This Sunday
This Sunday
Constant coverage
of war ‘embeds’ us allSitting here, I can hear the war. Not the war proper, the war on television. A rapid fire of sound bites from a lean and dapper ex-general. I keep hearing the word Baghdad. I want to get up and look.
I am hooked on this TV war. It's on in the gym, waiting rooms, wherever I go. At home, my wife watches faithfully, as if the stretched supply lines of our troops might snap if she doesn't pay constant attention.
The war is always on in our house. Our older daughter, Mallory, has stayed focused on her first love, University of Hawaii volleyball. The younger, however, is deeply concerned. When Mallory was thrilled that one of her friends had actually talked to UH outside hitter Arri Jeschke, her younger sister, half overhearing, said, "Ari Fleischer?! She talked to Ari Fleischer? What did he say?" As if the president's press secretary might be holding briefings for eighth-graders.
I am not concerned about whether watching the war is bad for the kids. I do wonder whether turning the war into a protracted miniseries is good for adults.
Last weekend, I heard people complain the war had stalled. The scenario we'd all been sold -- a romp through an outgunned Third World army, mass surrender of enemy troops, a decapitated unpopular regime -- had begun to look more like a TV script than a battle plan.
The war threatened to become a grueling slog. That still could happen, of course. Pockets of resistance could fold themselves into the population, making for the kind of nasty guerrilla conflict that interferes with winning hearts, minds and viewers. That kind of war makes terrible television.
So you could hardly miss the glee of TV commentators when the battle once again turned mediagenic. The commentators bashed the doubters.
With our troops on the line, naturally we want to see things from their perspective. Still, American reporters are supposed to be skeptical, balanced. Americans mock the propagandistic media of places like Iraq. But the cable news networks, especially Fox, have been gung ho on the war from the early battle for public opinion.
We're entranced by those "embedded" reporters in the field with their compelling, pixilated video. But the networks also have embedded those reporters into an endless spinning of the American TV audience. It's a kind of psy-ops, aimed at us. One embedded reporter put a Marine sergeant on the mike. The Fox anchor came up with this probing question: "Are you fired up?" That is, word for word, what cheerleaders used to ask the crowd at my high school pep rallies.
Many of us were similarly glued to the TV during the first Gulf War. What do you remember? Hazy pictures of tracer fire over Baghdad? Nervous correspondents flinching at the possibility of incoming Scuds?
What didn't we see? The war. For instance, we didn't see pictures of the "highway of death," the road out of Kuwait where a convoy of fleeing Iraqi soldiers and civilian workers were bombed, carbonized where they sat in their vehicles. Many of those Iraqis acted barbarously during the occupation of Kuwait and arguably deserved their fate. But despite the round-the-clock coverage of that war, those pictures remain unknown to most Americans.
Similar pictures of casualties in Iraq, both Iraqi and Western, both military and civilian, have been televised. They are not a secret from the rest of the world. No American media --not CNN, not Fox, not the newly bellicose, post-Peter Arnett MSNBC -- has room for them on their 24/7 newscasts.
The United States, to its credit, is trying to fight a virtually unprecedented war, one that is simultaneously lethal, yet humane and beneficial.
It's still a war. The images of bloody children, grieving mothers or dead soldiers, ours and theirs, represent real human damage. We have to be able to look at them. We may very well say after looking that what we're doing is still right. But until we look at them squarely, how do we know? How do we ask ourselves the tough questions? About what's really happening now, and what happens when the cameras shut off and we have to win the peace?
That's the real war.
Not the one on TV.
John Heckathorn is the editor of Honolulu Magazine. He is one of four columnists who take turns writing "This Sunday."