Somewhere after the Red Lake shootings the numbness settled in for good. I hope everyone younger than me can still react with unalloyed shock at another campus massacre. But I’m sorry, and I truly am sorry, the cycle of these things has become too frequent for me to be shocked anymore. From the first reports, to the re-re-repeated tapes of cops with rifles running from squad cars, to cable news anchors adding little for hours on end but the requisite verbiage of — “horrific”, “senseless”, “tragedy” and “shocking” — to, a day later, the candlelight services, the anchors-on-location and the “search for an explanation”, everything is too familiar to be “shocking”.
It has been a perverse relief to look away for two hours the last three nights and follow PBS’s, “America at a Crossroads” series. It is excellent. Varied and comprehensive.
Sunday’s opener, “Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda”, a tightly -compacted chronology of the jihad movement among radicalized Muslims and the West’s inept response, was both vivid and profoundly troubling. “Troubling” because even at this date, almost six years after 9/11, the United States projects woefully little awareness of the bigger game afoot.
Very little of the information was new to anyone doing regular reading on al Qaeda, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. But the ever-deepening sobriety informed citizens are bringing to this kind of programming is in itself a new context for assessing information.
Two episodes thus far, “Warriors” (Sunday) and “Gangs of Iraq” (last night), were remarkable for their long-form approach to military operations in and around Baghdad, and what they say about the standard coverage we get from the major networks.
I ask you, other than the occasional feature documentary, like “Gunner Palace” or “War Tapes”, how often have you seen sequences more than 45 seconds long of the working environment of US troops in Iraq? Then, of those 45 seconds, usually the aftermath of the latest car-bombing, how rare is a single sequence that hasn’t been edited into some producer’s version of an action movie frenzy, with flames, screaming, wailing and a terse-looking GI standing over a pool of blood? In these two films in particular, very little is being edited, (i.e. “packaged”), for the network news’ attention span. In each film the camera is allowed to linger on the faces and landscape, giving viewers who may have accumulated an inquiring knowledge from other sources a chance to make observations and cross references of their own.
Point being, be thankful again for public television. Although CNN and “Nightline” have produced long(er) form docs, the “America at a Crossroads” series, is actually far nervier for its willingness to let the futility of the current strategy re-indict itself over 11 hours of prime time, instead of the daily 90 seconds while most of the country is commuting home from the office.
In THAT context, last evening’s hour-long segment, titled, “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom”, narrated and hosted by leading neo-conservative, Richard Perle, is a testament to PBS’s commitment to a broader and deeper form of journalism than its commercial brethren are currently playing. (The film is actually a British production, by the lavishly-awarded production house, Brooke Lapping.)
Frankly, I’m wondering if Perle is so deluded he believes he made any kind of a case for the invasion, based on the film he obviously had to sign off on? Or maybe he’s just honest?
His conversation with Al Quds editor, Abdel Bari Atwan, for example, is not my idea of something you plug into a fraudulent dialectic. Atwan, and later, Clinton-era assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke, cleanly eviscerate Perle’s theory of bringing democracy to foreign cultures whether they want it or not. Assuming Perle isn’t an idiot, the effect of the film is to conclude that he — unlike, say, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — is at least willing and capable of open debate.
My favorite moment though was Perle commenting on wild-eyed left-wing conspiracy theories, such as those where some small cabal of insiders takes control of government policy.
I mean, “denial” and “delusion” are different maladies, right?
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