Let it never be forgotten, that our Negroes are freely the Jacobins of the country; that they are the Anarchists and the Domestic Enemy: the Common Enemy of Civilized Society, and the Barbarians who would, if they could, become the Destroyers of our Race.

-Edwin Clifford Holland, from John Hope Franklin’s The Militant South, 1800-1861

The French take to the streets!

It is not only that the French might attune to what is happening and won’t hesitate to organize resistance to whatever they deem is injustice, unfair, unequal - just downright wrong. Something else is happening here that keeps taking it to the streets, a refrain in an old song.

Well, there’s news for dummies. Its 20 degrees and citizens are advised to dress in layers. Where to purchases those layers of clothing? Stay tuned for the real news - a department store sale!

Along with the news, American citizens are offered front row seats to the show, 24! The corporate brains believe that when U.S. citizens are participating in the great American pastime of consumerism, they should keep on eye on Jack Bauer.

And 16 million views sit in their living rooms each week to become voyeurs of someone else’s suffering. In “real time” sessions, one show per one hour of interrogation, Bauer and his operatives have “terrorists” talking, even if at the real Gitmo the “terrorists” are just dying.

The “common thread is terrorism” writes Michael Brandon Dougherty in his article, “What Would Jack Bauer Do?” The show, 24, “not only informs or reinforces views on torture, it shapes viewers’ perspective of the entire war on terror.” In other words, the fictionalization of torturing “terrorists” educates while actual news regarding the use of waterboarding and other techniques are deemed not appropriate for viewing on the public airwaves.

Most importantly, with no real understanding of the “enemy,” viewers are “acclimated” to think “there may be a terrorist in your house,” writes Dougherty. In 24, Dougherty argues, conservatives have found a “worldview consonant with their hawkish tendencies…they have embraced Jack Bauer as their pop-culture icon.” In turn, “his name [is] uttered as an invocation of the grit and guts needed in the Age of Terror.”

It isn’t just conservatives, however, who embrace this fictional Bauer as their hero. “Conservatives” may say so openly, but with 16 million viewers, it’s more than a conservative/liberal issue - this fascination with a television show featuring torture of brown-skinned people.

To either exceed the reality of confronting difference or to serve as protocol for handling the Other, fantasy is an Amerikkkan tool for educating its citizens and enforcing the image of white heroes and dark evil villains. The show, 24, acclimates a new generation of young viewers to the “cult of chivalry.”

This “cult of chivalry” in the U.S. is nothing new. It owes thanks to the imagination of slaveholders who “acclimated” the American citizenry to the enslavement of Africans. Slaveholders imported Sir Walter Scott Waverly novels and poems across the seas and transformed the American landscape and the American mind with images of feudal mansions and “gentlemen” and “gentlewomen,” among the “gardeners in the garden” (enslaved Black Americans). As historian John Hope Franklin writes, the wildest dreams of the Southern settler involved his establishing himself as a country gentleman, living in noble splendor, receiving the services of his coterie of subordinates, and discharging the obligations that his “high position” imposed upon him. (The Militant South). Such “high positions” require mechanisms of control. Similar to 24, fear prevails.

In that “Age of Terror,” the “conduct of the master toward the slave was determined by rules and considerations not unlike those of the military [so that it was common in time to associate] the “swagger of the bully” with “chivalry.” Vigilance was crucial. Freedom for the slave, Franklin writes, “‘would have virtually destroyed the institution.’”

“The South’s greatest nightmare was the fear of slave uprisings; and one of the most vigorous agitations of her martial spirit was evidenced whenever this fear was activated by even the slightest rumor of revolt,” writes Franklin. Etched in the minds of Americans is the image of the “villain” - a threat to body, home, social order, and land. Slaveholders “sought the cooperation of the entire community.” Black resisters met with their Jack Bauer represented in citizen militias, “which became an established institution” that strengthened “the position of the military in the Southern community.”

While many American citizens know Pax Americana is in full stride and it’s Pax Americana that has reached into their homes, while they know it’s rampaging throughout Iraq in search of “terrorists” and threatens to “liberate” Iran of “terrorists,” and while it’s swaggering bullies coerce “allies” into “cooperating” with it’s corporate militia, they stay tuned in to the adventures of hero Jack Bauer who can do what they wish to do to all terrorists once and for all!

To envision a call to “take to the streets” means confronting the paradoxical idea that the government of the people, by the people and for the people is frightening! For fearing the people, specifically the Red, Black, and Brown, is the “common thread of terrorism” that keeps anti-war, and-Empire rallies the domain of pre-dominantly white Americans. These Americans fear the U.S. government less! Even some Red, Black, and Brown people have learned to fear a revolt of the masses of people most affected by the agenda of Pax Americana. Any gathering of Black Americans on the streets raised the “terrorist” alert from Yellow to Red - even before such official alerts! As we witnessed in the late 60s and early 70s, the anger of the disenfranchised and the Black Power Movement in the streets, sent white Americans scurrying back to their homes.

While countries like Spain, Naomi Wolf argues in “Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps,” (from her upcoming book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot) “know that they face a grave security threat,” Americans, on the other hand, believe that it is “potentially threatened with the end of civilization as we know it” if the myth of the traditional hero and villain are not maintained.

The “cult of chivalry” moved to Hollywood long ago. And the corporate-backed presidential Republicrats have faith in the partnership of government and corporations maintaining the myth of heroes and “terrorists.” So the American public will be busy hero worshipping Jack Bauer.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.