mikegerber.com

The current issue of The New Yorker has a lovely little humor piece about reality TV by George Saunders. It is witty, compact, doesn’t seem afraid to stir up the imagination, and has a nice satirical point, one that goes beyond the usual “isn’t TV stupid?” barrelfish shooting that Shouts is so fond of.

Also: ever since a fascinating college course, I have been interested in the First World War; hence the current exhibit at Britain’s Imperial War Museum, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” spotlighting that country’s war poets (Sassoon, Graves, Owen and others) was a recent surf. On their site, I dug up a nice review of it in the Sunday Times. Here was the portion that moved me to blog it: “In the best of all worlds, I would wish the history of warfare to form a less prominent part of the education of my children and their children than it did my own,” reviewer Jon Stallworthy writes. “In the world in which I find myself living, however, I wonder if American public opinion of an invasion of Iraq would be closer to British public opinion if Americans had heard and read as much about the wars of this past century…”

Most days, the History Channel seems to be all grainy green shots through a tanker’s night-vision scope, or smart bomb footage that allows the viewer to watch with delicious anticipation and glorious release. Don’t be fooled by the stagecraft–modern war is slaughter with all the efficiencies and scope our technology can muster. It is to killing what McDonald’s is to food, and should be undertaken with the greatest unwillingness and trepidation, no matter what the reason, or the perceived odds. Back in 1914, they expected the war to end by Christmas, but an argument could be made that it didn’t end until 1945. Much is made of Americans’ lust for bloodless (or at least one-sided) conflict, usually negatively, as if being able to countenance the wholesale killing of other humans is a virtue. This sensitivity is our culture’s self-protection kicking in; on some wordless level we realize that “the necessitites of war” are just as much of a threat to the way we live as an anthrax attack.

During the First World War, after a few disasterous attempts at documentary, the governments of the countries effectively drew a curtain over what was really going on. Only engineered public ignorance allowed them to fight–no sensible person would’ve allowed it. I think drawing back the curtain, as widely and as often as we can stand it, is a wise idea. Since we cannot do this in real-time, the conflicts of the past will have to do.