I took the car to work today, and on the way home – tired of the CD’s I keep meaning to change in the changer – I turned on the radio. Drivetime radio in Los Angeles is all talk and ads and far too little music, so as I hit the buttons, I got KCRW and NPR’s “All Things Considered”. They were covering the vast psychological toll that peacekeeping in Iraq is having on our troops; the sonorous, self-righteous tone of impending defeat rang through the soft, concerned tones of the reporter as she interviewed depressed troops and the psychologists the military has sent out to help them. Collapse, it seemed could come any day.Defeat, and doom everywhere. Death, pain, ruin.
Somehow those have become the coin of our realm. GGonzalez had an excellent point in his comment about journalism below “But even if the facts are correct, there will always be selectivity of information and, equally important, selectivity of presentation.”
There is no circumstance so good that it doesn’t leave itself open to the possibility of bad outcomes, and when we select the information and presentation in the one way that fits the story we want to tell, we can tell a story of impending disaster almost as well as one of victory. Nick Kristof was willing to tell a story that he hadn’t planned on, and I’ll read him with more respect because of it. Somehow, sadly, every time I listen to NPR I leave some of my respect for them behind.
There’s something in me that is pleased at the notion that the worst thing that can happen to our soldiers is depression.
And another that worries that our true vulnerability isn’t material but spiritual – philosophical, as I usually put it.
Then sometimes I read stories like this, and I don’t worry so much. The NPR brigades may be near emotional collapse, but the Palmdale poets and Vietnamese postal workers seem to be doing OK.
For myself, when I find myself nodding, mesmerized by the soft voices of defeat, there are a number of answers. The soft slide of a motorcycle tire as you round a corner just fast enough, followed by the hard kiss of the pavement on a knee slider. My son’s grin of victory as he lays down a full house. My sweetie’s smile when she wakes up. The view from the hills, through the newly clear Southern California air, and out over the distant towers of downtown Los Angeles. You doubtless have your own.
And art. Always art.
I once quoted Mark Doty:
I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,
…
That’s how it begins – but not how it ends…
UPDATE: See also this follow up post. Societies proceed on faith. That faith depends in large part on our belief in the future, and that future will have patches of dangrous rapids. I’ve got a very different faith than Trent does. But here’s why I’m happy to sit here, paddling toward the sound of the oncoming rapids so my sons can live on the other side – and in turn face rapids of their own.
Well, this is a weird sort of synchronicity. Art, you say… and here I just posted Ben Harper’s “Jah Work“, which also speaks to your question.
Speaking of musical moments, this Mark Saleski article at Blogcritics on some of his great “musical moments” is pretty cool, too.
Make no mistake – the doomsters want the US to fail.
That’s why they always compare anything to Vietnam – because we lost there.
And they didn’t argue that we needed to get Vietnam right, but that we should never have been involved. Like they argued we should not be involved in Iraq.
It’s much more dramatic to sound a premature death knoll than it is to keep living, after all…
What?
Take comfort that the worst thing that can happen to our soldiers is depression?
And how many weeks did you go to Pitcairn Island?
You don’t have to be a defeatist to know that things are not going as planned.
Doomster and proud of it.
From a fellow “doomster,” the columnist Pete Hamill:
“Over the past six months, in conversations with old friends or with strangers, I keep picking up a new kind of bleakness.
‘I can’t even watch the TV news anymore,’ one friend said. ‘Three dead in Gaza gets one minute, followed by another American shot in Iraq, a minute and a half – and then they cut to Scott Peterson and I turn the thing off. Even in 1968, in the worst of everything that year, there was some hope. Not now. It’s gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.’
The bleakness index contains many items: the mediocrity and cynicism of politicians in both parties; the merging of religion with politics, from Peshawar to the Potomac; the growing power of true believers in our government; the wretched runup to the Iraq war, the war itself and the bloody aftermath. We’ve known since 9/11 there are lunatics out there, some so crazed with religious visions that they’d try to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the world’s glories. Reason has fled. Vandals haunt our nights.
Meanwhile, the American government says it feels free to launch preventive wars, the way the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor. Vice President Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, is building a prison camp in Guantánamo, complete with execution chamber. And the bloody quarrel between Israelis and Palestinians goes on and on.
It’s hard to find consolation, for popular culture is also a wreck. Most prime-time TV is insulting to human intelligence. Movies are comic books. Popular music is calculated junk. Exuberance is gone, along with joy or even the artistic defiance of the ’60s.
In public life, facts don’t seem to matter much. Through sustained propaganda and ingenious presidential photo ops, illusion dominates the political debate. In Iraq, nobody’s found weapons of mass destruction or a factual link to Al Qaeda. Yet the polls show that as many as 65% of Americans are in favor of their own deception.”
The full column is here:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/94429p-85638c.html
I think that if you’re cheerful these days, you’re either stupid, insane, a chaos-and-war- lover, a “true believer” seeing the apocalypse coming or so because of medication.
Um, klaatu – things are not going as planned? That old saw about a battle plan only lasting until the first shot is fired ringing any bells for ya?
inkgrrl,
Yes it does, because I’ve done some military operational planning on the logistics end.
Maybe I should have said “You don’t have to be a defeatist to know that things are not going as they were sold to the American public.”
Nor did the British do as well as Churchill sold them, nor the Americans as well as FDR sold them…
…what’s your point? That rulers lie? That populations have a hard time dealing with the truth?
As someone who manages people in very mildly stressful situations, I’ll testify that one of my major functions is to keep meetings from becoming a litany of risk and the possibilities for impending failure, and instead keep everyone focussed on facts and goals.
klaatu,
I’ll agree that events are definitely not progressing as sold to the American public, but overall things are going as well, and perhaps even better in some ways, as could reasonably be expected by a semi-informed person with a moderate amount of knowledge of both the region and the general history of colonial imperialism’s legacy around the globe. Unfortunately it would seem that our administration’s stated objectives and justification for war don’t completely match the reality we’re discovering. Again, not a big surprise. Were we to revert completely to the founding fathers’ ideal of non-involvement on foreign shores then we could stay out of other people’s fights and focus on our own dramas here at home, but that’s not a viable path economically, militarily or even from a warm fuzzy humanitarian perspective. We as Americans like to believe that we’re the good guys in all circumstances, and we’re certainly not, but if the net effect of subverting our foreign policy to big business or media interest promulgates human rights – specifically the right to self-determination, a Western Civilization meme that just plain works – it’s simplistic cynicism to write all events along the path to that end as merely doom and gloom and badevilbad. No, the end doesn’t always justify the means, but which is the greater evil? Lie to get the job done, or tell the truth and allow suffering to continue because the great soccer mom voting bloc doesn’t give a damn about those’ems over there? (Okay, so now I’m the cynic.)
Well, with FDR and Churchill we knew what the mission was all about.
The problem is not that the cause of getting rid of Saddam and bringing democracy to Iraq is not noble, but rather that sufficient resources have not been brought to bear. Bush & Co. pissed off most of our allies, shut some of them out, made the USA really suspect in Europe.
Now we’re making a show of asking for help.
Think of it this way: the recent leadership of the US Army (White, Shinseki) were not too happy with the way things were going.
I think before going into whether things in Iraq are going or not going according to plan, I would have to question exactly what the plan was.
I think it’s naive to believe that the Pentagon and State Department went into the situation honestly believing that we would go in, clean up and walk away a few days later with Iraq deep in the throes of democracy.
The military was fully expecting Saddam to blow up his oil wells and were planning on how to prevent that as much as possible. Repairing the kind of damage they expected from that is not the sort of thing that has a weekend turnaround. It takes time. Details are forced to change according to shifting circumstances. They knew this.
Did the administration lie to us? Looked at from a particular point of view, certainly. It’s called spin. It’s a necessary part of politics, whether on a government level or within one’s own personal life. We’re all politicians to some extent and we all spin our stories. That’s how we convince those around us to our way of thinking.
For the most part, the American people didn’t want to hear that it was going to be a long, torturous road ahead. We’re talking about a largely sound bite culture here. There are a frightening number of people getting more news from MTV, not NPR.
So, I would agree that it’s not going according to the plan we were sold on, but I would disagree that it’s not going according to the plan as it was laid out.
Stephen:
Good point. And might I also add that the war and occupation of Iraq isn’t going NEARLY as badly as the opponents predicted. Are we at the predicted 250,000 casualty figure yet? How about 100,000? 10,000? 5000? Hell, Saddam murdered more people than that on an average month.
And, has anybody noticed Martin Sheen’s recent dissappearing act? That wouldn’t have anything to do with his claim that (paraphrasing) “you don’t have to be an expert on foreign policy to know that this war will be a catastrophe,” would it?