Omega Point

Jack Bauer wouldn’t have stood for that!

I thought this was kind of inter­est­ing: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Dou­glas”. I don’t just mean the cul­ture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepi­ness that would ulti­mately lead to the down­fall of the RCMP Secu­rity Ser­vice and the sub­se­quent cre­ation of CSIS, Canada’s mod­ern intel­li­gence agency. (For those of you out­side Canada, CSIS is known for such classy oper­a­tions as help­ing to form the white nation­al­ist Her­itage Front and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the USAUK ECHELON pro­gram. Nicely done, guys.)

No, what I actu­ally found inter­est­ing was that I’d never made the con­nec­tion that Don­ald Suther­land was Tommy Dou­glas’ son-in-law. I knew who they both were indi­vid­u­ally, and I knew Don­ald was father of Kiefer, but I never actu­ally asso­ci­ated the two.

When I men­tioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to under­stand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact impor­tant? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its impor­tance in the arti­cle or in our con­ver­sa­tion, but that got me think­ing — did it actu­ally mat­ter which he actu­ally meant? Why would some­one con­sider that sort of trivia impor­tant? More­over, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Dou­glas was. How­ever, sev­eral mil­lion peo­ple watch 24. By asso­ci­at­ing “Tommy Dou­glas”, a rel­a­tively unpop­u­lar brand, how­ever impor­tant a fig­ure he may have been, with a highly pop­u­lar, well-known brand like “Kiefer Suther­land”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audi­ence, see­ing the man’s grand­son hack­saw off ter­ror­ists’ heads every week, have formed an emo­tional famil­iar­ity with him. See­ing the vast num­ber of peo­ple: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a sin­gle day — causes us to become inter­ested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pur­sue pop­u­lar pop­ulist — placed in pop-cultural con­text for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Moun­ties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?”

Pre­dictably, Ze Frank already spent time think­ing about this stuff… pre­sum­ably so I didn’t have to.

(Orig­i­nal link via Rob Cot­ting­ham)