The Aerie
I'm in a quandry.
On the one hand, it feels somehow disrespectful to have a blase
attitude about a war. Legions of young men who were born after I
graduated from high school are advancing through hell, it seems only
right to pay attention.
On the other hand, this war has been and is being manufactured and
packaged almost as if it's some sort of really expensive reality
television program. "Embedded" journalists, live feeds from Baghdad as
the bombs explode, celebrity reporters "playing Ernie Pyle" as one of
them put it, Geraldo in Afghanistan and Dr. Bob Arnot outside Basra.
Intro music, three-level crawls, blaring pundits and each battle with
its own font and logo.
Is it disrespectful to ignore a war when they turn it into a show you
don't want to watch?
The most annoying element so far has been the "Shock and Awe"
controversy. The news networks positioned themselves for this immense
onslaught of explosives, and the military failed to meet the network's
schedule. So the networks began whining. From NPR to Fox News, the
pundits carped about the delay in the bombings like bored children in
the gloaming of another July Fourth.
And part of me wants to scream, "'Shock and Awe' is death and ruin!" I
mean, even if you back this war, you can't be so excited to see the
explosions that you ignore the fact that civilians are going to be
maimed and incinerated when it starts... can you?
George Orwell was more thoughtful and Aldous Huxley more artistic, but
the future has turned out to be closer to "The Running Man" than
either of the noted authors.
It's arrogance, and it's ignorance, is what it is. A generation grown
up with peace is deluding itself about the costs of war. A generation
raised on tales of World War II heroism recklessly charts a course to
war in order to measure themselves against the legends. A generation
grown accustomed to giant strength of America arrogantly approaches
war as a thing that can be patrolled and predicted.
Yet it was in the Mideast where David slew Goliath.
Does that seem laughable? That America could lose?
Oh, we won't have Saddam Hussein in the White House. We won't be
enslaved in order to paint mustachioed murals. America won't become a
colony of Iraq.
But we will can win the battle and lose the war. We can exercise our
unstoppable power, and simultaneously lose our moral strength. We can
demonstrate our might, and lose our sense of right and wrong. We can
be Goliath in this war, and defeat David.
But that makes us Goliath, then, doesn't it?
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Posted by Albatross at March 23, 2003 12:00 AM