Crossposted at My Left Wing and elsewhere…
The cable news networks set upon the various “news stories” of missing white girls, celebrity trials, hurricanes and fluff pieces on George Bush’s uniformly hideous nominees like ravenous gourmands at a card table with one tray of snacks remaining, and the print news, reduced to janitorial status, follow the fat boys around, sweeping away the detritus and occasionally remembering to point out that what the gluttons think is a full meal is, after all, nothing more than stale cheese puffs.
Meanwhile, at the lonely buffet, the red meat lies rotting, virtually ignored:
Despite the claims of the Bush Administration that the so-called “handover of sovereignty” to their newly installed puppet government would turn the tide in Iraq, despite the absurd claim of Vice-President Dick “Dick” Cheney that the “insurgency” is in its “last throes…”
Americans continue to die.
From Casualties.org:
• Latest Military Fatality Date: Jul 21, 2005
• Total Fatalities since May 1, 2003: 1718
• Hostile US Fatalities Since May 1, 2003: 1265
• US deaths since July 22, 2003: 1537
• (the deaths of Odai & Qusai Hussein)
• US deaths since July 2, 2003: 1567
• (Pres. Bush announces, “Bring Them On”)
• Total Fatalities since December 13, 2003: 1420
• (Saddam Hussein is captured)
That brings the total of Americans killed in Iraq to One Thousand, Seven Hundred and Eighteen — though the number is difficult to pin down, since almost not a single day goes by without at least one and usually several more deaths to add to the tally. These numbers, of course, do not include the 194 “coalition” deaths, nor the 2763 Iraqi Police and Guardsmen killed.
And again, we hear virtually nothing of the tens of thousands of “injured.” What a poor word it is, when it cannot conjure in the minds of a listener the reality of those injuries – severed limbs, lost eyesight, permanent nerve damage, brain damage, pieces of metal lodged forever in the flesh of the survivor – and the attendant physical, emotional and spiritual suffering of the injured.
Yet another generation of U.S. soldiers will return to their country hopelessly dependent on morphine and other painkillers, only to have the pain of their injuries compounded by the agony of withdrawal from the drugs – or the horror of an addiction to those drugs that cannot but be exacerbated when they discover that heroin will do the trick once the docs stop giving them their prescriptions.
Don’t kid yourself that this time it will be different; the Bush Administration’s cuts to the Veterans Administration and callous refusal of full health benefits to reservists guarantees a whole new batch of drug addicts and homeless souls who used to wear a United States uniform.
So the media drools in deluded ecstasy over celebrities and missing white girls; not for the Right Wing Corporate Media Whores the gory sight of the flag-covered coffins returning in the dead of night, under shameful cover of darkness, bearing the corpses of Americans killed in an unnecessary war. They have their marching orders, after all — that absurd belief that the U.S. might have won the Vietnam War if not for the fact of it being televised….
The fact that American television refuses to air the images because they’re “too graphic, too disturbing” — this is what I find disturbing. Because that’s so OBVIOUSLY NOT why they’re not being televised. First, there’s that ban on images of the dead with which to contend. But if the media were REALLY interested in, say, doing their jobs, does anyone doubt they could find a way?
It’s NEWS. It HAPPENED. The 1718 dead Americans REALLY DIED. Have we seen their caskets come home? No. The American public is shielded from the reality of this catastrophe, like children who must be protected from R rated movies.
This is colossal irresponsibility — no, worse, it is DERELICTION OF DUTY — on the part of those whom we are supposed to trust to show us what is happening in the world. We see dead Iraqi bodies, blown apart, blood everywhere — somehow this is suitable for airing. But they won’t show us the devastating reality of what has happened to Americans, they won’t show us our own people’s corpses. I’m sorry — this is not about prurience, this is not about protecting our sensitivities — this is about protecting the interests of the Bush Administration.
This is APPALLING policy.
Now the public, knowing only what they see and hear on television and, to a much lesser extent, what they read in the newspapers, is only vaguely aware that things aren’t going so well in Iraq. But they hear “Najaf” and “Imam Ali shrine” and “al Sadr” and “Iraqis killed.” They don’t hear, “Americans are dying and it doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon.”
We are not reminded – so we are not aware, for our attention spans are short and our memories shorter – that every day their fellow Americans are dying at a steady pace. The numbers are not put up on the screen. Certainly, each day’s two or three or five dead Marines or soldiers is dutifully reported, thrown in with a “Meanwhile, in Iraq, four Marines died in heavy fighting blah blah blah – but now back to this group of trained monkeys and their organ grinder, and how is their rabies-infected siege on our collective consciousness going?”
1718 Americans have died in Iraq. Many more have died in Afghanistan. Oh, and that number? It doesn’t include the Americans who commit suicide on returning stateside, which is happening at an impressive clip. No reports in the media on that, either.
So, media, you feast on the junk food you prefer to distract from the meal your masters have told you is off limits, bad for you and bad for America… and the maggots come in droves, quietly eating the evidence. Eventually you’ll turn in desperation to the last vestiges of rotting meat and wonder why you didn’t see it before.
