The Media Narrative Strikes Again

It's pretty much BAU (business as usual) for all nuance to be dropped in a sound-bite media industry.

Take the recent faux pas by Pat Robertson in referring to overseas dictator Chavez. The buzz was that Robertson suggested we should assassinate Chavez simply as a matter of policy. I'm no fan of Robertson (and I'll leave it go at that), but what the media is insinuating about his comments isn't quite accurate.

...There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chavez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop...

Robertson begins by stating that he "doesn't know" about assassination, but if Chavez is insisting that we're trying to kill him, why not just do it? It's not like the malicious schemer promoting violence and mayhem in order to get his way. Rather, it's simply someone saying, "Hey, if you're going to keep accusing me of this, then I'll just go ahead and do it so that you can enjoy being right -- so how do you like them apples?"

That being said, Robertson is infamous for speaking where most normal people fear (wisely) to utter a sound. Like the Super Bowl halfway show, he needs a 10-second buffer to screen his thoughts before broadcasting them for everyone to hear and committing a "social malfunction."

Now everyone feels a need to comment on HIS comments. Christians are hasty to back-pedal from his irresponsibility, in order to defend the faith against misjudgement. Humanists are quick to condemn his comments as immoral. (And now I'M commenting on OUR comments on HIS comments!)

We all take ourselves so seriously. Are we all so blind that we can't figure out for ourselves that Robertson simply let his mouth do his thinking for him, as I think (deep-down) we all realize?

There is no "public debate" that needs to be entered over what his comments meant and how they should be handled. I think we all are smarter than that.

Perhaps it would be better to simply chuckle and sigh, "Oh, there goes Pat again, that man is always getting himself in trouble," and then moving on without wasting more time on this.

Are We Really Enemies? Cindy Sheehan and the Media Narrative

In Texas, Cindy Sheehan still sits outside of Bush’s ranch, demanding answers for her son’s death in Iraq. Outside Texas, public conversation about the validity of the Iraq “war” continues to polarize.

The story itself aside, I find myself fascinated by the media’s role in creating this conflict. Going to ABCNews.com today, I was greeted by the following banner headline:

Military Mom Takes Pro-War Stance
President Bush may have a secret weapon to combat the anti-war debate outside his Texas compound in the form of an Idaho mother.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/IraqCoverage/story?id=1066030&page=1

It’s an interesting slant, in light of the fact that original story is about Cindy Sheehan and how she deals with the pain over losing her son. Those who know her are part of this very personal story; those who do not know her (the vast majority of Americans) were not aware of her story.

The story is no longer about Cindy Sheehan -- for her story has been hijacked, she and her son subsumed into someone else’s narrative. Her grief has been recast by the media as a black-and-white melodrama, an epic battle between opposing political forces.

And it is in this form that the story reaches most of us. It’s less about Cindy Sheehan and more about “How do I feel about the war?” and “Is the war right?” It encourages us to choose sides, and these sides have been invariably created by the media that has delivered the message to our doorstep. Our frame of reference has been determined for us, without our consent, and we accept it blindly simply because we do not know (or have forgotten) the original seed from which the media’s narrative has sprung.

Are these two mothers really antagonists? Do they really want different things? And what of the rest of us? Are we really that different in our feelings?

In contrast to the public narrative, I do not believe we are truly teams of black and white, blue and red, good and bad. We are each blended people, capable of nuance; we share much in common with both mothers and with each other; our feelings about the whole brutal affair are mottled.

Who cannot empathize with the pain of both mothers and grieve with them over a loss that they should not have experienced? Who does not possess some amount of doubt (no matter how small) about the validity of this war? Who enjoys the idea of inflicting violence and death upon other human beings, even if we believe it necessary in the name of “freedom?”

We are not as different from each other as we have been led to believe.

No matter what the media’s narrative suggests, even at times when we believe we must support one side or another, we are not nor have we ever been enemies.

The Lost Year

I lost a whole year of my life.

I want to kick myself again and again for being such a fool. My zip disk crashed, for no apparent reason, after I had planned to perform a periodic backup. I blew it off for an extra week and suddenly found that I had missed my window of opportunity. When I popped in the disk, it clunked and clicked, and I think it even chewed up the drive(s) themselves because other disks work before I try that one but no longer work for any disk afterwards.

I saved A Single Broken Thread, by sheer fortune, and I hadn’t worked on The Silver Horn for so long that my old files were still current. And the Hope book and its iterations were on a different disk, so it survived the devastation.

But I lost all of my journal entries. ALL of them. Every freaking one.

Every day, I pop open a file for each thought that comes into my head and save it. Sometimes I don’t write a file for a week, sometimes I save three or four a day.

All of my bursts of inspirations, moments of clarity, pertinent events, ideas for future books – all of them, gone. Chewed up on that damnable disk.

For someone who lives in his head, it was literally like losing a year – being in a coma. I have no record of where my mind has been, my memories wiped clean. Part of me just wants to die, it feels that bad. There are thoughts there that I am afraid I will never think again… and not even know it, since I’ve forgotten them already.

The odd thing is a small sense of freedom, of being freed from clutter. I don’t know what to make of that. Maybe the only ideas worth saving are whichever ones that come back to me, and the others were just baggage for a cerebral packrat as myself to carry.

Bittersweet Tranquility in Shanksville

On our way home from vacation in the Laurel Highlands area of Pennsylvania, we stopped in at Shanksville to view the temporary memorial for Flight 93. We usually don’t get over there, and I’ve wanted to go for a long time – it’s taken almost four years.

We got there in the evening, just in time to see about 100+ bikers and a television crew filling the small parking lot. (It was like attending a fashion show for leather gear.) Apparently we caught the beginning of what has become the annual motorcycle ride from Shanksville to DC to NYC. When we got there, we were barely able to walk through the crowd and had to park way up the lane; when we left half an hour later, there was barely anyone else there.

There was a tall portion of link fence (about 20’ long by 8’ high) covered with knickknacks and mementos that people had left behind as a memorial. The items, which range anywhere from hats and t-shirts to pictures and trinkets and figurines and necklaces, are taken down every so often and cleaned and stored in Stone Mountain. The on-site fellow (a local historian type, with a shock of white hair and no falter in his voice) said they’ve already catalogued and stored 19000 items and will continue to do so.

It was an odd feeling to see all the little crosses set up for each civilian killed there, with names I’ve known (Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, the Petersons – the last in particular because Cherie’s mother was actually close to Jean once, when she attended her Bible study group a number of years ago).

Gettysburg is a nice place but sometimes feels irrelevant because the events occurred so far in the past and have thus become impersonal. Everyone with a direct connection to that war has been dead for decades. The Flight 93 memorial was much more evocative and meaningful because I had experienced the events in question and had faces and names to attach to them.

I sat on one of the benches for a bit and gazed across the field towards the crash site. The temporary memorial is a few hundred yards from the place of impact but the area is so wide and open that it really doesn’t look that far away.

It was early evening and cool, with a kind wind blowing –comfortable, not chilly. The sun was setting, casting its rays over the fields. It was a beautiful place emanating peace and sweetness, belying the fact that forty people died when their plane accordioned into the ground at almost six hundred miles an hour. It’s a bittersweet thing, an impossible juxtaposition that such horror can be accompanied by such good and courage and nobility -- people who made the best of the worst situation imaginable, and saved the spirit of the nation in the process.

I can’t imagine any permanent memorial evoking a deeper positive feeling, and I almost wish things would remain as they are now.

I could have sat there a long time.