They Don’t Know Jack
In the New York Times on February 5, Sarah Vowell hailed 24 as a liberal’s guilty pleasure. Describing a recent scene in which Bauer, interrogating a treacherous aide to the president about missing canisters of nerve gas while time was, as time always is on 24, fast running out, points a knife at his face and tells him that if he doesn’t talk, “the first thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to take out your right eye. I’ll move over and take out your left.” Vowell admits, “Sitting on my couch, under the watchful stare of no fewer than six busts of Lincoln, while wearing a sweatshirt given to volunteers at a children’s tutoring center, as Bauer’s knife was poised to break the man’s skin, what I was thinking was: Do it.”
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He’d have whispered, “The terrorists are about to spot me hiding here and then I’m going to have to kill some people so this is a bad time to talk. But I want you to know I love you. We’ll get through this.” Whatever he thought, whatever she decided, she’d need his strength and not his sanctimony, and he’d be there for her. And it would occur to Jack Bauer that whichever way things played out, at some point down the road he’d be as sad as could be.
Melnyk and cowriter Rick Caine focus on Black’s Canadian and British operations. He’s a native Canadian, and London–where he owned the Telegraph–was the city he longed to matter in. It seems that Chicago, despite the Chicago Group, was barely on his radar.
“You can see them around the world on the Internet,” host Howard Kurtz observed during the Reliable Sources discussion. Papers that don’t mind ceding more and more of their purpose to the Internet can console themselves with that thought. But few papers seized the obvious middle ground–telling their readers where to look online or linking to them. Try michellemalkin.com/archives/004413.htm if you haven’t seen the cartoons yet and want to, and then I recommend www.cagle.com, a showcase for editorial cartoonists. Poke around there and you’ll find a wide selection of American cartoons commenting on the Danish cartoons plus a vigorous debate by American cartoonists (look in particular at host Daryl Cagle’s own blog) on the way the nation’s papers handled the story.
