An editorial I really enjoyed...
At six, I saw the flag draped coffins, but it didn’t quite connect. These are our soldiers, the newscasters said. Our Sons, our brothers, our heroes.
I learned the Pledge of Allegiance, with upturned eyes and hand over heart – a first grade prelude to the American Dream. One Nation Under God. . .with Liberty & Justice for All.
That year, NBC cameras focused on a Saigon prisoner standing in the street, his hands tied behind his back, his face twisted in fear. There was an outstretched arm, a gun, another face devoid of feeling as he pulled the trigger. There was blood, as red as the stripes on our flag.
Shell shock reverberated across the continents. We were not indivisible by then.
Three years earlier, a young Morley Safer took Americans to Cam Ne. People watched, horrified, as renegade-heroes set fire to straw roofs. CBS was there, capturing the images as reality and history both. Weeping mothers held their babies close, children screamed, fathers begged. Desperation and fear was thicker than the smoke.
Lyndon Johnson was angered by Safer’s report. As Star Spangled denials were being written & rehearsed by the Department of Defense, Johnson accused CBS of shitting on the American Flag.
Flags wave higher and hearts are prouder, it seems, when the gory details are kept under lock & key, and selected truths are plucked from days of glory.
Lyndon demanded his glory days, and the rose-colored filter of censorship. But no - fearless networks and intrepid journalists opted for reality.
It really was the land of the free and the home of the brave. America.
War.
In the 70’s - millions showed up in Washington, DC & San Francisco demanding an end to the war. Their demonstrations filled the airwaves and the front page of every newspaper.
And it worked, the boys would come home – but it would take four more years.
“And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind. - Major Michael Davis O’Donnell (KIA).”
Those gentle heroes – those bright-eyed youths, brave women, and courageous fathers – are memorialized on a long black wall. The death toll math still hurts. 58,195 heroic American sons forever young, forever mourned.
There is no memorial for the 300,000 wounded. And the 2-5 million left dead in Asia are forgotten ghosts, invisible and intangible.
In 2004, the flag-draped coffins of slain American soldiers made the news, and the Bush administration cried foul. The Department of Defense rushed to end the leaks of “sensitive” information. The propaganda machine was revved up, and the conglomerations were hushed up. Journalism was a thing to be chewed up and spit out, cowered into compliance.
Bush decided. No flag draped coffins, no children running from a spray of bullets, no piercing shrapnel, or screaming widows. Instead, yellow ribbons for all. A fight for freedom in a place that never challenged ours. A kiss on the cheek for the royal leader of the oil-rich Saudis, whose Madrassas teach death to Americans and suicide bombings as sacred scripture.
The news?
Most of the news, even as it appears to be from right, left and center, is pressed from the same cookie cutter.
In a land of 300 million, about 60 corporations rule the major media, and 6 of them rule more than the rest – giant conglomerates of light bulbs, toothpaste, washing machines, news, politics and war.
A bloodless war evokes support. A toppling statue saves the people. A dirty & shamed Hussein, later hung from the gallows, is a cheap substitute - a metaphorical Bin Laden.
The Iraq war - “a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion”, Senator Murtha said.
In September 2004, CBS – the once-spirited news enterprise that allowed Morley Safer to bring the realties of war into the public consciousness – delayed telling the public the truth about the Niger forgeries. Using their journalistic license to revoke the right of the public to be informed, they delayed the truth for the sake of a Presidential election. Americans would not know that Bush lied to them about WMD’s and yellow cake uraniam until after the election.
They would not know they were voting for torture, or hypocrisy.
“”It’s a no-brainer for me,” Cheney said of water-boarding torture and the breaking of treaties. As the CIA was pushing gasping men into the water, Lynndie England was serving 521 days in prison. The difference was in rank, who gave the orders, and who inflicted the pain.
64% of Americans now stand against Bush, but it’s a quiet revolution. There has been no March Against Death, no million-strong outcries from the change-the-world crowd, and no stirring speeches by political revolutionaries – at least none that make the 5:00 news. The beginning and end to salvation, it seems, is the ballot box.
In 2007, the streets are business-as-usual. The dissenters are scattered wide. Blogs are the new picket signs, read in solitude. There’s anger, but it’s restrained. As the yellow ribbons fade, there’s also a can’t-be-bothered numbness, a strange complacency with the numbers of dead-missing-wounded, and the purposeful lies that helped killed them.
Enter apathy.
You can’t change the world.
But we did once, before our hearts grew numb, before our eyes were averted, before we acquiesced. Before we let ourselves be blinded by the banner of patriotism, and the expedience of false pretense. Now we have let the world change in unspeakable ways. American bodies pile up, invisible, intangible. The ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have no names. Our leader wants to invade Iran, he wants covert operations in Pakistan. Even Europe is now named as a terrorist threat.
What will come first - WW3 or a real American Revolution?
