Clear Channeling the War

So the little man gathered all his chicken hawks in
And the neo-cons and his daddy's kin
They had their own clear channel and a hell of a spin
And a white man hidden in a black man's skin

--Eliza Gilkyson, "Highway 9"


Listening to WLW Cincinnati ("a Clear Channel station") a few days ago, to one of their on-air personalities saying that he's heard from the troops in Iraq that they want the "liberal" media to stop counting bodies -- the bodies, that is, of dead American soldiers -- and start accentuating the positive, talking about the good things that are happening over there. That's what the troops want, so that's what we need to do.

Imagine if there were fifty violent events a day in Cincinnati and the press decided that, instead of covering the shootings and kidnappings and bombings and general chaos, it was going to focus exclusively on the positive things that were happening in the city -- say, the renovation of a school or the construction of a new water treatment plant. Wouldn't the press be accused of participating in a conspiracy of silence, of abandoning and betraying its mission to keep the public informed?

It's pathetic how these flag-waving Bushites just want the ugly reality of Iraq to go away -- for us all to pretend that it is other than a disaster -- rather than admit that their support for this disgraceful war was and is wrong.

Every time an American soldier bleeds in Iraq or Afghanistan it should lead, be front page news. We need to be reminded of the real cost of war as long as the war drags on.

And too bad if it ruins Dubya's vacation to have the mother of a dead soldier camping outside his ranch, demanding that he look her in the eye and tell her that her sacrifice was worth it. He doesn't have the balls, obviously, and neither would any of his right-wing radio propagandists, these professional smart-alecks turned warmongers.

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I sent a version of the above to the on-air personality in question, who replied with an angry email saying that I had misrepresented what he had said on the air (I hadn't in the least) and letting me know that, because I was nothing more than another minor academic squirreled away in the ivory tower (an ivory tower in Lima, Ohio, no less), that my opinion about the war in Iraq was worthless.

This from a glorified disc jockey who took a week-long Potemkin village tour of Iraq and, on the basis of that experience, claims for his opinion about the war tremendous authority. What a joke! What of those soldiers who have been a hundred times longer in Iraq and think of the war as a complete disaster? Is their opinion a hundred times more valuable than his? If so, shouldn't he just shut up about the war?

I grow weary of Bushites trying to silence the critics of the war by claiming their criticism is an insult to the troops, is base ingratitude. For the thousandth time: one can be critical of the war without demeaning the men and women tricked into fighting it.

Besides, what does your average twenty-something soldier know of the true causes and long-term consequences of the war in which he fights? The answer to that, of course, is next to nothing. As Ambrose Bierce -- himself a soldier decorated for valor -- said of the rank and file's knowledge of the war, "they can know nothing more of the matter than the arms they carry." That was true at the time of the Civil War and still true today. Soldiers are trained to fight, take professional pride in fighting, and so fight without question. "Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die."

And dying they are, a few more each day. Let's all agree to look the other way. To do otherwise, apparently, is an unforgivable lapse in taste -- like gawking at the scene of a traffic accident.