Taking Abuse

Well there's a lot aimed my way this morning.

1) My reason for not watching 24 is not political at all. The show's trailers give every indication of the show sucking hard, and I find prejudgements about TV shows to be generally accurate. If it's true that the show's producers are making a deep point about the inefficacy of torture, I still think that Fox's audience is more likely to take away from that the face-value point that competent and cool people like Kiefer Sutherland use torture. I suggested this as a possibility before. This is then not a statement about the show, and certainly not about the freedom of people to create, produce, and watch it, but about how far our political culture has fallen.

2) By "Derridean," I'm referring to the idea that the audience to a work plays some role in determining its meaning. If this framework is ever operative, surely mass entertainments would be the paradigm case.