Commentary:
Just back from nearly two weeks in the Land of The Free. Scoff however we will, these people really mean it. They are easily moved and however ephemeral or shallow their patriotism may seem to be, they are tenacious.
Every other car seemed to be sporting a flag. The people who make the car mountings must have become rich overnight with all the outpouring.
In spite of CNN and MSNBC and Fox shoving Afghanistan non-stop, the ardour may be cooling. Americans move quickly to other things. In Cleveland where the Plain Dealer, a pretty good paper, had no Taliban on the front page, just a big item about how the sad-sack Browns lost another one in overtime. It is a good thing the country has all these distractions, or they would go mad.
Grasping for new angles and hooks and sidebars, the TV all-news guys are doing stuff about how the tension has gripped all the people. I sometimes wonder if the breathless reporting from Kabul isn't done with the kind of special relish TV weather people have for reporting high winds or searing (or freezing) temperatures. They tell us about the body count in the war against terror with the same perverse pleasure they get describing wind chill factor.
The medium certainly has become the message. McCluhan was right. The very presence of the television screen is news.
But wait. I'm completely overboard.
Do you now believe that the bombing campaign worked? Do you agree with many of the doubters that even Washington was surprised by the sudden cave-in of the Taliban? Can Bush can sustain his flimsy 90 percent popularity?
Is Tony Blair running for President? Now that the Northern Alliance monsters have been set loose can they be contained? Have you ever heard anything sillier than inviting a senile old man back from exile to be king? Is America going to indulge in another of those failed exercises in "nation-building?" Did anyone else see former Jimmy Carter National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski say that Putin and Bush are now buddies because Russia is scared silly about having China on one side and a solid fundamentalist Islam to the south? Brzezinski also tried to remove some of the scales from the eyes of unquestioning patriots when he opined that September 11 (or 9/11 as the shorthand crazed media refer to it) was not the beginning of the U.S. Russia thaw. It began when Putin realized that Russia was surrounded by enemies and he'd better start cultivating some new friends. In spite of reality, Republicans want to anoint Bush as the new saviour, just as they anointed Reagan for being on watch when the USSR tumbled. (I liked Gorbachev's comment that for Reagan to take credit for the decline was like giving the rooster credit for the sunrise.)
Is this finally the beginning of Bush's (père that is) New Order? God help us. And when a devout atheist evokes The Divine, look out.
Do you believe the bombing worked? Do you believe in bombing at all? Larry Solway and Straight Goods want to hear your views.
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Posted: November 21, 2001
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