- Nobody should have been surprised by TV's diversionary
tactics yesterday.
-
- It seemed that, every time I flipped between CNN and
MSNBC, they were telling and re-telling "Saving Private Lynch,"
that archetypal, blonde-in-peril, made-for-TV movie coming to a ratings
sweeps period near you. (And doesn't Saddam Hussein make the perfect Oil
Can Harry, tying the pure-hearted heroine to the railroad tracks?)
-
- It was perfect weekend viewing; all the better to keep
you glued to the set, my dear. Neil Postman was so right when he noted
in his Amusing Ourselves To Death that "Entertainment is the supra-ideology
of all discourse on television."
-
- The Jessica Lynch story has all the elements of a Hollywood
classic. As the Independent's Deborah Orr observed Friday, right from the
day she disappeared, Lynch commanded all the media attention, far more
than her less fortunate sisters-in-arms, Shoshana Johnson, whose terrified
eyes in that PoW video will haunt me forever, or Lori Ann Piestewa, a Hopi
Indian we will never see alive.
-
- It is, wrote Orr, "recognizable that America does
have a hierarchy of life, with pretty blondes at the top, black Americans
and Native Americans further down and the rest of the world trailing hopelessly.
Which might help explain the unseemly rush to war."
-
- Confined to quarters again yesterday, trying desperately
not to obsess over Judy Woodruff's floppy flip, it was difficult not to
wonder how the Lynch story was playing in, forgive me, the Arab street
- especially when things were going boom in Baghdad, causing who-knows-how-many
casualties on both sides.
-
- But then, Washington's "We will liberate you even
if it kills you - or us" attitude is the message of the moment. The
invading forces are so good and kind that, after they blow you up, CNN
reporters (Dr. Sanjay Gupta) rush in to perform brain surgery on you.
-
- "This feed-and-kill policy - throwing bombs in Baghdad
and throwing food at the people - is not winning hearts and minds,"
Khaled Abdelkarim, a Washington-based correspondent for the Middle East
News Agency, told the New York Times yesterday.
-
- Why the new tack on the message track?
-
- Because there's been plenty of gun smoke but no smoking
gun.
-
- As Reuters reported last Tuesday, "When Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spelled out the eight U.S. objectives in Iraq
on day two of the war, he said the first was to topple Saddam Hussein and
the second was to locate and destroy Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
-
- "On Day 10 of the war, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria
Clarke restated those eight objectives `as Secretary Rumsfeld described
just a week ago.'"
-
- Not quite. Suddenly, unearthing those nuke-u-lar, chemical
and biological weapons had dropped to fourth on the chart while destroying
them slipped to No. 5. Which is why, for the past week or so, including
yesterday in his treacly weekly radio address, President George W. Bush
has been all about "ridding the people of Iraq from one of the cruelest
regimes on earth."
-
- Can't say I've caught any discussion of this shift on
CNN. But then, being cooped up with Wolf Blitzer's blather is a form of
brain-destroying torture so evil that I would recommend it to any brutal,
vicious dictator looking to gas his own people.
-
- Yesterday, it got so bad, I actually started to miss
all the talking brass who were MIA. Maybe their contracts ran out, seeing
as how the war has lasted more than two weeks now.
-
- In fact, the TV generals are not the only things gone
AWOL. Except for the occasional mention of how there will be singing and
dancing in the streets once America lets Saddam's people go, there has
been no naming-names talk of who is going to run the country and how.
-
- But check the foreign print media, and the better U.S.
papers, and it's clear that the Bushies have lined up a hawkish bunch of
close pals, some with dubious commitments to democratic principles, as
"ministers-in-waiting."
-
- Which is why the scariest news I heard yesterday didn't
come out of Iraq but from the Los Angeles Times, which reported that more
than two-thirds of Americans rely on the cable news nets for coverage of
the war.
-
- And you wonder why so many Americans think Operation
Iraqi Freedom is going to end happily ever after? You would, too, if all
you heard was fairy tales.
- Published April 6, 2003
- Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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