Error Theory

Charlie Rose did a fascinating interview with Keifer Sutherland tonite. Sutherland directs the terror-fighting drama 24 hrs, where he also plays the lead character, Jack Bauer. Sutherland is a good actor, and comes across as plenty smart, but there is a consistent inconsistency in his viewpoints. Rose shows a clip where Jack Bauer shoots a smug, uncooperative terrorist prisoner in the femur to extract information. He presses his pistol to the terrorist's other femur and the terrorist, no longer smug, gives up his target. “Do I agree with it? No,” says Sutherland, “but Jack Bauer uses his experience, his knowledge of the stakes and the time, his instinct about what will work, and this is what he does. Later, in a quiet time, he wonders if God will forgive him, and his answer to himself is ‘no’.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

Sutherland’s denial that he agrees with Bauer’s use of torture seems to be based on a philosophically confused distinction between principle and necessity (as if principles don’t comprehend necessity), and this confusion seems to exist both in Sutherland’s own mind and in the character that he and his writers are creating. This was an interesting juxtaposition for me, as I had just channel surfed over from the grotesque spectacle of Ted Kennedy grilling Alberto Gonzales about his role in the supposed perfidy of opining that the President has war powers that Congress cannot outlaw. “If Congress outlaws torture,” Kennedy pontificates, “then under no circumstances does the President have the legitimate authority to order torture.” (Paraphrasing again.) Gonzales stuck to his position that, as White House Counsel, his role was to solicit an opinion on this question from the Justice Department, not to try to decide it himself, but I kept wishing that instead of resisting Kennedy’s attempts to get at the substance of the question, Gonzales would turn around and open it up on Kennedy: “If we have a terrorist who knows where a nuke is planted in Washington D.C., do you seriously believe that Congress can usurp the President’s war-fighting powers and forbid him to torture that terrorist for the location of the nuke? Just what do you think it means, sir, for the President of the United States to have war-fighting powers? Is it not the responsibility of the Commander and in Chief to decide what is and is not a matter of military necessity, no matter what those who are not charged with his war-fighting powers and responsibilities may think?” Hey, if the Democrats want to stand up like spikes on railroad ties, pick up a sledge hammer and slam ‘em home!

Kennedy was acting the outraged idealist in somewhat the same morally confused fashion as Sutherland, presuming that ideals and principles are not responsive to necessity. The difference is that Sutherland DOES recognize necessity. He just thinks it is somehow separate from principle, while Kennedy refuses to recognize necessity at all, perhaps because recognizing military necessity, and the war-powers that spring from it, would empower a president who he considers to be his enemy (the country, the will of the people and the Constitution be damned). Whatever the explanation, where Sutherland is merely confused, Kennedy is clearly perverse.

As the Rose interview went on, Sutherland’s strange two-mindedness continued. Rose noted that Muslim activists have protested a promotional clip from the first episode of the new season because it has Muslim terrorists in it. "It is a fact of the world today that there are Muslim elements that want to commit mass murder in America," says Sutherland, "so that gets into the show." "Good," I’m thinking: "At least he is not so P.C. that he can’t acknowledge the obvious. Maybe when he is done with 24 hrs we can make him secretary of transportation.” But then Sutherland launches into a P.C. expression of concern for "the extreme discrimination suffered by Muslims in America." WHAT??? He pulled that straight out of his ass! Serious discrimination against Muslims is extremely RARE. This is a country where the most blatant terrorist sympathizers find no shortage of friends and champions. Airlines are sued BY THE GOVERNMENT if they disproportionately search Muslims. Of course Islamists have picked up the Democrat trick of claiming that their free speech rights are violated whenever they are criticized for voicing terrorist sympathies, but that is isn't real discrimination. Sutherland’s duality on P.C. is similar to his duality on torture. In “principle” Sutherland is P.C., but necessity, or reality, forces him to be a bit un-P.C.. There ARE Muslim terrorists, but he has to balance this out with phony P.C. presumptions of horrendous discrimination.

Rose next asks Sutherland about another film he is making (Queen something). Sutherland says it is about the Maori uprising in New Zealand in the 1860’s. He talks about how the war was remarkable in that both the English-Irish soldiers and the Maori soldiers often switched sides. “You know it is a really dumb war when people can’t figure out which side they are on,” says Sutherland, an interesting observation, but then he continues: “which makes this story especially appropriate for the times we are in today.” WHAT????? Who doesn’t know what side they are on today???? But then I think about it. Hollywood types. Sutherland is surrounded by people who are rooting for our terrorist enemy. They aren’t rooting for the terrorists to successfully set off nukes in American cities. They are just rooting for the Republican [led] effort in Iraq to fail, just as they will root for whatever Republicans may do in Iran and North Korea and Taiwan and America to fail.

Sutherland thinks principle and necessity are on opposite sides and he keeps going back and forth between them. The Maori war is the perfect metaphor for his decent but confused mind. I take him as another example of why most Hollywood types should stay out of politics. Acting is about feeling, not logic. But at least Sutherland is not perverse. In fact, in the persona of Jack Bauer, he is all about necessity. Maybe someday Sutherland will figure out that principle is all about necessity too, and he can stop wondering if he is on the right side. In the meantime, kick that terrorist ass Jack.


UPDATE: Hey, an Instalanche! Thanks for visiting. I have updated with a couple of your corrections. Decentralized editing, whew! Check out some of my other cool junk if you have a few minutes. Too bad no one ever read this one, for instance, and only a couple of hundred people so far have met my friends Solomon and Jeffer.