If you look at the literature of war you will find an emphasis on birth during wars. It is a human mechanism to shut out some of the horror, an attempt to convince ourselves that something good might result.
Oh, yes, Badtux, can’t have those Yankees getting word of quaint local customs or attitudes that would make them reluctant to spend their dollars in the Triangle.
All of the Nazis died in the war, all of the Klan disappeared. Without the call of money available on television people would never be aware of the odd branches of ?Christianity? that have sprouted down here. They maintain a generally friendly front, but occasionally slip. The code words and euphemisms hide the truth from the public.
]]>Reading the newspapers here in Soviet America has always required something of a keen eye for reading between the lines if you wished to approach anything resembling the truth, just look at the “coverage” of the Iran-Contra hearings (the crimes of the Reagan administration there were similar to the crimes of the Nixon administration ten years prior, but the press had been purged of “subversives” by that time so there was none of the outraged coverage that Watergate received), but over the past ten years I’ve noticed that reporters have had to become far more subtle in how they slip nuggets of truth into morasses of “truthiness” in order to slip it past keen-eyed editors. And many stories, editors simply kill because they do not fit in with the overall picture that editors wish to present to the world. My first indication of the power of the religious right, for example, was an anti-abortion rally that shut down a major city in North Carolina for an afternoon. This rally was covered by… uhm… nobody. Not any of the newspapers in the region. Not any of the television stations of the region. And thus not by any of the national press, which relies on reciprocal agreements with local press to get local stories. Because it was embarassing to the city fathers of this major city, who wished to present their city to major employers as a progressive enclave where their upper-middle-class employees would be happy, rather than as an enclave of inbred buck tooth foul mouth redneck cretins.
It’s just sad that a respected reporter has to write an article about cats now to slip even a bit of truth past the filters at his bosses’ desks… sigh. A free press. It’d be a great idea.
]]>Oh, the horror, the grammatical horror… perhaps the NYT should hire me as an editor.
Seriously, I simply do not share Tristero’s assessment that Burns’s “cat blogging” constitutes a trivialization of war reporting. It is likely that I am fonder of cats than Tristero is, though he is far from an insensitive soul. (He is a composer of serious music in real life. I figured out who he is, and confirmed the fact by an exchange of emails, but I ain’t tellin’.) But we humans aren’t the only critters whose lives are ruined by war. Should a state of war diminish the worth of the lives of feral cats? Not in my estimation.
Jill, thanks for the Neruda poem… moving indeed.
]]>The Dictators
An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence
What the military hasn’t tried is telling the truth. If you don’t know, you don’t know. If it’s a disaster, it’s a disaster. People really do appreciate being told the truth. There were some major screw-ups in WWII, but they were reported, investigated, and people were held responsible. We still won and people didn’t give up.
The problem is that the first time people discover that something has been covered up, that’s the end of credibility. People remember.
]]>I’m reading a retrospective called The Jonathan Schell Reader. Schell’s first major gig was as a reporter in the Vietnam war, and the first extended report in this book is his first piece from that war, The Village of Ben Suc (1967). hipparchia, your memory is correct: the reportage from that war was brutally direct. Unfortunately, the main lesson learned by several later presidential administrations from the Vietnam experience was that they needed to control the media more effectively. And they certainly do.
(Schell is one of the best writers around, BTW; I recommend his later work as well, especially The Fate of the Earth, long ago available as a hardbound book, but also included in this anthology.)
]]>my car recently developed a little electrical problem that was draining the battery. not wanting to put any time, effort, or money into fixing a car at the time, i just started pulling fuses until the problem went away. now that life is a bit saner, i could easily fix the problem, but really, y’all are lot safer now that i’m not barreling down the highway, yelling back at the idiots who infest my car radio.
i can certainly see why people would have this reaction. i did find myself involuntarily comparing the images from that piece to the mental images i had stored away from reading riverbend’s blog as i was reading it, so i guess it had its intended effect, on me at least.
the human memory apparatus is faulty and selective, so i can’t be sure, but it sure seems to me that the news media of yore covered the vietnam war with more outrage and grisly detail than the present-day msm is giving to this one. then again, i was just a kid, and my parents, in spite of being staunch republicans, were anti-war. they may have been heavily filtering what their kids saw on tv and in the newspapers and magazines.
]]>United States citizens don’t do nuance very well.
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