If you're addicted to Fox's 24, you probably cheered on Jack Bauer when, in a recent episode, he snapped the fingers of a suspect who was, shall we say, reluctant to talk. Maybe you hated yourself a little bit for it, but you watched, and you got it: Yessssss!!!! Torture's a no-brainer here. He's got to save us all from imminent thermonuclear annihilation. Never mind the Geneva Convention, bring on the electroshock machine!

In pop culture, we approve of rogue heroes saving the day by any means necessary. It's all about getting the job done, and in getting the job done, there will always be casualties of war. And anyway, the bad guy deserved it.

It's not so simple, of course, when as a nation we're confronted with our own culpability. Witness Pfc. Lynndie England, the baby-faced Army reservist who Monday pleaded guilty to seven counts of prisoner abuse - not torture, mind you - at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (No one, apparently, wants to utter the T-word.)

It's hard to forget that picture of England leading an Iraqi prisoner around on a leash, but no one seems close to resolving the question about whether she and the other soldiers were pulling a Jack Bauer, or acting on the orders of a higher-up. Even her judge seemed to express doubt over at least one of the charges levied against her, questioning whether England knew it was a crime to pose for that picture. (After a brief recess, she told the judge she did know it was illegal.)

In the real world, we're all doing a soft-shoe over the oversize primate in the courtroom.

We can't seem to figure this torture thing out, but it's playing front and center in our lives.

Watching "Fear Factor," we squirm with disgusted delight as rodents run over bound and gagged contestants. It's a hoot in the video game Shellshock: Nam '67. It's cringe-inducing comedy in an expletive-laced bit from the Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 album debut: "I'll (expletive) pull your (expletive) tongue out your (expletive) mouth. ... BLAOWW!!"

But looking at real pictures of real people being humiliated and hurt is something we'd rather not talk about. Or face.

Indeed, as Americans, we're a conflicted lot when it comes to torture. A recent USAToday/CNN/Gallup poll revealed that a majority of Americans were against forcing prisoners to be chained naked, threatened with dogs, with drowning, with the type of things alleged to have gone on at Abu Ghraib.

Yet 39 percent were willing for the government to "torture known terrorists if they know details about future terrorist attacks in the U.S."

Torture was once a cultural shorthand for evil, one of the worst things that can happen to someone. If you saw Marathon Man, you won't soon forget the sight of Dustin Hoffman, trapped in a dental chair as the maniacally evil dentist (Laurence Olivier) went to work on his teeth. Vincent Price was a portrait in malice in Witchfinder General, eliciting confessions from women by torturing them, and then burning them at the stake.

In Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, there was honor among thieves. Until, that is, Michael Madsen pumped up the volume on his boombox, dancing around with a razor blade as he sliced off the ear of an undercover cop. And then doused him with gasoline. Then he was a bad thief.

Depicting torture was a way to establish a villain's bad guy cred, or to show that our hero or heroine has lived through some horrific things. Take Mel Gibson's paranoid taxi driver in Conspiracy Theory. Turns out they really were out to get him, submerging him again and again, head first, into a toilet, his eyes peeled wide open.

But something shifted along the way. Perhaps we can blame it on 9/11, from the resulting xenophobia and fear. Perhaps not. What is indisputable is that the tone and tenor of our attitude toward torture, as it's played out on small and large screens, has changed to a macho approach where vengeance is best served not cold but piping hot on a silver platter.

Two things are at work here: the notion of retribution, of anointing oneself judge and jury and doling out what is so richly deserved. And the jazzed-up jolt of the sexiness of it all, a violent one-upmanship where the stakes are ratcheted up, movie by movie, TV show by TV show, video game by video game.

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