Show Notes
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Fox’s 24 was set to premiere weeks after 9/11. Its first hour blows up a plane, so the network held it back. That delay is the whole show in miniature. It was the post-9/11 show before the letter. Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed and author of How to Sell a Genocide, calls 24 his favorite show of all time and an axiomatically reactionary one, and he holds both views at once. He has spent years on the propaganda beat, and this just might be his canonical text. The politics of 24 never came from the neocon intellectuals nobody read. They came from mood and vibe and movie brain. Joel Surnow, the creator and a Limbaugh-and-Cheney favorite, built a machine that runs on one line: “I don’t have a choice.” Jack Bauer is a reluctant serial killer trapped in a permanent ticking-clock trolley problem. Act now or wait for the nuke. The show aired an infomercial for torture before everyone else followed suit. And it kept you stuck in the final hour, where history and motive are deleted and the only virtue left is putting out the fire through the most brutishness of force. From there, it is a short walk to the sleeper-cell racism. The “they could live next door” billboard, the Iranian mastermind of season four, the season six turn where Kal Penn’s character suffers an anti-Muslim hate crime and is then revealed to be a terrorist after all. Adam ties this straight to his book. The word “terrorism” props up entire galaxies, quietly dropped by the Times and then revived the instant Gaza needed it. The goal has always been to make everyone a Jack Bauer, killing with a heavy heart because we have no choice. We also get into the Sutherland family moral inversion, the FBI sting operations that manufactured the very plots they then foiled, and the show’s iron law that no good deed goes unpunished. Further Reading and Listening The Column (Adam’s newsletter) Citations Needed (Adam’s podcast with Nima Shirazi) How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza by Adam “The Essential Terrorist” by Edward Said “The Depraved Heroes of 24 Are the Himmlers of Hollywood” by Slavoj Žižek Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky “Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24” by Jane Mayer Teaser from The Episode 24 Trailer
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From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️ “When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. Neither achieving box office nor critical success, the movie still evokes a wide range of reactions. Especially when it comes to its ambiguous relationship to the original text. Van and Lyle have fellow vet and strategist Alexander McCoy on the show to debate their competing reads. Along the way, they come to agree that certain insights gleaned from the cinematic rendering might be at odds with Card’s politics. Ranging from the ultimate lovelessness of war to the emptiness of any strategy unharnessed from justice and peace. Alex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexandermccoy.bsky.social Further Reading “A Primer on Orson Scott Card and the Ender’s Game Controversy,” by Anna Silman The Internationalists, by Alexander Ward “The Great Humbling,” by David Klion “Four Futures,” By Peter Frase Strategy and Conscience, by Anatol Rapaport Ender’s Game Trailer Teaser From The Episode
Ryan Miller, the next on the show’s fellow veteran lineup, was a Marine in Okinawa from 1998 to 2002, spent years in About Face: Veterans Against the War, helped Oakland decriminalize plant medicines in 2019, and now works as a therapist in psychedelic integration. He joins us to discuss Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film documenting three special operators from SEAL training through Afghanistan to Iraq to a clinic in Mexico, where ibogaine and toad venom do what sixty pills a day could not. For Lyle the film’s real subject is a trauma apparatus built to repair faulty equipment rather than heal people (one SEAL is sent to the military’s brain-injury center, patched up, and returned for four more deployments). As the scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj has argued in Combat Trauma, PTSD was popularized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in rap groups that turned pain into politics. As the decades followed, this promising origin story nonetheless raced toward an endpoint constituted—in Ryan’s words—by psychedelic-assisted stormtroopers. Van invokes Fanon’s French torturer, begging his psychiatrist for a way to sleep at night and keep his job. Then there is the narration itself, where the enemy appears only as bad guys, terra nullius in uniform. No Afghans, no Iraqis, not even Mexicans in a film set half in Mexico. The one line that breaks the frame, a SEAL wondering whether we’d have a military at all if we didn’t abuse children, lasts no more than a second. Further Reading and Listening Ryan Miller’s therapist profile Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj “Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by Lyle Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode Teaser from the Episode In Waves and War Trailer
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com