Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when
the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly
patting death on its head.
Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet -- most of
all -- war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on
abstractions. Their media successes depend on evasion.
President Bush has tried to keep the loved ones of America’s war
dead at middle distance, bathed in soft fuzzy light: close enough to
exploit for media purposes, distant enough to insulate the commander in
chief’s persona from the intrusion of wartime mourning in America.
What’s going on this week, outside the perimeter of the ranch-style
White House in Crawford, is some reclamation of reality in public life.
Cindy Sheehan has disrupted the media-scripted shadow play of falsity.
And some other relatives of the ultimately sacrificed have been en route
to the vigil in the dry hot Texas ditches now being subjected to enormous
media attention a few miles from the vacationing president’s
accommodations.
At this point, Bush’s spinners are desperate to divert the media
spotlight from Sheehan. But other bereft mothers arriving in Crawford
will hardly be more compatible with war-making myths.
Consider the perspective of Celeste Zappala, whose oldest son
Sherwood Baker was a sergeant in the Pennsylvania National Guard when he
died 16 months ago in Baghdad. She is a co-founder of Gold Star Families
for Peace, and what she has to say is gut-wrenching and infuriating:
“George Bush talks about caring about the troops who get killed in Iraq.
Sherwood was killed protecting the people looking for weapons of mass
destruction on April 26, 2004. This was one month after Bush was joking
[at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, on March 24] about
looking for weapons of mass destruction. And then my Sherwood is dead
trying to protect people looking for them because Bush said it was so
important to the safety of our country.”
Disregarding the tacit conventions of jingoistic newspeak, Zappala
adds: “I don’t want anyone else to go through this, not an American, not
an Iraqi, no one. As a person of faith, I firmly believe we have the
ability to provide better answers on how to resolve conflict than what
Bush is offering us. I’ve tried to meet with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, I
was turned away by armed guards. It’s incumbent upon everybody to take
responsibility about what is happening in our country. I have no recourse
but to go to Crawford to do what I can to change the disastrous course we
are currently on and to bear witness to the true costs of this war.”
The true costs. Not the lies of omission.
War PR and war grief have collided at the Crawford crossroads at a
time when the Bush administration is in the midst of launching its scam
about supposed plans to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. On
Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that a spokesman for Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “said he did not know how many extra troops
might be needed during the referendum and election period” through the
end of this year. The AP dispatch added: “Other officials have said that
once the election period has passed and the troop total recedes to the
138,000 level, a further reduction in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 is
possible next spring and summer. That could change, however, if the
insurgency intensifies or an insufficient number of U.S.-trained Iraqi
security forces prove themselves battle-ready.”
When a mass killer is at the helm of the ship of state, taking a bow
now and again while “Hail to the Chief” booms from big brass bands, a
significant portion of the country’s population feels revulsion. And
often a sense of powerlessness -- a triumph for media manipulation.
Passivity is the health of the manipulative media state.
Cindy Sheehan and Celeste Zappala have joined with others in
Crawford to insist that death is not a message for more death -- that we
can understand death as a profound reality check, imploring us to affirm
and defend life.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Dylan Thomas wrote. The
unavoidable dying of life is bad enough. The killing is unacceptable.
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Norman Solomon is author of the new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents
and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Excerpts are posted at:
www.WarMadeEasy.com