Wednesday, March 26
The war's started, but the protests continue. In most cases, for most wars, that would be appropriate. Not this time, I think. I think the protests aren't helping much. In part, this is due to the simple fact that protesters are simply annoying--or appear annoying when portrayed on TV. They scream, they yell, they mace cops--they do everything other than represent "peace." These antics cause those who would otherwise be supportive of the protester's position to second-guess that stance and assume that the protesters are against the troops, not the war. Of couse, that's silly--protesters are as supportive of the soldiers as anyone else (heck, more so: they don't want any of them to be killed). But false dichotomies like this, when screamed loudly enough by talk radio idiots, tend to beat out logic every time, so there you go.
However, the REAL reason protests aren't helping much is that the media is doing the protester's job for them. This whole thing about embedding troops is fascinating, I've got to admit, and it's brought home the real horror of this war in such a way that even those in favor of the war are second-guessing the logic behind getting soldiers killed for such a specious outcome.
This coverage shows just how far video games have come. That sounds weird, but hear me out. In the first Gulf War, the coverage was all staged by the military--they had press briefings and they showed videotapes of bombs expertly hitting their targets (complete with the crosshairs to prove the target was hit). At the time, lots of people talked about how this coverage made the war look just like a video game. Of course, the video games they were thinking about were the old arcade games like Asteroids, Missile Command, and the like: games that were extremely two-dimensional.
Have you seen the ads for the latest batch of simulated war games? Have you seen the D-Day one, where troops Saving Private Ryan their way off the boats in Normandy and battle Nazis and watch their best friends get shot in the face? Well, it's those kinds of games that are being portrayed now on TV, only this time it's real life. The gruesomeness of video games, the thing that all the parents groups bitch about, is now a 24-hour reality show, presented live on TV.
Trust me, in the next few weeks, someone will get shot on live TV and the cameras will be there to record every single moment of the pain and suffering--probably complete with a final farewell for the family, who might or might not be tuned in to CNN at the time.
With war coverage like that, who needs a protest?
However, the REAL reason protests aren't helping much is that the media is doing the protester's job for them. This whole thing about embedding troops is fascinating, I've got to admit, and it's brought home the real horror of this war in such a way that even those in favor of the war are second-guessing the logic behind getting soldiers killed for such a specious outcome.
This coverage shows just how far video games have come. That sounds weird, but hear me out. In the first Gulf War, the coverage was all staged by the military--they had press briefings and they showed videotapes of bombs expertly hitting their targets (complete with the crosshairs to prove the target was hit). At the time, lots of people talked about how this coverage made the war look just like a video game. Of course, the video games they were thinking about were the old arcade games like Asteroids, Missile Command, and the like: games that were extremely two-dimensional.
Have you seen the ads for the latest batch of simulated war games? Have you seen the D-Day one, where troops Saving Private Ryan their way off the boats in Normandy and battle Nazis and watch their best friends get shot in the face? Well, it's those kinds of games that are being portrayed now on TV, only this time it's real life. The gruesomeness of video games, the thing that all the parents groups bitch about, is now a 24-hour reality show, presented live on TV.
Trust me, in the next few weeks, someone will get shot on live TV and the cameras will be there to record every single moment of the pain and suffering--probably complete with a final farewell for the family, who might or might not be tuned in to CNN at the time.
With war coverage like that, who needs a protest?
