way torture is accepted as standard operating procedure on "24" and pointing out the fact that it's not the first time our hreoes have used (ahem) aggressive tactics in pursuit of the bad guys. But I think there's more of a connection than that.

People say that art reflects life, and sometimes that's true. But sometimes, art reflects what we want life to be. In the 70's, people had completely given up on the ability of government to maintain a civil society. Thanks to liberal incompetance and social engineering, urban crime was rampant and regular folks were barricading themselves inside their homes behind iron bars and six or seven deadbolt locks.

Into this festering wasteland stepped heroes like Charles Bronson in the "Death Wish" movies and Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry Callahan. They saw the problem, and they took matters into their own hands, without a lot of hand-wringing over civil rights or root causes.

Now the problem is terrorism, and people see that their leaders are either incapable or uninterested in dealing with it. Enter Jack Bauer and his buddies at CTU, who take care of business without regard for public opinion polls.

People may go on and on about how they're worried about human rights violations or how tourture costs the torturer his soul or all that blah blah. But deep down, even the most enlightened liberal hopes that somebody will do what is necessary to stop the bad guys and save our enlightened skins. If we don't see somebody doing it in the real world, it's gratifying to at least watch it on TV.