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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
As the Iraq nightmare deepens, Fox News and its cable competitors wallow in shark attacks and Natalee Holloway. If you don't cover a war, does it exist?
Jun 29, 2005 | Almost four years ago, the American right launched a great moral crusade. Sept. 11 had changed everything forever, the war party and its supporters repeated. The apostles of the New Righteousness used the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center to anathematize anyone who failed to embrace the cause. To dissent, even to analyze, was to dishonor the dead, virtually to commit high treason. Those few who tried to stop King George's Crusade from marching to Jerusalem (or Baghdad, in this millennium-later iteration) were swept away like the black protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, hosed off the streets not with water but with the saintly blood of the 9/11 victims. Pundits railed against an elitist "Fifth Column" and compared dissenters to Neville Chamberlain-like "appeasers." In one of the great failures of the opposition in American history, the Democrats and the mainstream media joined the angry mob. A few mumbled some pathetic caveats as they waved their pitchforks, but their bleats were drowned out as the patriotic horde swept on to Infinite Justice.
Beyond the calls to war and vengeance, Americans were told that this was a transforming moment, an epiphany. It was a Great Awakening, not just a political but a spiritual watershed. Pious writers insisted that after 9/11, irony was dead. Analysts from across the political spectrum argued that the terror attacks, like a vast memento mori, were a manifestation of death and evil that would forever change our superficial, sensation-addled culture. The astute New York Times columnist Frank Rich criticized the media for its petty pre-9/11 obsessions with such ephemera as shark attacks and tawdry murder cases. In the dark months after the attacks, the left and right agreed that the new era should, must, be one of dignity and gravitas. For conservatives, those qualities were in the service of anger; for liberals, of analysis -- but there was no disagreement about the need for transformation.
Today, the issue of how to comport ourselves in the wake of 9/11 is moot: It has been almost four years since the attacks, and most Americans -- without forgetting the tragedy or disrespecting the dead -- have gotten over it. But our current situation raises almost identical issues, of morality, personal conscience and the responsibility of the media.
For those opposed to the Iraq war and appalled by the moralistic blackmail practiced by the right, it has never been easy to separate legitimate mourning and reflection on the significance of 9/11 from hysteria and unreflective anger. (Indeed, one of the sadder consequences of George W. Bush's divisive war has been the way it has scattered what could have been a shared American grief.) The "9/11 changed everything" line became a tool used by the right; it overstated the significance of what was not, historically speaking, an epochal event, and implicitly laid the groundwork for the Iraq war.
In fact, soon after the trauma of 9/11 faded it became clear that the demands for a permanent change in American manners and mores were naive at best and overbearing at worst. Moralistic pronouncements about what we should think or watch are tiresome, would result in terrible sitcoms and in any case are doomed to be defeated by what Daniel Bell called "the cultural contradictions of capitalism." No one would really expect, or want, American culture to suddenly abandon irony, or even its obsession with shark attacks, weird real people conniving against each other on prime time and addictive murder cases. What's the use of defeating a global enemy if as a result you can't watch "America's Next Top Model"?
Still, one need not be a Victorian, or Marxist, moralist to find some of those cultural contradictions pretty appalling -- and getting worse all the time.
We are at war. Dozens of Americans are dying every month, and hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis, and there is no end in sight. It is a situation that calls for seriousness, analysis and reflection -- in a word, for respect.
So one might expect that the mass media -- and in particular, those media outlets that were the most aggressive in calling for war -- would treat the war with at least a modicum of respect, and cover it seriously.
But if one expected that, one would be colossally wrong. Welcome to Fox's America, land of dissociation, where war isn't real but must be supported at all costs.
Fox News is rapidly becoming an essential if faintly horrific guide to the American soul, a kind of cross between an organ and a tumor. Fox is certainly not the only offender -- its cable competitors CNN and MSNBC are chasing the same ratings, and are guilty of similar sins -- but it's the most egregious. Those who have watched Fox News recently must feel as if they had fallen into a bizarre time and logic warp out of Philip K. Dick, where 9/11 never happened (except when necessary to drum up support for the war on Iraq, which also doesn't exist except when it has to be defended) and we've returned to those happy summer days when lurid, sexually charged murder cases and shark attacks were not just the most important stories, they were the only stories.
