Tuesday, July 13, 2004
A Modest Proposal to Save the Times
I spent yesterday lazing about, reading the Sunday Times (an activity I haven’t had time for nearly enough since moving here) and blowing dog hair off my sandwiches. What a disappointment, the Times, not the sandwiches. Aside from a short, fluffy, piece on Barry “Twisto” Mcgee it was full of worthless trash (which I like, but get enough of, and better, elsewhere) amateurish, self-indulgent, blather (I thought that’s what blogs like this were for), not to mention yuppie bullshit like this.
Where is the news from the war? Where is any sort of election campaign analysis? Nowhere. I don’t know if this is a pattern I hadn’t noticed or what, but this rag was about as substantive as the Post, or shit, AMNewYork. Maybe it’s because I finally got out and dropped $10.25 to see “Fairenheit 9/11” but I was sort of expecting my war coverage to contain some mention of, you know, death.
To be fair the Times does do the daily little box with the names of confirmed American deaths, a feature which, in moments of great cynicism, I often check hoping it will be lengthy, as that would prove my lefty politricks correct. I need to check myself. Or maybe I need to see a real, non-sanitized, video-game and press-conference, version of the war, so the death of all these young poor folks can seem like something more than abstract political talking points.
That was the best (worst) part about “9/11.” I‘ve already read “House of Bush, House of Saud” (which did a great, thorough, thoroughly boring, job of proving connections Moore manages to make seem like a conspiracy theory,) so none of that was news to me, and I’ve been paying attention, however slightly, to W ever since he was doing a shitty job of governing Texas, so I was already well aware that our President is a fucking idiot.
What Moore did do that was powerful was show dead, fucked up, and scared people participating in and being victimized by war. It’s not a novel idea, Switzerland has pictures like that on the front-page of their newspapers every day(I’d link,but I’m too lazy to search in French or German). Neither was it shocking. Legless rednecks and melt-faced babies hardly even get a rise out of me, raised as I was on violent 80s music and action flicks (my old lady, bless her heart, weeped profusely the entire time, proving once again, that she is a better, more sensitive soul than I, who cry only during sporting events and movies about dogs). No, what was shocking about all that footage wasn’t the blood and gore and screams of motherly pain, it was that we never, ever-ever, see that shit in the media here. Could it be so simple that if we did, we wouldn’t be so quick to drop bombs on impoverished countries half-way across the world?
More dead babies in the news! More dead babies now!
I spent yesterday lazing about, reading the Sunday Times (an activity I haven’t had time for nearly enough since moving here) and blowing dog hair off my sandwiches. What a disappointment, the Times, not the sandwiches. Aside from a short, fluffy, piece on Barry “Twisto” Mcgee it was full of worthless trash (which I like, but get enough of, and better, elsewhere) amateurish, self-indulgent, blather (I thought that’s what blogs like this were for), not to mention yuppie bullshit like this.
Where is the news from the war? Where is any sort of election campaign analysis? Nowhere. I don’t know if this is a pattern I hadn’t noticed or what, but this rag was about as substantive as the Post, or shit, AMNewYork. Maybe it’s because I finally got out and dropped $10.25 to see “Fairenheit 9/11” but I was sort of expecting my war coverage to contain some mention of, you know, death.
To be fair the Times does do the daily little box with the names of confirmed American deaths, a feature which, in moments of great cynicism, I often check hoping it will be lengthy, as that would prove my lefty politricks correct. I need to check myself. Or maybe I need to see a real, non-sanitized, video-game and press-conference, version of the war, so the death of all these young poor folks can seem like something more than abstract political talking points.
That was the best (worst) part about “9/11.” I‘ve already read “House of Bush, House of Saud” (which did a great, thorough, thoroughly boring, job of proving connections Moore manages to make seem like a conspiracy theory,) so none of that was news to me, and I’ve been paying attention, however slightly, to W ever since he was doing a shitty job of governing Texas, so I was already well aware that our President is a fucking idiot.
What Moore did do that was powerful was show dead, fucked up, and scared people participating in and being victimized by war. It’s not a novel idea, Switzerland has pictures like that on the front-page of their newspapers every day(I’d link,but I’m too lazy to search in French or German). Neither was it shocking. Legless rednecks and melt-faced babies hardly even get a rise out of me, raised as I was on violent 80s music and action flicks (my old lady, bless her heart, weeped profusely the entire time, proving once again, that she is a better, more sensitive soul than I, who cry only during sporting events and movies about dogs). No, what was shocking about all that footage wasn’t the blood and gore and screams of motherly pain, it was that we never, ever-ever, see that shit in the media here. Could it be so simple that if we did, we wouldn’t be so quick to drop bombs on impoverished countries half-way across the world?
More dead babies in the news! More dead babies now!
