Oh sure, protecting freedom certainly, saving face after removing Saddam without a plan for winning the peace planting democracy in the Middle East? Um, okay? Saving the world from terrorism? Making the world a better place? How does making war make things better? My dad and my grandfather were both enlisted men and if either were involved in active duty today, I’m not sure that I could really understand what they were after. Because that’s what this war seems to lack - there is no real villain anymore, no hero, there is no sure outcome, there is no obvious way to end this black hole that’s been unleashed. …which I suppose is why the faux-headline in the Onion caught my attention and gave me a sense of, well, hope. The same can nary be said for the current war.Īnd, whatever the reality of earlier wars, this one seems even further away from reality - even more impossible - and even less certain about its ultimate goal than the previous black-and-white conflicts. If there was ever such a thing, history has recorded this affair as the feel-good war of the century - where boys were turned into men, women filled the factories and smoking and Coca Cola became icons of the American psyche. Y’know, I’ve always liked war movies - especially ones about World War II. And yet the thing keeps dragging on, to no certain end. More than ten times that have been injured or wounded. We’ve now seen more soldiers and coalition forces killed than went to my high school. I mean, facing fact, this is the largest war that my generation has ever seen. ![]() Alas, the medium betrayed me.Īs for the message - it is revealing to me how sharp the sudden sense of relief was at that the thought that “the war is over”. Instead it has to do with the medium and with the message.įor one thing, the fact that what I thought I saw was in newsprint still carried with it a certain kind of psychological weight or trustworthiness… it wasn’t like reading Tailrank about some spoofed headline… if it was in print and on the street in one of hundreds of thousands of newsstands around the world, surely there must be some truth to it. What’s interesting about this has nothing to do with The Onion, though. Upon further investigation I suffered the let-down of all time: just like always, the Onion was not reporting real news, but merely made up fantasies that were too good to be true. And sometimes that belief, though powerful, proves false. I was walking down the street today when I glanced sidelong at a newspaper box and caught the words “Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy”.Ī fleeting moment of relief came over me and I thought to myself, “Finally.”īut sometimes we believe into existence that which we want to see.
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