May We Remind You?

In "The War That Isn't," his latest column in National Journal, William Powers notes, "It's not at all unusual lately to pick up a large metropolitan newspaper and find that there is nothing -- zero -- on the front page about a war in which nearly 4,000 Americans have died." (Let alone the tens of thousands wounded. Or the hundreds of thousands of dead or wounded Iraqis and the millions forced to flee.)

Not to worry. Unless you agree with George C. Wilson, whose article in Army Times and other military publications, "Vietnam Redux," points out, "Now, as then, [the] generals are leading us down the primrose path." But this kind of news, as Powers says, "gets lost in the noise of other news." You know: "Obama and the Clintons. The mortgage crisis. Sports. The Hollywood writers' strike. The Clintons. The weather. Obama. Celebrities in trouble. Obama. Your health."

Postscript: An inherent part of genocide is to deny that people have died. Read "Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy," about "the war's exceptional human costs" and the smear campaign to deny them. It is a devastating indictment of the American press -- and National Journal and The Wall Street Journal in particular -- by John Tirman, the executive director and a principle research scientist at M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies. Tirman commissioned the survey published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006, that concluded that 600,000 Iraqis died during the first 40 months of the war.

February 17, 2008 9:08 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
HERMAN WOUK'S LATEST 
It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on February 17, 2008 9:08 AM.

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