"The Television War"

An essay after my own heart, by Brendan Bernhard in The LA Weekly:

If the first 10 days of the war had been a tennis match, the score would have been 6-0, 6-1, 6-0. And yet, listening to much of the commentary about it on television and elsewhere, you’d have thought that every set had ended in a tiebreaker with the plucky Iraqi underdog pushing the pampered infidel overdog to the point of exhausted, red-faced collapse. And that was on American television. Imagine what it was like on Al-Jazeera....

The Anglo-American soldiers, most of whom have never seen battle before, are learning that they really are up to the job they trained for, and you can sense their growing pride in the realization. I think a lot of them are going to die, and the lucky who survive are going to be haunted by the amount of Iraqis they kill. The war may go on for so long that eventually we’ll tune it out and nudge it toward the periphery of our vision. But one way or another, sanitized or not, an unprecedented amount of it is going to be seen on television, and it’s going to change the way we think about the military as much as the way individual soldiers think about themselves....

(Thanks, Clyde.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 04/05/03 09:09:48 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.