April 28, 2004 (World News Trust) -- Each workday I commute toward Washington, D.C., along Route 7, where patriotic war slogans are spray painted on the overpasses, and homemade signs jut from the median in support of our "boys in Iraq." Mud-splattered construction trucks rip by with frayed flags popping in the wind, loaded with burly bearded men and looking very much like the footage of Afghanistan or Angola, minus the 50 caliber gun mounts. Yesterday I saw my first stretch Hummer, painted in desert tan and carrying half a dozen soccer mom types, which rather sums up the point I am trying to make here. There is a distinct martial ethos, the tang of steel and the smell of gun oil in the air around Washington these days, I swear it.
Only a blind microcephalic could fail to notice this systemic militarization of the American culture, and the media's hyper-escalation of warrior worship. Reputedly, our national character is supposed to be improved by all this. But I was in the military for a time -- a "young warrior" in Fox Network parlance -- and I can confidently say I was not improved one bit by the experience. (Although I did learn to cuss properly, if a bit too much.) That was 35 years ago, back when there was little, if any, mythologizing of Vietnam's warriors, much less patriotic news spasms ejaculated by embedded reporters between the commercials. News was duller then. Certainly not as entertaining as the Jessica Lynch story of a fetching, innocent young blonde wounded while supposedly blazing away at the face of evil itself, only to suffer multiple wounds, then be rescued from some fly-ridden Iraqi hospital (more radio crackling and gunfire please) by her comrades in arms. After this stirring rescue we were served the titillating dessert of the subsequent doctor's report: She was sodomized by the sweaty stinking bastards! In the television news business it just does not get any better than that. Pass the corn chips, please.
With television news like that, who needs a rational explanation as to why we are at war? The entertainment value alone is worth it. And therein lies the problem for those of us in that last generation of people who gained most of what they know from reading: We need a tangible explanation why we are spilling so much blood and bullion in that god forsaken desert pisshole. Still no answer. Or no new one at least. Oh, there is the standard line that goes, "We are defending democracy and liberating a people from oppression." That old saw was getting mighty dull even back in my day, when it was used to explain Vietnam.
I cannot remember a time when the American public ever asked any important questions of its national leadership. In the American scheme of things, that is the media's job, media frames the question and the public asks it, after having been appropriately bludgeoned over the head with it. That's our system by damned, we love it, and it has even been known to work on occasion. Which would be fine, except that Edward R. Murrow has been dead a long time. Since then, the American psyche has been hardwired into a new world communications order, one in which global corporations now pay the freight for national television. Halliburton, Boeing and Sprint ain't Geritol and this ain't Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour. Content with selling us chewing gum or Chesterfields, early television sponsors were not players in the Pentagon defense contract game and never slept with the government to obtain more bandwidth.
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