If only the war in Iraq had been the video-game cakewalk the Bush administration promised, Fox wouldn't have had to deal with this taste problem. After all, everyone knew at the time that the most pro-war cable channel was also the one that wallowed most luxuriantly in shark attacks, tawdry murder cases and cheesy sexual titillation. There seemed no reason at the time that this should trouble anyone: After all, we were going to swagger into Iraq, kick Saddam's evil ass, declare "Mission accomplished" and swagger back to a hero's greeting of wonderfully pneumatic blond babes in bikinis on some cool Pacific island where the beer flows 24/7. This wasn't going to be a war, it was going to be another hit reality show -- "Survivor" without casualties, where all the dudes score with the chicks! Plus, if gravitas was needed for some reason, like if somehow a GI actually got killed or something, all the news anchors were wearing U.S. flag pins in their lapels and were pumped to get deeply emotional and patriotic at a moment's notice.

Still, it is now slowly beginning to dawn on the American people -- perhaps even on Fox, although it is not going to do anything about it -- that there is a disconnect at the heart of the war party's rhetoric about the grand mission, a deeply mixed message, and that this is doing something bad to our national character. After 9/11 Bush told Americans that they were embarked on a great struggle, the "war on terror," and he periodically appealed to their fear and anger. But he has demanded no sacrifice -- unless slapping a $1 yellow "Support Our Troops" sticker on the back of your car counts as a sacrifice. In his speech Tuesday, Bush seemed aware that the war is a phantom, disconnected from American reality: He appealed to the country to make some gesture of support to the troops on July 4. It was a pathetic, token appeal that will do little or nothing to unify the country. Perhaps it will raise some troops' morale, but properly armored vehicles would do far more.

In the end, the larger question of how television should cover war today remains unexplored. In this era of a toothless and intimidated media, this is not surprising: It's an explosive issue, one that places the media in direct opposition to power. Governments never want their citizens to know the truth about war. Fox News or any other media organization could argue, legitimately enough from the traditional war-coverage perspective, that U.S. casualties in Iraq are so low that covering them in detail, in the modern age of instant mass transmission, of color film and close-ups, would be both unnecessary and a manifestation of antiwar bias, since the bloody images would harm national morale. This is, of course, a debate as old as the Vietnam War: Some conservatives insisted that the American people only rejected that war when body bags began appearing on the screen, and they demanded -- and demand now -- that the media serve as an instrument of the government.

In fact, this attitude patronizes the American people and imposes a kind of national repression about the actual realities of war that is deeply unhealthy. That unhealthiness, a kind of spiritual rot, rises up not just from Fox's coverage but from all war coverage that flinches, that glosses over, that pleads "taste," that pleads "we're a family newspaper," that does not actually depict what happens when you go to war.

I am not a pacifist: I accept that there may be times when it is necessary to go to war. But if we do make that ultimate decision, we should do it knowing -- and seeing -- what war does.

We now live in an age of near-total information. In our fear and uncertainty about this unprecedented state of affairs, magnified by our underlying confusion about how to deal with war, we have embraced near-total repression. As a result, this war has been absurdly sanitized. It's time to grow up, to make ourselves face the real boogeyman of war -- not fake ones like the BTK killer, now safely behind bars and telling his gruesome tales for our horrified titillation. As Chris Hedges, one of the most unflinching chroniclers of war, has noted, modern war is "industrialized slaughter." Or, as some GI somewhere put it, war is "about blowing motherfuckers up." It's about heads getting shot off, and faces torn apart, and babies cut in two, and everything else horrible that can happen to a human body when big pieces of metal hit it at incredible speed. That is what war is -- no more, no less. Goya knew this; he drew it in his "Disasters of War," and under one of his hideous etchings he wrote these simple words: "This always happens."

This always happens: Every combat veteran knows this about war, but the politicians who make war don't, or don't tell. Yes, compared with World War II, or even Vietnam, not many American troops are dying in Iraq. But every GI who dies in Iraq, and every dead Iraqi civilian we don't count, is a human being like you or me, and as worthy of memorializing as the people who died in the World Trade Center -- certainly as Natalee Holloway. It's time, long past time, for the media to get real about war. Until it does, the TV channels will just be filled with bread and circuses and lies. And the Great Awakening that was supposed to be ushered in will be revealed to be a restless sleep, haunted by shabby, mean-spirited dreams.

Recent Stories