Letters to the Editor
-
Baptism by Lies
I still remember watching the cable news on the night of "shock and awe," and the ensuing days of the romp to Baghdad, because it marks my final break with the mainstream media. The last bits of scales fell from my eyes, and I finally understood what was going on. To my memory, the most distinct illustration was when one of the talking heads -- perhaps the loathsome Aaron Brown -- accidentally let Gore Vidal on the air to fire a few choice, well-aimed darts at the bubble of delusion Brown and the rest were so busily inflating. The network spent the next ten minutes falling all over itself in abject apology for this lapse. I swear, they were still apologizing two commercial breaks later.
The utter corruption of the mainstream media is a product of many forces, but there's something else going on too. However much the media may shape our culture, they also mirror it. They are in a sense the collective "us." And they don't want to hear from genuine war dissenters, or from our victims, for the same reason a small town doesn't want to hear from the victims of some mass crime in which its citizens have colluded. It is a phenomenon as old as our species, or at least as old as conscience -- the collective, consensual forgetting-and-ignoring of the unspeakable things we sometimes do.
Whatever its prosecutors' intentions may have been, the invasion of Iraq was a crime against the law of nations, a gross breach of universal standards of honor and decency, and a sin against any credible conception of morality and ethics. That's why Charlie was begging those two guys to give him a crumb of, if not forgiveness, at least moral respect. Of course they could not do that. Who in their position could? Who in any objective position could? The only way for most Americans to feel okay with themselves now is to drive on deeper into the heart of self-delusion and insularity. Which is exactly what makes McCain such a frightening candidate.
All this goes double for the mainstream media, without whose complicity this catastrophe could not have happened. It's well worth keeping the heat on them. If you're subscribing to any of the culprits, stop your subscriptions and tell them why. If you're viewing them, boycott their sponsors and tell them why. But let's don't be surprised if mere logic and evidence leave them unmoved. They're all way too deeply invested now to back out merely because they were grossly and tragically wrong.