24 Lowers the bar

YHVH declares (Amos 3:7) that He does nothing without declaring His plans through His “servants the prophets”.

The Adversary seems to do similarly — although not with the same level of integrity, or for the same reasons — and it could well be argued that he uses television and the movies for that purpose.  There may be no better example of the concept than the  TV show 24, particularly when it comes to propaganda for the burgeoning police state.

I originally started watching back when the threat that Jack Bauer faced was a terrorist nuclear weapon in LA, in large part to check out the message being sold to Amerika.  While the show is without question well-acted, fast-paced, and finely crafted — making it not only entertaining but a great vehicle for the purpose of “molding hearts and minds” — it is certainly not subtle:

If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

When the Constitution, and concepts like the “rule of law”, stand in the way of the “good guys” like Jack, we are evidently to be comforted by the fact that torture, break-ins, collateral damage, and a total surveillance state are all “necessary evils” in the Fight Against Terrorism.  While there may be a few bad guys in Government Itself (even in the Oval Office from time to time) the message is that ultimately the ends justify the means, even if there is a bit of ambiguity about getting there.  It is the subtlety of how good is mixed with evil, in other words (see Genesis 3) which makes the message so effective.

But when I watched the two episodes last night that I had missed during the recent trip, something new hit me:  24 is now lowering the bar.   The noble TV President  made that clear when she declared that the “total resources” of the United States would be brought to bear against the terrorists this season when they threatened about a 20 block square area of Manhattan with a “dirty bomb” made of nuclear fuel rods — a bomb smuggled into the city in spite of all the traffic cameras, spy drone UAVs, satellites, and even the NYPD’s Finest.

We were lured into Terror Fear Syndrome over worries about suitcase nukes and bio-terror pandemics.  We were conditioned to accept wiretaps and the torture of suspects because the “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few – or the one”  (OK, that’s a bit of Star Trek “new-agery”; after all, this concept has been around since the Garden).  We strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel, in other words.

But look at how far the bar has now been lowered!

What constitutes a terror event justifying acts that were once utterly prohibited by Law have morphed from pandemic and national destruction to a few city blocks.  “Weapons of Mass Destruction” once meant a Manhattan Project effort, which required the resources of a nation-state to construct.  Now a Maxwell Smart wannabe shoe-bomber and an idiot who couldn’t even properly light his own underwear have managed to sell post-Constitutional Amerika on a series of airport intrusions and naked body scanners that would get ordinary peons arrested for child pornography if the very same images were found on a laptop that one of them tried to carry THROUGH the very same portal!

Even rifles that were once (prior to the bootlegger-era US v Miller travesty) called “weapons of military utility” and obviously protected by the Second Amendment are now being labeled “WMDs” by media sycophants.

Once the Police State “ball” starts rolling downhill, it obviously picks up speed.  The next steps are becoming increasingly apparent, particularly to those who study what our Creator Wrote for us.

The “prince of this world” and his servants, the prophets of Hollywood, have indeed managed to lower the bar once again.  It should make us prayerfully consider what those who “have eyes but do not see” are being set up for next.