March 25, 2003
War Porn.
One of the things I'm really disgusted about is the sanitized, airbrushed pap that passes for war coverage -- actually, even before the war -- that our "embedded journalists" are presenting. A few weeks ago, Time (or was it Newsweek?) had an actual full-color centerfold of the map of Iraq and loving photographs of all the various tanks, missiles and stealth fighters the U.S. was planning to unleash. What characterized most of the coverage leading up to the war was the vaunting of military technology and the astonishing absence of any discussion of casualties, whether civilian or military, whether Iraqi or American. (Even Bush kept skirting the issue during his last scripted conference.)
And so what America gets from CNN and MSNBC is this heavily-censored, aestheticized Hollywood movie -- one which other networks around the world (presumably because they are not cowed by the Pentagon) have not been showing. (The telling fact -- carried, at least, by CBS News and the New York Times -- that the Filipino mother of Joseph Hudson, one of the prisoners of war, found out about her son via The Filipino Channel says it all.)
To the folks in the media and in the Pentagon: war kills people. Those precision bombs still do not discriminate. You are doing the American public a disservice by showing them something that's even tamer than The Bachelor.
But I'll pull my punches. Instead of those photos of mutilated feet and bodies buried in rubble, I give you something generic:
(From The Memory Hole.)
This is what your bombs do, Mr. Bush.
And to all of you who still support this unjust, imperial war: let this be on your conscience.
Posted by the wily filipino at March 25, 2003 07:34 PM