- The Super Bowl, played yesterday (a week later than
originally
scheduled, due to September 11), is notable among major American sporting
events as well as major American pop culture events for the extent to which
it has always warmly embraced America's wars.
-
- Beyond the usual martial metaphors of the game itself
(avoiding the blitz by throwing the long bomb from a shotgun formation
while the offensive line kills them in the trenches), the National Football
League's premier game has gone out of its way in the past to promote and
glorify the nation's military.
-
- The 1991 Super Bowl, played in the opening days of the
Gulf War, used its pre-game and halftime ceremonies (and assorted other
festivities) to plant wet fat kisses on the war that was at that very
moment
massacring hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, with a few dozen Americans
lost. (The real toll came later -- illness and suicide among U.S. soldiers,
disease and privation among Iraq's families.)
-
- And yesterday brought more of the same. From Fox TV's
repeated camera shots of U.S. troops watching the game from Kandahar (at
4 a.m. local time?), to Budweiser ads with the Clydesdale horses bowing
to the Statue of Liberty, patriotism and warfare and corporate branding
were very much considered interchangeable, all part of a spectacle suffused
with smarmy jingoistic bullshit.
-
- Even the Irish rock band U2 -- whose lead singer, Bono,
was fresh from hanging out with the world's corporate and political elite
at the World Economic Forum in New York -- was in the spirit. U2 first
rose to fame off a breakthrough album in the early '80s called
"War"
-- the band, born of a country plagued by war and terrorism, was against
it, and later songs like "Bullet the Blue Sky" specifically
ripped
U.S. military adventurism and its impact on poor countries. Yesterday,
Bono finished the band's short halftime show with the inevitable tribute
to 9-11 victims, literally wrapping himself in the American flag, as though
honoring 9-11's dead -- many of whom weren't Americans -- somehow required
solidarity with the U.S. flag and with the waging of yet another war, or
three, or five. Permanent war, reduced to emotional spectacle and a
brandable
moment.
-
- The Super Bowl is the premier annual spectacle not just
in professional football, but in the world of advertising. A 60-second
TV ad during the game is the priciest air time in the world, costing more
than the GNP of some of the world's smaller countries. Ad agencies and
trade publications buzz for weeks with anticipation over the wildest,
flashiest,
most expensive commercials of the year, which the world's biggest companies
unveil during The Game to the estimated 130 million people that are
watching
in the U.S. alone.
-
- Enter your tax dollars.
-
- It's one thing for Budweiser to spend a small fortune
waving the flag; it's another for we taxpayers to foot the bill for ads
touting controversial public policies. In an unprecedented move, the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy (home of the "Drug
Czar")
spent over $1.6 million each for two 30-second ads airing during the
telecast
of yesterday's game. That's over $50,000 a second, by far the largest
single-event
advertising buy in U.S. government history.
-
- And what did we get for our money? Blatant propaganda
-- specifically, an argument closely linked to the Bush Administration.
The Drug Czar's ads focused on the idea that fighting the War on Drugs
also helps stop terrorism, because the money your local pusher makes
eventually
finds its way into the pockets of Osama bin Laden and his various terrorist
colleagues. ("Where do terrorists get their money? If you buy drugs,
it might come from you.")
-
- Now, this particular argument is nonsense on several
levels. If you put gas in your car, some of the money might wind up in
the pockets of a Middle Eastern terrorist, too. (Or, more destructively,
in the pockets of Big Oil.) But concerning drugs, in Afghanistan,
specifically,
it was the Taliban who after decades of futile Western efforts were largely
successful at wiping out poppy (and thus heroin) production in Afghanistan
-- so successfully that only last spring the Bush Administration was paying
the Taliban as a reward for their stellar anti-drug works.
-
- By contrast, in the two months since the Northern
Alliance
and their various brutal warlords have assumed power, rural farmers have
rushed to replant their poppy crops, and an enormous new wave of heroin
for Europe and North America will be on its way in a few months. So far,
the War on Terrorism has caused more drug production, not stopped
it.
-
- At a larger level, it's not drugs that fuel political
violence throughout the world -- it's their prohibition, and the forcing
of drug transactions into the black market. There, as the CIA well knows,
lies the world's most efficient system for funneling large amounts of
untraceable
money.
-
- From Afghanistan to Southeast Asia to Latin America,
the CIA has for decades been accused (often irrefutably) of reaping huge
profits from illicit drugs, money which -- as with its illegal arms sales
in the '80s that went to anti-Nicaraguan contra operations -- has tended
to go directly into funding our terror campaigns. If the U.S. does it,
it's no surprise that al Qaeda et al would, too. The effort to eradicate
certain popular drugs -- including the War on Drugs touted by yesterday's
TV ads and the Drug Czar office that paid for them -- has literally
created,
and perpetuated, the very black market now accused of being a source of
cash for al Qaeda's jihad. Ending drug prohibitions would do far more to
thwart terrorism than the War on Drugs ever could.
-
- Other ironies abound. The War on Drugs is also being
used as the excuse for U.S. military involvement around the world,
particularly
in the Andean region of South America. There and elsewhere, U.S. liaisons
with paramilitary thugs (including a hundred American mercenaries for every
John Walker), with their peasant massacres and other human rights
atrocities,
is helping to breed new generations of anti-American terrorists. And two
fruitless decades of War on Drugs propaganda, complete with two million
people in U.S. prisons, erosion of civil liberties, and neither an end
in sight nor a vision of what victory would look like, eerily evokes how
the Bush Administration has envisioned the War on Terrorism.
-
- Lastly, as with the War On Terrorism -- where it's only
particular kinds of terrorism (theirs, not ours) that we object to -- the
War on Drugs is a selective affair, too. Some drugs are profitable and
OK, even though they kill thousand each year; some are worth life sentences
or worse. Hence, year after year, part of the Super Bowl spectacle is the
highly anticipated Budweiser commercials. Use -- er, drink --
responsibly.
-
- But hey, it's the Super Bowl, entertainment, a time to
suspend belief. A perfect setting for an administration whose rhetorical
excesses have been veering lately into the absurd. (E.g., Iran, Iraq, and
North Korea as some new form of World War II fascist "Axis of
Evil,"
when none of them have any proven links to September 11, and probably,
among all three of them, don't have enough money to afford calling each
other long distance.)
-
- George Bush is free, of course, to say ridiculous and
nonsensical things, even when they piss off allies and commit soldiers
to battle; heck, it's what he does best. That, too, is entertainment. But
spending $3,200,000 of our tax dollars on Super Bowl propaganda is neither
entertaining nor appropriate.
-
- Oh, and the game? The Patriots won. Go figure.
- _________
-
- Addendum
-
- I knew some alert reader would find it, and several did:
The long list of appointments, budget cuts, and other atrocities
perpetuated
by the Bush Administration, which I ran as part of my column on the first
Bush year over the past weekend, does, indeed, have a source.
-
- It was a modified version of a list originally prepared
by Dr. David A. Sprintzen, Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the
Institute for Sustainable Development at C.W. Post College on Long Island.
The list actually only covered Bush's first six months, which explains
some of the glaring omissions (some of which I filled in). As I noted,
a lot more could have been added; I ran the litany merely to establish
the sheer scope of the quiet revolution, largely escaping media attention,
that our unelected and misunderestimated Great Helmsman has inflicted on
our country.
-
- At minimum, whether the public agrees with such moves
or not -- and they certainly didn't vote for them -- such a radical
reworking
of public policy desperately needs greater exposure and more widespread
public debate. But without any meaningful challenge from the Democrats,
most major media news editors don't see any conflict; therefore, no story.
Scary stuff. Many thanks to the readers who filled in the source of Dr.
Sprintzen's list.
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