HEROES. Via Kevin comes this data point on the increasing representation of torture as a tool of heroes. From 1996 to 2001, prime time television had 102 torture scenes. From 2002 to 2005, there were 624. But it wasn't only the quantity that change. "During this uptick in violence, the torturer's identity was more likely to be an American hero like "24's" Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) than the Nazis and drug dealers in pre-9/11 days." A competent analyst of culture could probably wring a three-book deal from the datum, but let me just say this: There's been an unsettling change in not only what heroes do, but what makes a hero at all. Any comic book reader knows that what separates heroes from evildoers is their unwillingness to kill, torture, or even personally punish the guilty. Restraint, in and of itself, is a heroic attribute. DC's Identity Crisis series spends quite a bit of time on that question, as it comes out that a few caped crusaders have spent decades covering up the one night when they went too far against an enemy, as they know the larger community of superheroes would be enraged if they discovered the transgression. It isn't that their actions were indefensible, or even particularly avoidable. The merits of the act itself are beside the point. You can't transgress ever, or you blur that line separating you from your enemies (another treasured trope is the defeated villain taunting the hero to give in and kill him, the subtext being that if the evildoer can make the hero act the villain, he will have won even as he died). Bauer, of course, is the antithesis of that attitude. His heroism stems from his brutality, his willingness to dissolve every ethical boundary in pursuit of higher ends. His is a heroism for a weak and scared nation, one that's decided the old ways of restraint and ethical exceptionalism are insufficiently effective and is trying to convince itself that a loosening of those bonds could restore order and security. That's a scary shift in the culture. An America that looks to Bauer rather than Batman is an altered nation indeed. --Ezra Klein.
