Help, I'm Trapped in the Media Cocoon!

"'Kerry is love, is understanding, is peace. Bush is bad." OK, I can understand an old Stone Age Amazon jungle tribesman squinting at American politics through 5,000 miles and layers of media distortion and seeing that. But here I sit alongside people plugged right in to the media machine and their view of it is essentially the same thing.

Here's the picture that came from, by the way. The photo caption reads: "Kashalpynya, 35, of the Korubo Indian tribe of the Javari Valley in the Amazons dances in front of a poster in favor of American presidential candidate John Kerry in downtown Brasilia on Friday, Oct. 10, 2004. He said, 'Kerry is love, is understanding, is peace. Bush is bad.' "

But what is Kerry? When Kerry says in an interview in The New York Times Magazine that, "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," I am going to trust that he means we're going to do such a good job fighting terrorists that the average American won't have to worry about them as we do now. (But I'm not going to trust that he has a good plan to get there until I hear one.)

However, I strongly suspect that my pro-Kerry co-workers would like to take that statement more literally. They think terrorism is Bush's fault. No Bush=no terrorism threat. Frankly, if I take their conversations literally and the current polls hold steady and Kerry wins, they'll expect to wake up Nov. 3 in a world suddenly without major conflicts of any sort. Some sort of surreal world where even on "Honeymooners" re-runs Ralph and Alice will be a happy, loving couple.

Maybe I understand that. They and I formerly agreed on most things that came up for discussion around here. Even now, I tend to align more with Kerry than Bush on most social and domestic issues; and on Sept. 10, 2001, those were the "most important things." When the planes and the towers came down, my choice was to support the president who, in the words of Dennis Miller, gets up every morning, scratches his balls and thinks, "I'm gonna kill me some @#%$&* terrorists today!"

One alternative to that was to find a candidate to do a right-flank around Bush. Lieberman, perhaps, or McCain. Someone tough-smart on terror AND right in social issues. That person never got into the game. My other realistic alternative was to cling to the old issues, and part of that is making out that a war on terrorism is just an overreaction or a plot by the evil Republicans to take away my rights. And gods know I hear enough of that around me in here.

If we Americans value our society, our polity, our rights and liberties, and our security, we must begin exposing George W. Bush and his War Party for what they are: craven usurpers aiming at nothing less than the undermining of all those things that most of us hold dear.

It’s going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush Administration’s fear mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by Hitler and Goebbels on the German people and their Weimar Republic are not at all out of line. [Counterpunch.org]

That's a shifty and uncomfortable position, though; Michael Moore couldn't even make it look consistent and tenable for the length of a single movie. Yet my co-workers seem to be too intellectually flabby to walk the tightrope act of saying Islamist terrorism is a real threat to Western civilization, but Bush is taking the wrong approach to it. The nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world has got to be running pretty strong in such people.

I just keep hearing the same two quotes, in various forms, from my co-workers:

"Don't you think we're overreacting to this whole thing?" [circa Sept. 14, 2001]

"Terrorism, schmerrorism, it's all Bush's fault."

Or quotes like this one, from an AP story tonight about the Afghan elections, by a representative of Human Rights Watch:

"Everything that went well on election day was as a result of the Afghan people. Everything that went wrong was due to the international community."

It's just that simple, isn't it? Once you can squeeze inconvenient facts like Mohammed Atta back down into the pit of forgetfulness.

Armed Liberal (posting at Winds of Change) reminds me of the original "media coccoon" post, almost a year ago, from Mickey Kaus:

The point is that reporters and editors at papers like the Times (either one!) are exquisitely sensitive to any sign that Democrats might win, but don't cultivate equivalent sensitivity when it comes to discerning signs Republicans might win. (Who wants to read that?)

Or sensitive to signs that American foreign policies might cause people to get killed, or that Americans might be hypocrites, or that Americans' religiosity, or their pride in their culture and symbols, are irrational and dangerous. But they are blankly and willfully unaware that Islamist death-cult preaching or Palestinian martyr-mongering have any effect on the world.

Volokh, meanwhile, finds the back half of Kerry's NYT quote more disturbing than the front half. He compared terrorism, the way he'd like to see it contained, to prostitution and illegal gambling:

But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

These are examples of practical surrender, or at least a cease-fire punctuated by occasional but largely half-hearted and ineffectual sorties. It's true that illegal gambling and prostitution aren't "threatening the fabric of [American] life," but that's because they never threatened it that much in the first place. One can live in a nation with millions of acts of prostitution or illegal gambling per year or per day. There are good reasons for simply calling off those wars altogether. Surely the strategy for dealing with terrorism must be very different, in nearly every conceivable way, from the strategy for dealing with prostitution or illegal gambling.