Today’s Huffington Post has an interview with Deepak Chopra by Michelle Haimoff. I’m not much of a Chopra fan, but he has some interesting insights into the self-censorship by the media during the eight years Bush has been in the White House, especially since the USA Patriot Act was introduced and the Orwellian Dept of Homeland Security started poking into citizens’ private lives. (Bet you didn’t know that USA Patriot is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. Nice to know someone in Homeland Security had the time to sit around thinking up that one!)
Chopra also speaks about the Iraq war and the appalling loss of Iraqi lives since it began. And then he says:
FOX News actually produced the Shock and Awe campaign as a theatrical production. They hired a musical director. They had symphonic music. And when you saw it on TV it was a glorious, glorious attempt to liberate the people of Iraq. It’s easy for a person sitting in a plane 32,000 feet above sea level to press a button. When he looks at the map he presses a button. And you know, we’re seeing it on screens. We’re calling it ‘Shock and Awe’ and we hear this beautiful music – sounds almost like Mozart – while this is happening, while on the ground there are grizzly scenes which we don’t see in the media, of people being mutilated. People in the throes of death. Bodies all over the place. And gruesome scenes the American public is totally unaware of, but people in the Muslim world are very aware of… We are very self-absorbed.
It brought rushing back to me the events of one January night, way back when the first Gulf War began — what did they call it? “Operation Desert Storm?” I was working with a potato chip company at the time, in the marketing department, and I was responsible for the introduction of some hot shit new packaging. I got a call one afternoon to say the first print run would be on the presses at the printing company that night, and I had better get my ass down there to meet up with the design team and carry out the final proof before millions of packages were printed. I raced out to #1 Son’s babysitter (he was about 7 years old) and picked him up, promising him he was going to have a great time (yeah right) watching this process. (Come to think of it, maybe he did — he’s an industrial designer now, after all, able to design and proof packages in his sleep!)
To cut a long story short, we finished up around midnight, and I set off on the 75 km journey home with one mighty sleepy kid curled up under a rug in the back seat of the car. At that hour, the roads, which had already been cleared of snow and salted, were fairly quiet, and I drove steadily towards home, listening to all-news radio as I went. The airwaves were ablaze with the news that Operation Desert Storm was under way, and some five hours earlier, while we were holed up in the printing room, US-led coalition forces had begun bombing Baghdad. Excited reporters on the ground were yelling over satellite phones about bombs lighting up the early morning sky, and they were all just as happy as clams, as reporters usually are in situations like this.
I was still listening to the reports as we drove past Toronto Airport, and I looked up, startled, as a plane flew low over the car on its way down to the runway. I checked the rearview mirror to see how #1 Son was doing, and he was still sleeping, his blonde hair tousled and cheeks flushed. Out of the blue, a rush of emotion forced me to pull over to the side of the road, where I clutched the wheel, waiting for it to subside. To this day, I still remember it — a visceral realization of exactly how an Iraqi mother was feeling at that same moment, fleeing with her child as the planes rained death all around them. I was so shaken that I could not drive on for a half-hour or more.
Twelve years later, when “Shock and Awe” — such a puerile name — began, I turned the television off and went for a walk.
Great post…sometimes (most of the time?) it seems like every news story that comes up is a theatrical production, hence my own personal ban on watching the news for several months at a time. And i won’t even begin to do my rant about how the Bush administration has ’sheltered’ the American public on how horrible this war has been for both sides. One of the reasons i loathe Stephen Harper so much is for his transparent attempt at the same ’sheltering’ re: the arrival home of fallen Canadian soldiers. One can only imagine where he came up with that idea.
Well, Thistle, I’m happy to know that he really didn’t succeed at that as well as his idol Bush did. Witness the crowds of people who turn out on the bridges over the 401 every time a soldier’s remains are sent to the Coronor’s office in Toronto.
Exactly!…more evidence of why i love being Canadian…
Yeah. Me too. Those turnouts always bring a lump to my throat.
Great post Tessa, I’ve been profoundly affected by the bloggers who live in Iraq and tell it like it is, losing so many of their families, living in fear, without food, medicine, education, transit. Their lives are far, far worse than they’ve ever been, sacrificed on the altar of American greed for oil.
The media are totally complicit in staging these horrific events and spinning them into a Great Adventure.
XO
WWW
I wandered in from Thistle’s place. What a profoundly moving post. When you connected with being a mother where the bombs could harm your child….
I don’t have high hopes, but mayb ethe news will begin to move bac towards journalism with some integrity.
Thank you, wisewoman. We’ve become so inured to violence and death on our tv screens, that we don’t really stop to think how the people on the ground are being affected. Do you remember the nightly news pictures of bits of bodies being scraped off Northern Ireland streets in the 70s? I’m not sure today’s audiences could take that, now that it’s all been sanitised and prettied up by news shows.
I’m glad you did wander in, phhhst – you’re always welcome. Like you I don’t have high hopes, but, you know, hope on, hope ever … But I’m pretty sure the media’s corporate owners are not too keen on real journalism – it might upset their advertisers, don’t you know??