Extremes

The following letter appeared in Body and Soul:

"After reading Donald Johnson's post I wanted to just add a few last thoughts. The first is that after watching too many hours of CNN, BBC and FOX this last week, I heard not a single anti-war voice, not a single serious criticism of Bush and Rummy and the rest, and not a single moment of genuine compassion for the dead -- though there were enough tributes to the heroism of "our" boys and girls. So I have to wonder about any discussion of extremes. I mean the absence of real reporting in the mainstream is pretty obvious, and the government propaganda equally obvious, and if to ask for such voices to be heard is extreme, then fine, I am extreme.

But it goes beyond this -- and here is where Johnson's letter made me think, because I like it a lot. and yet, there is still an assumption about the good intentions of this government, and previous governments, as if we can't really somehow bring ourselves to say that those in charge -- people like Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and Ashcroft -- are simply bad bad bad people, immoral and criminal people.

This raises questions about our democracy and about how to rescue it (although after 50 years of perpetual war I wonder what I might mean) I want to think there is something to be saved, but at this point all I see is total media monopoly and a world increasingly run by corporations and the vested interests of the war economy, run by an elitist few with utter disregard for the poor and suffering of the world. When I realize that nothing is said about depleted uranium (for instance) since the war started -- in mainstream media, certainly nothing on TV anyway, and little anywhere else -- then i wonder what world I am living in and I wonder if a discussion of moderate and extreme and center and so forth has any meaning at all.

This makes me feel pessimistic and I don't like that feeling, and yet I don't know how else to feel. Part of my depression is how naive and uncritical most Americans seem to be, how arrogant and self satisfied a culture this has become, and how clearly it will destroy itself, if not destroy everything. For a government to lie about bombing a market or a hospital is one thing, but to continue to spew out jingoistic and hyper-nationalist rhetoric while children die and then to wax concerned about the Geneva Convention is just more hypocrisy than I can take.

Well, I know this is rambling, but it's the result of my mind incrementally dissolving in the vertigo of swill from the Pentagon and CentCom and the "embeds" and all the rest of this spectacle. I did have a nice exchange with Kevin about his posting, but I fear we will never agree about this topic. Joe Lieberman is hardly going to help matters and neither is Kerry for that matter.

Regards, John Steppling"