Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

"Today's war is brought to you by Doritos."

I'm trying to not watch much of the TV coverage of the current war. I find it disgusting for a lot of reasons. It's disgusting that all the TV stations have come up with title graphics and theme music. The other day somebody had their TV on and turned up loud enough for me to hear it from the nasty little cubbyhole where I write this drivel, and I heard one of the local channels' war report. They used Holst's Mars, Bringer of War as bumper music. Why not Rock the Casbah?

Do we really need play-by-play coverage, including photos and stats of each casualty? Can you imagine being at home watching the evening news and finding out from Dan Rather that your son is dead? Then, while you're trying to comprehend this information, which all your friends and family got at the same time you did, there's a knock at the door and some guy with capped teeth and a botoxed forehead shoves a microphone in your face and asks how you feel. I truly wish somebody would say "I feel like shoving that mic down your throat if you don't get it out of my face."

The other night I saw one of these ghastly segments. The reporter, dripping with insincerity, had the grieving mother show off pictures of her son and his children, including "the twins he would never know." He couldn't have been more obvious in his attempts to exploit this woman's grief, and actually had the gall to include a bit about how she is handling "the media circus that swirls around her" while showing footage of his own news van.

Granted, the news people have always been whores, but this is too much. If World War II had been covered by CNN, we'd all be speaking German now. What would they have said about the Battle of Normandy? Certainly they couldn't have shown us pictures and biographies of the thousands of men who died there. Fact is, if TV had existed then, the invasion would never have taken place, because it would have turned public opinion against the war effort. Hitler would have died an old man in his palace in Berlin. CNN would have given him the victory.

And there's the rub. Leaving aside all the politics and partisanship, it comes down to one thing: Saddam Hussein is a monster, and he needs to die. He has used nerve gas on his own people, killing about 60,000 at a time. He is so far responsible for about a million deaths. If left to his own devices, he would certainly increase that number many times over. Are we really supposed to just leave him alone and hope he doesn't kill too many more? American troops deposed Milosivec, Aristide, and many other dictators. We supported the removal of Duvalier and Idi Amin, have tried repeatedly to take out Castro, and should have made more of an effort to take out Pol Pot. American citizens went to Spain in the 1930s, signing up to fight against Franco. It's what we do. We have a pretty strong dislike for thugs and oppressors, and once in a while we have to do something about it. Whether one thinks this is about oil, or about avenging Bush's daddy, is utterly immaterial. We could get cheaper oil by dropping the embargo against Iraq, and avoid this war, but that would be a death sentence for the Kurds and eventually for Kuwait. It would be wrong.

The student protestors, almost all of whom are there (a) to ditch a class or (b) because that's where the girls are, all wave signs with the same misspelled slogans on them. Clearly, these are kids who can't afford to ditch class. But more than that, they don't seem to have grasped a rather obvious fact: communication and understanding only work when dealing with rational, reasonable people. You can't reason with an unreasonable person. Hussein is an unreasonable person. We're never going to talk him into having any regard for human life or his own citizens, we're never going to convince him to comply with the UN resolutions that he's been ignoring for a decade and a half. He needs to be forced to do it.

We keep hearing the same old myths...

"Violence never solved anything." Wrong. The Civil War and its violence seemed to do a pretty good job of stopping slavery, didn't it? If anything, violence is too effective. It solves problems permanently. The trouble is knowing how much to use. You don't kill cockroaches with a machine gun; you also don't let them have the run of the house.

"War never has a winner." Wrong. The innocent people whose lives are spared, who enjoy the benefits of freedom and liberty, are the winners. In this case, when the US defeats Hussein, the winners will be the Iraqi people, particularly the women. They'll probably get the right to vote, hold jobs, go outside without a tarp over them, and so on. Besides which, war doesn't need a winner. It only needs a loser. The US and its 35 ally nations don't need to win, Hussein needs to lose.

"We can solve anything if we sit down and talk about it together." Wrong. Communication and understanding are vastly overrated. There's a line in Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns that sums it up pretty well. The young, idealistic social worker, talking about one of her clients, says "I didn't like Raymond Ledbetter, so I tried to understand him; now that I understand him, I hate him!" Then there's Douglas Adams' Babel Fish, an alien creature, which, when inserted in one's ear, gives a person the ability to understand any and all languages. By eliminating all barriers to communication and understanding, the Babel Fish is responsible for more and bloodier wars than anything else in history. The problem isn't that we don't understand Saddam Hussein. The problem is that we do, and we are morally obligated to do something about it.

But as long as we're going to televise the war, and seeing as how it comes with a pretty hefty price tag, why not take a tip from NASCAR? Let's cover the soldiers' uniforms with sponsor's patches, and all the tanks and humvees with corporate logos. We ought to at least make a buck off this thing as long as it's going to keep interrupting my Seinfeld reruns. 

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