Aquarian Weekly 4/9/03
REALITY CHECK

POST MORTEM FOR WAR COVERAGE

It is an embarrassing time to be a commentator on current events, bludgeoned beneath a miserable torrent of opportunists reduced to regurgitating fascist blather for network dollars in a twenty-four hour a day propagandized abortion of reporting. It is the kind of demented philosophizing that has expensive messengers shamelessly cheerleading and reasoned dissention reduced to a treasonous anathema. This military campaign, and the circus of television madness it has wrought, has reached a level of dangerous stupidity that even my most painfully cynical paranoia would not have dared conjure.

I knew the idea of true journalism had been fatally wounded years ago, but to parade this rotting corpse out onto cable waves incessantly is at the least criminally insane and at its worst a terminally damaging exercise in national brainwashing. Every moment we continue to broadcast foggy glimpses of this fairytale to what is left of the American psyche we are perpetuating an electronic form of generational genocide that will have our children thinking how they are expected to think, and believing what they are told to believe.

I also know that this is wartime personified, but now it is updated by the minute when there is nothing to update. It is editorialized when there is no actual fact to support it, and it is politicized when the debate sounds like the final gurgle of a bleeding animal hunted down by brainless thugs who elicit joy from massacring helpless creatures to compensate for desperately failed images of an angered God.

Know this, if you know anything about what is slowly happening to the social landscape of this country, as long as this nation is at war the truth can no longer be considered an absolute, it is a concept to be manipulated and raped and put on display for those with agendas to dance around like savages soliciting rain.

Answer this: When did the news become only relevant through its interpretation? How many more of us have to endure the following extremist definitions: People protesting for peace hate America and wish death upon every kid enlisted in the Armed Forces or those who support the foreign policy of the present administration are kill-crazed white supremacists ridding the planet of Muslim scum and colonizing a perfectly structured nation.

This may be the collective delusion of retired Birchers jerking off to old Joseph McCarthy speeches while kicking in the heads of their deviant teenaged brats, and may be all the rage for granola-addled burnouts needing something resembling Viet Nam to allow them to appear passionate to the dates their trying to screw, but is it news? Is it disseminating moments that make up an historical record?

Perhaps I'm mistaken. Maybe it's all right now to have news anchors wearing American flag pins and going on and on about "we" and "us" and frowning over video of burning buildings. Apparently it is now considered responsible journalism to prop up military fossils in front of maps and reduce carnage and death to a game of Risk. Perhaps I missed the rule changes in allowing events to unfold under their own momentum. Now we predict and re-predict, and when it turns around, we blurt out barely confirmed abuses of rumor and pass it off as competitive reporting.

I think I see it now. We need news channels run like a Don King Promotion promising "Shock and Awe" and co-opting terms like "imbedded" to increase the excitement and ratings, then after a few days wonder when the good stuff starts because the numbers are dipping. People are dying all over the place, and the entire composition of the Middle East is being challenged by the day, and all we care about is who is the most watched coverage of this thing, and wow, look at this fantastic technology we've got going here!

Then there are the skewered perceptions born of clumsy propaganda.

Let me make sure I've got this straight, if the press questions the Pentagon's operation it is a blatant insurrectionist movement against the American spirit of freedom and an endangerment of the troops? We're talking about the same Pentagon that has stood as a monument of chronic disinformation since its inception. The Pentagon is always "on track." They're always "on plan", but journalists are killing our brave boys and girls stuck in the desert with horrible queries like why the hell did the military decide to rush through the Iraqi countryside in three days, woefully stretching the supply lines and failing to fully control cities and baring its flank?

Meanwhile these uniformed marionettes stand before the pack-rat laziness that passes for the eyes and ears of the American people and act surprised a pathetically out-manned rag-tag mafia of frothing religious maniacs fight dirty to defend land they believe was bartered directly from Allah?

I expect Donald Rumsfeld to act like this is business as usual. He is a festering boil on this wildly moronic fantasy machine. He is a puppet, a mouthpiece, and he knew less about Iraqi resistance or the Republican Guard than the Central Intelligence Agency that has failed this country once again. What I don't expect is for anyone to take a damn thing this strutting ass has to say as anything approaching fact. And neither do I expect anything representing a doomed regime to utter even a slice of newsworthy commentary. Of course whatever is left of the Iraqi government is going to pump out militaristic tripe and pass it off as news, but do we have to acknowledge it? It is getting harder to control these violent retching attacks every time I see another Iraqi diplomat using airtime denying 30 years of human atrocities as if it is merely a cultural divide between the Zionist Western establishment and Islamic law.

And this latest pandering of Iraqi television by Peter Arnett to gain access to Saddam Hussein is so off the charts wretched it bares discussion not as a matter of national security, but of journalistic integrity. If the Iraqis had any guts they'd shoot that miserable bastard in the head and put his severed head on Al Jazeera. It is equivalent to FOXNEWS anchors using "the good guys" rhetoric to suck up to the Pentagon and the current administration to cull better access on this end. This type of grandstanding is also used by those on the inside like the generals conning the Washington Post to rip other military leaders for going with plans differing from their own. Not to mention that self-aggrandizing turd, Geraldo Rivera who is the most glaring example of phony journalism since that insufferable windbag Rush Limbaugh.

In a few days this invasion will be over and we'll all get back to covering celebrity divorces and political dalliances. That suits the medium better anyway.

Reality Check | Pop Culture | Politics | Sports | Music