catapult magazine

has anyone else been keeping up with news coverage of the war in iraq? it’s really strange to have cameras in baghdad as it’s being bombed. last night, you could hear dogs barking and birds chirping as the bombs fell.

and then there are all of these reporters who are “embedded” in military units who are giving constant live reports. heck, saddam hussein could just watch CNN to see where everyone is coming from and when they’ll be arriving on his doorstep.

weird.

Here’s an insider’s perspective (on Fox News specifically).

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/10/31/fox/

I found a new trick for making the evening news watchable. I turn down the sound on my tv and play old spirituals and gospel tunes overtop the images of destruction and death. It’s remarkable how different my perspective on the world’s events becomes when the soundtrack isn’t the urgent melodramatic music that many of the networks use. The Gospel music doesn’t make the images any easier. It just puts the pictures in a better context.

I thought about trying this after listening to a cd of spirituals that was made in the sixties during the Civil Rights Movement. The music actually put the struggle in the right context for African-Americans who might not have realized they were involved in a spiritual revolution of the highest order without the gospel resonances that the music brought to the situation.

Does anyone think something’s a little out of whack here? The media attention given to the pyramid-piles of Iraqi criminals at Abu Grabe is getting way more attention than the images of BEHEADINGS and EXECUTIONS done by Iraqi insurgents! I heard that one Iraqi prisoner at Abu Grabe said what he suffered in the hands of the Americans was much worse than anything Saddam Hussein had ever done. Does that seem a little odd, since Hussein actually killed hundreds upon thousands of people with biological agents and tortured and executed others?

What the soldiers did at Abu Grabe is rather tame compared to many of the things that have gone on in war throughout history. But many of these terrible things are not documented in pictures. Why are we so offended by images?

The images from Abu Ghraib are much more watchable if you listen to gospel music at the same time. Bad joke. Ok, so grant’s complaint is that Iraqis are doing worse things than Americans and that as a consequence, Iraqi sins should get more air-time than American sins. That’s a strange argument since it puts the two sides on equal moral ground. As if it were a war of equals.

It’s not a war of equals. The US is the aggressor and occupier, so if it wants to show some kind of moral superiority, it can’t allow systemic human rights abuses, let alone torture. Iraqis on the other hand are attacking the aggressor and occupier. Fighters are mostly poor, their militias are disorganised and grassroots efforts, but they are fighting for what they perceive to be freedom. Both sides are doing horrible things, but isn’t the United States supposed to be in a different league?

grant can you tell me why you used the plural for the beheading we’ve seen? i’ve only heard of one.

What about the dozens of Iraqis American troops kill every day in Iraq? Because they’re not on TV we don’t care? One image of a beheading and the American presence in Iraq is justified and suddenly the murder and turture of Iraqis inside American jails is “getting too much attention.”