David Jacobs - Death Angel

Jack Bauer's enemy as he operates in the apparently still a bit Wild West is a group called "Annihilax", which struck me at first as a Superman-style villain, until I read further and it turns out to be a bit like the James Bond nemesis SPECTRE. A new SPECTRE which has taken a page from the Al Qaeda book in keeping with the realities of the 21st century. Whatever it is, they're trying to grab up a new laser-based weapons technology called "Medusa", which possibly spells The End Of The World As We Know It if it falls into the wrong hands. And since Annihilax is apolitical like SPECTRE, the motive is what money can be made. We see the Jack Bauer as we know him from the Fox series and earlier books in this series--a cross between James Bond and Dirty Harry, blowing away everybody in sight in a way that seems aimed at making the liberals gasp; "See that? Those right wingers are all alike, placing bargain-basement prices on human life!" Okay, it's a given that the left hates Jack Bauer and are glad that at least he's off TV where he "can't teach our young people that violence is the answer to everything". But we've seen what happens when a major nation takes a pacifist (or at teast isolationist) direction in foreign policy. The West has been telling the world; "we don't hate you and we don't want to fight you" to the rest of the world for years, and we've been getting the response; "Yeah, but WE hate YOU, and we DO want to fight you." The trouble is that not enough people are listening. Jack Bauer is a fictional character, and as such a bit of a caricature, but our only hope is that maybe we've got some people who care enough about our country to want to fight for it. We've got too many of today's versions of Hanoi Jane in the form of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Michael Moore. Who all have audiences who practice "militant apathy" in true "Me Meneration---middle aged version" fashion. Tina Turner once sang "We Don't Need Another Hero", but the truth of it is that we do. Maybe Jack Bauer as originally created is an epression of that feeling. To be a Sarah Palin doofus "flag waver" is seen as the epitome of uncool, but I tell you, having one's country come down around one's ears is even less cool. Let's leave Jack Bauer as he was first imagined, not the aging misanthrope seen in this book.