Is it unpatriotic to think war is too important to be left to the Pentagon? One needn’t be a news junkie—or kin to a soldier—to worry about the competency of military brass entrusted with defending American citizens at home and American interests abroad. The headlines reveal how easy it continues to be for our enemies to inflict bodily harm on thousands of impeccably trained men and women, who are being mistaken for sitting ducks. I wonder if anyone in Washington has considered reaching out to some of the same cyber-pirates who routinely break copyright codes, hack into the world’s most secretive bodies and come up with wireless devices that defy the imagination. Perhaps one of them could invent a gizmo to detonate roadside bombs ahead of a convoy’s advance. God knows, if we can download movies to cell phones, there should be a way to trigger homemade bombs.
Perhaps the Joint Chiefs have more serious problems to solve. The Marine Corps recently announced it would crack down on tattoos that might be visible to civilians and thus create “image problems.” During a visit to Fallujah, the commandant of the Marine Corps lifted morale by informing the men and women that new tattoos of a “garish and visible nature,” or on areas of the body visible to civilians, would be banned. Apart from any adherence to military tradition, many in the audience already had memorialized buddies killed in the line of action in large and ornate tattoos on various parts of their bodies. Clearly, policymakers in the Pentagon have too much time on their hands. If nothing else, they’ve provided an easy out for pissed-off soldiers and, should the draft be reinstated, 18-year-olds with other plans. If the ban was in effect in 1968, there would have been two or three tattoo parlors outside every induction center and in the student union of every college.
For their parts, folks at the FCC and PBS have decided war is “heck,” and they don’t care who knows it. Using the same logic as Marine brass, the nervous Nellies of public broadcasting censored their Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, fearing the FCC would level fines for every naughty word. The show is based on the journals of several everyday soldiers who experienced terrible things in defense of such freedoms as speech and liberty. By extension, our soldiers also were protecting the rights of PBS to conduct stultifying pledge months (that feel like years) and the ability of FCC commissioners to be paid for pissing on the Constitution. Audiences in a handful of markets have been deemed sufficiently mature to handle rough language, and they’ll see the uncensored versions. Everyone else will be protected from what amounts to seven profanities, several graphic images and a solider raising his middle finger at a picture of Saddam Hussein. But, perhaps, words and ink are only the tip of the iceberg.
I may have missed something along the way, but has President Bush asked the American public to sacrifice anything, besides their sons and daughters, since the events of 9/11? What is the 21st century equivalent of Victory Gardens, rationing and dispensing with nylon hose? A few moments of inconvenience at the airport, I suppose. The media seemingly have better things to worry about, as well. Only a few papers keep correspondents in the war zones, and even fewer report anything more substantial than body counts. Some of the nation’s newspapers reserve their best war coverage for the obituary pages, where feature-length profiles of fallen soldiers now run on an almost daily basis.
Instead, we’re asked to care about Don Imus’ racial slurs, childhood obesity, who’s wearing what to the awards shows, Phil Specter’s wigs and the integrity of our pet-food supply. It was the pet-food emergency that finally got the goat of CBS newsman Allen Pizzey.
“There seems to be an inordinate amount of time spent on what started out as 12 dead pets,” wrote Pizzey on CBSNews.com, after watching one too many satellite feeds of American newscasts in his Baghdad office. “What is depressingly clear is that what seems important here is far removed from what viewers in the U.S. seem to be concerned about. How 12 dead animals in a country the size of the U.S. rates with the sliding scale of mayhem here is what I’m finding hard to gauge.
“When only 12 human bodies are found on any given morning in Baghdad with marks of the kind of torture the ASPCA would quite rightly have a pet owner in court for, it is judged as ‘progress’ for the security plan.”
This didn’t sit well with pet advocates, of course. They lit up the Internet with links to the offending column, and angry notations on their blogs. Some things remain sacred.