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November 03, 2003

TALKING BACK TO THE TUBE

A friend messages: "Aren't you bothered by the fact that at a time when too many children in this country go to bed hungry, when senior citizens cannot afford medical care, when soldiers are being sent home from Iraq in boxes, the U.S. Senate held public hearings on college football's Bowl Championship Series? And you wonder why people blandly accept George W. Bush? We've exactly the government we deserve."

That got me to thinking: Have you reached the point of talking back to the network television news programs? I have ... whenever Gee Dubya Shrub comes on to tell me how wonderful things are in that "dangerous place" called Iraq ... whenever Rummy comes on shows like "Name That Tune" -- sorry, "This Week" and "Meet the Press" -- to say how "tragic days" (such as Sunday, when 16 U.S. soldiers died in the downing of a helicopter) are "necessary."

Lately, whenever the just-passed $87 billion appropriation for Iraq is mentioned, and especially when the $20 billion grant is mentioned, an involuntary reaction wells up. Nasty words form like cartoon bubbles on my lips. This sort of backtalk is no help of course, only a symptom of my desperation. It's a measure of outrage and frustration lying too close to the surface.

A Washington Post-ABC poll now shows that a majority of Americans are beginning to feel the same way (scroll down to fourth paragraph). The reason -- and here I'm taking the liberty of excerpting the words and transposing the reference points of one of the great writers of the 20th century -- is that almost every American between the end of World War II and 9/11 lived in the tacit belief that civilization would last forever. You might be individually fortunate or unfortunate but you had inside you the feeling that nothing would ever fundamentally change. But since 9/11 that sense of security has not existed. Osama bin Laden and the terrorist jihad shattered it as the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis and even Vietnam had failed to shatter it. We've been living in a world in which not only one's life but one's whole scheme of values is constantly menaced. In such circumstances detachment is not possible. You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat.

In fact, that passage is taken from a 1941 BBC broadcast on art and propaganda by George Orwell. (Read the original.) He was talking about Europeans, not Americans; about the period between 1890 and 1930, not 1945 and 2001; about the shattering impact of Hitler and the Depression compared to World War I and the Russian Revolution, not about Osama bin Laden and the terrorist jihad compared to the Cold War and so on. Admittedly, Orwell himself would not countenance such distortions of time and place. You can't change historical particulars and expect the same meaning to hold up.

But it's remarkable how well the transposition seems to fit. Uncanny even. It's why, when the president and his minions patronize me, when they treat me like an idiot too stupid or trusting to call them on their "unshakable" determination and pigheaded lies, when they claim for their own political aims and not my safety to be dealing with the terrorists holding the knife at my throat, that I go around the bend and find myself talking back to an inanimate object.

Posted by at November 3, 2003 10:18 AM

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