Is ’24’ a Republican show?
I didn’t realize conservatives considered “[tag]24[/tag],” the [tag]Fox[/tag] action/drama, a [tag]Republican[/tag] [tag]show[/tag]. According to TNR’s Christopher Orr, it’s a fairly common sentiment.
American hero [tag]Jack Bauer[/tag] is an ex-swat, ex-Delta Force commando working for the Los Angeles branch of the (fictional) Counter Terrorist Unit ([tag]CTU[/tag]), an elite, high-tech CIA spin-off. As befits his training, he is a man of action: decisive, aggressive, and disinclined to play by the rules when he feels they’re getting in the way. He never wavers, second-guesses, or gives in to criticism, instead doing whatever needs to be done to safeguard American lives, regardless of the costs.
[tag]Conservative[/tag] fans of the show frequently note the similarities between Bauer’s disposition and that of a certain White House resident, and they claim that “24”‘s popularity is evidence that, whatever the polls may say, Americans want someone like [tag]Bush[/tag] to defend them in these troubled times. Buchanan has gone as far as to pronounce the president our “Jack Bauer in the war on terror.”
Mrs. Carpetbagger and I have been watching the show for a while now, and it’s never occurred to either of us that Bauer’s life-saving heroics resembled President Bush’s national security policy in any way. Well, aside from the fact that they’re both largely based on [tag]fiction[/tag].
It’s always been rather disconcerting that characters on the show seem willing to torture just about anyone at the drop of a hat, but in terms of political ideology, “24” has struck me as relatively neutral. TNR’s Orr actually believes the show tilts towards the Dems, suggesting that GOP fans of the show are missing key indicators.
Yes, there have been characters on the show who seem hatched from an Ann Coulter fever dream: a terrorist-coddling lawyer from “Amnesty Global” who prevents a much-needed interrogation; the secretary of defense’s petulant lefty son, who has to be chided for his “sixth-grade, Michael Moore logic,” et cetera. But their population is dwarfed, in both number and significance, by the cast of liberal bugaboos:
the shadowy businessmen who nefariously appear to pull the strings of more than one president; the vice president so eager to start a war in the Middle East that he uses the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove the more cautious president; and so on. It’s also hard to imagine it a coincidence that David Palmer, the wise, stalwart, honest president of the early seasons, is a Democrat, and that the Republicans who succeed him are a scandalmonger and a Nixonesque weasel who ultimately proves to be at the center of a conspiracy to manufacture evidence that will enable the deployment of U.S. forces abroad. “[tag]24[/tag]” may swing right more often than such one-sided liberal wish-fulfillments as “The West Wing” and “Commander in Chief,” but, on balance, its schizophrenic mix of political provocations still leans to the left.
That point about the Republican presidents seems particularly noteworthy. In previous seasons, the Jack Bauer character could count on the White House to be a key ally in whatever counter-terrorist activity he was up to on a given episode. This year, there’s a Republican president with a dangerous combination of dishonesty and a thirst for near-dictatorial power, who can’t be bothered to deal with constitutional limits in his ends-justify-the-means approach to national security. In fact, the fictional president this season is so desperate to start a war, he’ll used trumped-up evidence to justify a military strike that he decided was necessary regardless of the facts.
Wait, that sounds kind of familiar….
Scott
says:If you want real Republican fiction (and you’re tired of watching Fox News), check out NCIS. My wife loves it, but I can’t sit through an episode without the urge to throw something at the TV.
slip kid no more
says:This year, there’s a Republican president with a dangerous combination of dishonesty and a thirst for near-dictatorial power, who can’t be bothered to deal with constitutional limits in his ends-justify-the-means approach to national security.
Today in The New York Times, Bob Herbert slams Bush on this very point:
“The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.
“Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.”
2Manchu
says:The Decider
memekiller
says:One of the writers for the show got hired by claiming a “liberal bias” in Hollywood for not buying the film rights to his books. I’ve read them, and have come to another conclusion as to why they passed them over: the books suck. What the books did do, which is near and dear to the heart of every conservative, is promote torture of bad guys by the hero. Thus, I’d say he’s responsible for the pro-torture storyline on the show.
slappymagoo
says:I would be loathe to defend 24’s penchant for torture, because it often does come across as, to me, un-American. At least, un-what-America-is-supposed-to-stand-for. But the benius of the show lies in Sutherland’s ability to look conflicted and resolute at the same time-doing what “needs to be done” while knowing a shit storm will come from the consequences of his actions. Compare that to an Administration who basically keeps saying “fuck you, we’re doing what we want, and what are you going to do about it?” An Administration that tells us they have to be allowed to break the law in order to win the war on terror without ever proving to us that their illegal actions assist in the war on terror AT ALL.
I think where the article gets it wrong is the idea that 24’s popularity indicates that we want someone like Bush leading us. It seems to be it would indicate that we want someone like Jack Bauer leading us. Hell, if anything, Bauer is more like Lincoln, I shit you not. When Lincoln broke the law as defined in the Constitution, he acknowledged that he would have to explain his decision and still be held accountable if his explanation didn’t hold water with the Congress. On 24, Bauer’s mantra is pretty much “I did what I had to do, and I will accept the consequences after this crisis is over, but for now please let me stop the world from blowing up.” Accountability. Novel concept.
Bruno
says:It’s certainly true that people see what they want to see in these shows. There are many, many instances on the West Wing where the President breaks with the left (privatizing social security, school vouchers, free trade, etc.).
Disillusioned conserveatives may be latching on to Jack Bauer not because he’s a Bush Repbulican, but because they see him as the real deal. He plays into that Regan-era Rambo fantasy that lets them escape from the failures of politics and policy: the defiict’s rising, spending’s out of control, GOP policies are in disarray…let’s just go kick some ass!
2Manchu
says:memekiller,
Rambo II & III, Top Gun, and Red Dawn.
Do we need any more proof why conservatives should not make movies?
I also have a beef with whoever the hell directed Starship Troopers. Not their political affiliation but just to complain that it sucked, bad.
Swan
says:It’s probably written by a committee (despite what the credits say– I don’t watch the show, so I don’t know, though) composed of persons of varying ideologies who vie to have different references to real-life included in the script, to advance their respective points of view.
Swan
says:But if you want to get an idea of how screwed up this country is, check your local TV listings for how many hours of murder investigations are put on the major networks as entertainment on any given weekday night.
Remember when stuff like Perfect Strangers and Three’s Company came on at 8 pm? Now it’s got to be at least close to either Sex and the City, Southpark or CSI to get on at primetime– maybe excepting the gameshows.
That, I think, is less the result of the market and more a few scared people who want everyone else to be scared like them all the time.
Rian Mueller
says:What a great idea for a topic. It’s quite a departure from covering the news, dare I say a departure from reality-based discussion even! I have several related points I’d like to ruminate on, but they aren’t hard or fact-based, more like soft observation.
I think that, for the most part, Hollywood is pretty good in being non-partisan and giving equal opportunity to liberal and conservative caricatures.
But it would be good to point out to the Pat Buchanans that George Bush is not our Jack Bauer come to life, he’s our President X (I don’t know that weasel president character’s name, sorry,) and that Jack Bauer is the tireless CIA agent that President X/Bush has been betraying. Quite like he betrayed Valerie Plame. You could also paste the Jack Bauer image on our soldiers, whom Bush endlessly uses as political tools to attempt to make himself look strong.
There’s a point I want to make that requires a bit of a background story. I dunno, maybe it doesn’t and I just like to tell stories.
While I never saw 24, I used to watch The Shield, which was enjoyable in part because of the sometimes reprehensible actions of the characters that created good drama. (I fell out of watching for reasons not having to do with the show, I just stopped watching TV altogether in between seasons.) Additionally, about the same time, and when the Abu Ghraib scandal hit, I had a pretty rigorous (IMO) discussion with one Shield fan I knew on an Internet board about the use of torture, my position being that it’s immoral, reprehensible, ineffective, and illegal. I can’t remember if he tried to argue the legality aspect but he attempted to demonstrate that it was effective, “not that bad”, and that it saved lives, and he used the inevitable ticking time bomb scenario. Something I remember being a large part of the pilot of The Shield, and I bet was a major part of 24’s plot.
But I can’t help but wonder if this affects a lot of peoples’ perceptions. The permissiveness of violence in media has gotten to the point that it would seem that a lot of Americans actually condone torture. The point isn’t that violence is there, it’s the way it’s portrayed – as acceptable – that is disturbing.
Also, I occasionally feel as if Halo and a lot of the WWII shooter games are at least somewhat Republican fantasies. I find myself wondering if Half-life 2 is, too. There are definitely a lot of conservative themes that can be found. The noble, individualistic supermen warriors like Master Chief are present, as are their noble and morally clear (never any lack of clarity!) causes such as freedom from oppression or fighting for their way of life or for their very lives, their willingness to fight and risk their lives, and their dramatic, soul-stirring, life-saving actions (Master Chief in the Halo 2 cutscenes in particular.) The jingoistic, militaristic theme in Halo especially is particularly strong, and the soundtrack, when it kicks in while you are fighting, makes you feel it, in that movie theater way. (BTW, watch Red vs Blue, it’s way better than playing Halo.) Interestingly, Half-life 2 makes the same use of the soundtrack, but not in a jingoistic way, the soundtrack is far from that, while the Halo soundtrack is noticably jingoistic.
However, the WWII games have become more about cooperative teamwork in the last few/several years, which strays from that whole superman warrior cliche. In some games you can even play as a medic, whose primary purpose is support, not getting the most kills. Machine gunners are generally support classes, and need to be team players to stay alive. You have this seperation of roles with different classes now, which adds realism and further requires cohesive teamwork, not heroic independence.
I’d also add that while these games portray war as noble causes, (think the WWII “Great Crusade” ideal that is so popular with conservatism) they don’t really attempt to convey that war is hell.
Interestingly, in contrast, the “war is horrible” point is an incredibly prevalent message in Japanese culture. Almost every Final Fantasy game is about how horrible war is, Final Fantasy being the first Japanese game series that comes to mind. And anytime war is discussed in anime, it’s almost always with a predominant “war is horrible” message. Grave of the Fireflies, a Miyazaki film, was so incredibly, powerfully depressing that I had to go into another room while my girlfriend cried watching it. Japanese society is still very distorted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they are still nursing those wounds. I’d postulate that to a certain extent they are defensive about this and possibly for that reason they haven’t apologized for atrocities done to the Chinese and Koreans.
Anyway, just a bunch of observations that I hope weren’t too incoherent.
Dan
says:I, for one, am not surprised.
One of the great (at least to me) antiwar novels was Once An Eagle. However, I’ve read more than a couple of rightwing blogs that equate the near perfect hero, Sam Damon, as a Con Arctype whereas the careerist antgonist, Courtney Massingale, as a Lib Arctype. But it just tells me that those particular bloggers don’t have great reading comprehension or just didn’t read the book.
The reality of the book is, that Sam was a fighter for the underdog and considered by many of the others as a Barracks Bolshivek. Not exactly qualities found in many of the right wing.
I find that many of the rightwing (not to say lefties are immune, we aren’t but we don’t generally avoid deep hero worship) can’t reconcile their internal views of themselves with the external reality. What is funny is that the war movies they enjoy are those that they can project their perceived fantasies of themselves into the main characters. Consider the above mentioned examples of Rambo and Top Gun. What they hate are movies that show the hero as a doubter or of dubious qualities or isn’t the perfect killing machine. You can see the hate in the reviews for such war movies as Platoon or a more obscure movie like When Trumpets Fade.
The Germans have the same attitudes on war as the Japanese. See Das Boot and the Sam Peckinpah helmed (German produced) The Cross of Iron.
As for Starship Troopers, the director was Paul Verhoven who single handedly destroyed the stripper as hero genre with his cinematic “gem”, Showgirls. Apparently, he didn’t read Heinlein’s book as he found it boring. Would have been nice if he did because maybe the movie wouldn’t have sucked so much. I do love the book, but hate the movie.
Rian Mueller
says:Re: Rambo – I think Rambo is noticably different than some other movies that are just plain jingoistic. Rambo had a message for the soldiers who felt abandoned after Vietnam. If you remember First Blood, it was about this guy who was so traumatized that he was wandering around the Cascade forests killing people, thinking he was still in the shit. And the local cops who had to bring him in had to deal with his emotional trauma, and try to resolve that. It was a message of sympathy for the vets who felt betrayed by their country when they came home, either by a government that abandoned them after the war, or a government that lied to them about why they fought, or a country who didn’t celebrate their return, even blamed them for fighting at all, all of that.
Quoted from Wikipedia: ‘Nothing is over! NOTHING! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn’t let us win!’
That fits an awful lot in there. The inadequacy veterans felt transitioning from military to civilian life, the PTSD he has been left to deal with, anger at shifting government policy and the pullout. I think Rambo was an important part of the post-Vietnam healing process, and not jingoistic in the least. It’s a catharsis, most definitely.
Part 2 follows the catharsis theme to the letter. It features Rambo rescuing POWs, and being thwarted by a military brass that wants to abandon them. God, how I hated Murdock. It felt good to watch Rambo release his anger and take that machine gun to Murdock’s office. Catharsis.
Part 3 actually strays from the catharsis theme, since from a summary you get the impression that it delights in watching Russia suffer its own Vietnam (apparantly ignoring the humanistic messages of the first two films,) but it primarily identifies and sympathizes with the native Afghan Mujahadeen. You even get to see Rambo play buskashi! (It is to rugby what rugby is to checkers.) I thought that, if anything, Part 3 was a love letter to Afghanistan. Beyond that, it seems your typical mindless action flick fare, ie Commando. Which, I suppose in being that mindless, one could find room for being conservative fare too. Which isn’t to say conservative = mindless, though I suppose that that could be said 😉
Wasn’t Top Gun about gay people?
Ed Stephan
says:I gave up on “24” just after it began its second season. I watch very little Tee Vee, absolutely no “news”, and what little I do watch is pre-recorded so I can kill the commericals. When the Mariners are doing well (hah!) I can stand them “live” on the radio, but even there the commercials nearly always drive me away. Needless to say, I can’t stand to see or hear the Regal Moron, ever. I will not go gentle into that corporatized night.
Craig
says:The show is right-wing in its excesses of justified torture, but I don’t think it’s a big deal.
There’s a big difference between the show’s boundaries to this point where the ticking bomb scenario, with major casualties or an assassation are involved, and the real world discussion involving the calculated torture of people for information with much less urgency and direct connection to preventing attacks.
So, I do think it’s some problem that the show encourages misguided views on torture policy, but it has a pretty low connection to real policy.
Instead, we should continue to push the ‘torture is un-American’ morality in public debate and ignore the tv show, IMO.
Jeany
says:Fear pornography. I’m a newcomer to the series, introduced by my younger brother at the start of the season, I started TiVoing and picked up the end of the first season and am now well into the second as well as the current one. I think it panders to the hope of near perfect success at foiling a large number of particularly heinous plots, and it’s interesting that the plot so often turns on people whose patriotism is misguided or the presence of moles inside high security agencies. The characters are mostly interesting, but the plots are preposterous.
Happy Dog
says:I’m a TV editor in Hollywood. A good friend of mine has written scripts for 24 and he told me this anecdote (which came to me, I admit, already 2nd hand):
John McCain, a big fan, came to visit the set and meet the producers. He told the producer that President Bush is also a big fan and that McCain and Bush sometimes watch the show together.
That’s the end of the anecdote, but as my friend told me we had to speculate that Bush’s attitudes towards military action, gun fire as a means to solve problems, and especially torture may have been influenced by the show. Reagan, after all, routinely cited scenes from movies as evidence that his policies were the right ones.
Lance
says:“Reagan, after all, routinely cited scenes from movies as evidence that his policies were the right ones.” – Happy Dog
Reagan’s brain was beginning to turn to mush do to Altzheimer’s.
Boy George II’s brain has already gotten there by use of alcohol and other recreational substances.
K-Man
says:Is Ann Coulter is a transgender person? Its all over web but no realconformation to date.
Mr Furious
says:I don’t think the show is kind to Republican politicians, but I do think there is plenty of red meat for the Republican base.
I loved it for the first two seasons, then gave up, so I can’t comment on the post-Palmer era. But I did always fear the stereotypes the show would encourage, particularly the “break a few eggs” style of torture/interrogation…
Mr Furious
says:The problem is this. @$ operates in a ticking time bomb scenarios at all times. It’s what the show is alll about.
Bush and the maniacs in charge want to pretend we are always on the verge of a TTB scenario, and therefore are justified in tossing aside caution, the law, whatever…
Bush might actually think he’s Jack Bauer and that is aslo scary.
Difference Bauer is accountable for his decisions, and takes responsibility. He knows that if he kills this guy and he’s wrong its his ass.. No one in the Administration operates with that fear/accountability.
Mr Furious
says:“@$” is “24” with me stupidly holding the shift key…
Laszlo Panaflex
says:I like that commercial with MacGuyver.
That’s what I want. A President who can get us out of a jam using a tube sock and a turkey baster. That may be all we have left by the time this crew is done.
DCeiver
says:For the record, I am a lefty Dem and a huge 24 fan. As I am prone to saying on my blog, I think Joel Surnow is a “magnificent bastard” who delights at pulling strings and pushing buttons, and many times, those manipulations are tied right in to our political zeitgeist. Personally, I think it makes for engaging television. I enjoy the fires Surnow and his writers set off in my brainpan, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
But let’s get to the root of the matter. Here’s a signature moment of this season’s show: Jack Bauer and a Secret Service agent bang into the conference room at the President’s retreat. Bauer’s supposed to be in custody. He and the agent make for one of the President’s aides–he’s got information on terrorist activities that he’s been keeping to himself. Bauer, in the presence of the President and against his orders, threatens the aide with torture in order to get the information.
Here’s what’s cool. The very next thing Bauer and the Secret Service Agent do after securing the information is hand over their badges and guns and turn themselves in for violating the President’s order. See–that’s called a fundamental respect for the rule of law. Even though he knew he had to break the law to achieve a greater good, Bauer stuck to that baseline respect for what makes our American society unique.
Contrast that with the gutless way Bush has defended his actions the two times he got caught red-handed on the illegal wiretap front. We can and should have a debate as to where our society of laws hinders us in protecting our fellow citizens. But at the same time, we should respect those laws. If Bush has any sort of courage behind his convictions, he’d say: “I thought it was necessary for the greater good to break the law in this instance. I promise that a time deemed appropriate, I will turn myself in, offer a full explanation for my actions, and answer for what I have done in court.” But he doesn’t do that–he weasels and inveigles and prevaricates like a common thief. So, I’d say there’s a big difference between 24’s protagonist and our current leadership.
Chris Orr
says:Interesting discussion guys. Since my article is behind the TNR subscriber wall, I thought I’d excerpt some more here. Hope you find it interesting (and if you don’t, feel free to delete):
Ultimately, the world that “24” envisions each week is less liberal or conservative than it is one from which political belief has been banished altogether. We’re introduced to a strong Democratic president and a weak Republican one, but neither is, for example, recognizably hawkish or dovish with any consistency. The former sometimes demonstrates his strength through aggressive action (e.g., illegally detaining a journalist who might reveal a terrorist threat to the public) and sometimes through thoughtful restraint (resisting his vice president’s war preparations). Likewise, the latter’s weakness initially makes him appear overly cautious; only later do we learn he is behind a nefarious secret plot to extend U.S. hegemony in Central Asia. Character is everything; ideology, nothing.
Indeed, the entire show takes place in a peculiar political vacuum: September 11 appears to have happened (there’s at least one reference to “Guantánamo”), but there’s no sign of Al Qaeda or the war in Iraq. Only two of the show’s five seasons feature jihadist foes, and, in one case, they’re the unwitting pawns of an American oil company exec. The rest of the time, the nation’s safety is menaced by vengeful Serbs, Chechen separatists (again, caught up in a U.S. plot of which they know nothing), and a pissed-off ex-member of the British special forces. It’s an odd but effective bait-and-switch: Though “24” trades upon post-September 11 anxieties for its sense of urgency and moral purpose, the world in which it takes place seems almost entirely untouched by September 11.
This contradiction between intended message and actual one extends to “24”‘s underlying moral philosophy as well. The central mythos of the show is that Bauer is a superhuman patriot who will sacrifice anything for the good of the country. Except, of course, when he doesn’t. In the very first season, Bauer is forced to weigh two conflicting duties: preventing terrorists from assassinating presidential candidate Palmer, on the one hand, and protecting the lives of his wife and daughter, whom the terrorists have taken hostage, on the other. And, far from privileging the former duty, Bauer repeatedly undermines Palmer’s safety in his effort to keep his own loved ones alive. (His wife dies at the end of the season anyway, but he couldn’t have prevented it.) One could argue that this elevation of the private over the public was appropriate in the first season, with its pre-September 11 origin and a terrorist plot that threatened only the life of a presidential candidate. But, as the stakes rise exponentially in subsequent seasons, the pattern repeats itself: Bauer’s loved ones fall into harm’s way in the midst of terrorist crises, and he does whatever it takes to save them–disobeying orders, diverting CTU resources, even jeopardizing national security.
Bauer is not alone. The question of public versus private duty is raised most explicitly in the third season, when the virus-wielding terrorist Stephen Saunders captures Michelle Dessler, the wife of CTU agent Tony Almeida. Saunders demands that Almeida allow him to escape a CTU siege or he will kill Dessler. Almeida saves his wife’s life, but, in the process, endangers millions of others. And, while he is briefly imprisoned for treason, the show leaves no doubt that he did the right thing. As Bauer himself argues, citing Almeida’s earlier work, “You should be putting a medal on him, not handcuffs.” Of course, in all of these cases, everything works out: The loved one is saved, and the threat to the public is nonetheless averted.
That is not necessarily so, however, when a CTU character takes the opposite course and prioritizes patriotic duty over familial love. In season four, then-CTU chief Erin Driscoll is trying to juggle her job and her emotionally unstable young daughter, who is being cared for in the CTU infirmary. At just the moment Driscoll is scrambling to override the meltdowns of several nuclear reactors, the infirmary calls. Driscoll says it will have to wait. But when she arrives at the infirmary barely two minutes later, her daughter is dead, having somehow managed to slit her wrists right under the doctors’ noses. It’s hard to miss the point here: When your private and public obligations come into conflict, pay attention to the former.
Luckily, the terrorists also seem to prize the personal over the political. A series of otherwise ruthless, fanatical killers give up when Bauer threatens their children. Indeed, it frequently turns out that even the motives that lead the show’s villains to attack the United States in the first place are more individual than ideological. The main baddie of the first season is a Serbian warlord who targets Bauer and Palmer because of their roles in a botched covert operation to take him down. In season three, Saunders’s viral scheming is due to his bitterness at having been left behind by Bauer on that very same Balkan mission. And, in season five, a former CTU agent’s involvement in the president’s conspiracy is due in part to Bauer’s having drummed him out of the agency for corruption. It all raises the possibility that Bauer could best safeguard the United States by moving elsewhere and bringing his collection of vendettas with him.
Without a doubt, “24” is clever entertainment–riveting and occasionally thought-provoking. Is it the “central moral-political drama of our time”? Hardly. But, even if the saga of Jack Bauer is not a serious commentary on this anxious moment in American history, it does reveal a great deal about the seriousness of a culture that could mistake it for one.
After September 11, there was much talk of how we as a nation were going to shed our innocence and enter an age of greater common purpose, in which politics would cease to be petty and irony would be extinguished. Obviously, it didn’t work out that way. The attacks wounded the American psyche, but they had precious little impact on American life. Though we pay lip service to the enormity of the attacks, we still drive the same cars and watch the same silly TV shows and engage in the same partisan squabbles.
“24” is, in some ways, the perfect cultural artifact for this post-September 11 moment. It extols patriotism but doesn’t quite believe in it, preaches a self-sacrifice it practices only intermittently, and offers up a world in which the choices are always impossible but the answers are always right. On the surface, it flatters our belief that we’re better now, more stoic and unselfish, committed to ideals larger than our individual wants and needs. But, below, it reassures us that it’s OK to place our own households first, that politics is empty if not actively corrupt, and that belief in a cause will only lead to disillusion or betrayal.
It’s been four and a half years since “24” first stepped out into the unexpected shadow of a national tragedy. But it remains to this day what it was from the beginning–the orphan of a more frivolous age, trying hard to prove it is tough and serious enough for the rigors of a post-September 11 world. Just like the rest of us.