“I truly admire what all the new technology can do,” she said politely. “But for the mothers and wives out there watching, it is murder. It is heartbreaking. We can’t leave the television for a moment because we might see our sons or husbands… The technology is great, but there are moms, there are wives–and they are suffering.”
We all have movie reels unspooling in our minds, and mine that afternoon was an unlikely one: Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” The Holocaust scenes in that film are all shot in black-and-white, except for the bright red coat of one little girl–a glimpse of humanity against the numbing machinery of death. Mrs. Chamberlin’s voice was that red coat. And so the anchor and the military experts–barely containing their emotions–set aside their war-gaming for a few minutes of reflection on the feelings of loss that families never lose, a moment of television at once excruciating and strangely welcome.
The popularity of this war so far is at least partly due to the human face of the coverage, a brilliant PR contrast to the antiseptic briefing-room videogames of what is now called Gulf War I. But I could hardly have been alone in feeling neither shocked nor awed by the bombing of Baghdad. As pure television, it looked like suburban Fourth of July fireworks or a second-rate Vin Diesel movie. It required a leap of imagination to picture the Iraqi cleaning women or unlucky bureaucrats dying live worldwide as those buildings were engulfed in flames, unintentionally dead but dead all the same.
I tried to explain that leap to my children, watching at home on spring break, but it was no use. The abstraction was a bridge too far. Like many New Yorkers, I viewed the urban explosions through the prism of September 11. If this was, in President Bush’s cosmology, some kind of preventive payback for September 11, how would “they” retaliate? But the kids, understandably, experience the war more literally as an extension of what they normally see–hyper-reality TV. Which is the real Saddam? Which desert “survivors” have the best team spirit? Which correspondent looks coolest in a flak jacket?
I happen to think this war was inevitable and therefore necessary. Better to get the job done now. But there’s something sick about what the whole thing is doing to the values of our government. As we marvel over military prowess, let’s not forget about other, less covered stories: that the National Security Agency bugged the delegation of every other member of the U.N. Security Council except Britain; that the CIA was either too incompetent or too politically corrupted to spot a crude forgery of a document tying the Iraqi regime to purchases of nuclear materials in Africa; that the president of the United States is so petulant and so oblivious to the basic diplomatic requirements of the job that he has not spoken to the president of France for a month.
There also hasn’t been enough coverage of the antiwar demonstrations, the largest in numbers in the history of the world. Some are silly: the San Francisco “puke-in” (where protesters spit up milk dyed blood red) takes no account of the thousands of Iraqis who can’t puke anymore because Saddam’s goons have slit their throats. Even the more rational ones are irrelevant, as if saying “never mind” and retreating were some kind of option now.
But the response of some pro-Bush blowhards is even more insulting. “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president,” Teddy Roosevelt said during World War I, “is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable.” Not to mention that when Republicans, in a coordinated effort, attacked Sen. Tom Daschle for criticizing Bush, they set a new indoor record for hypocrisy. These were the same folks (e.g., House Majority Leader Tom DeLay) who, with our pilots in harm’s way over Iraq in 1998, decried the bombing because it was launched by President Clinton. The movie they explicitly invoked was “Wag the Dog.”
Every war has its master narrative. Vietnam’s was the folly of fighting nationalism; Gulf War I was about proving we had gotten over Vietnam. We don’t know the larger story of this one yet, and the “slices of war” (Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase) embedded in our consciousness may not cohere until the fighting is long over. But we do know this: Mrs. Chamberlin’s view is not a slice. It is the essence of all wars, a cry to look beyond the surface and listen for the human voice within.
