THE UNSPEAKABLE AND THE UNSPOKEN

THE UNSPEAKABLE AND THE UNSPOKEN

Increasingly, the media hatred of George W Bush is becoming transparent and its cozy hand-in-glove relationship with those who would depose the President is being laid bare.  Perhaps the most stark rendering of this tableau can be seen in the recently and repeatedly told tale of two sets of American images. 

The first set, of course, came to our attention when America was dunked unceremoniously into a cesspool of pornographic photos of Iraqi prisoners being toyed with by sexual sadists disguised as United States soldiers.  The media loved this story as much as it loved to pretend to hate it.  It was vile, reprehensible, disgusting--but no story ran without another display of the grinning face of Lynndie England lording it over a pyramid of naked Iraqis.

For more than a week, day in and day out, every time the news cycled, the image was thrown in our face again, along with dark intimations that the Secretary of Defense somehow should be held accountable for the midnight games of perverts drunk on unrestrained power thousands of miles from Washington.  Moreover, one pundit after another fretted endlessly that for some inexplicable reason, President Bush didn't seem to be losing popularity in the face of this horrific scandal.  I even heard one say that the reason the American people still supported Rumsfeld was that there was a lot of ground to make up from its formerly "idolatrous" coverage of the Secretary.

In other words, the people will only think what the media tell them to think, and if, by some malfunction of the public mind, they do not, it is only because the media has not sufficiently browbeaten them with the facts.  How the people interpret the facts for themselves has nothing to do with it.

And then came the inhuman, inhumane, and brutal murder of Nick Berg.  Except, truly, "murder" is too genteel a word for it.  That word conjures images of the pearl-handled revolver in the handbag, the bustling clean-up work of the crime scene squad, the legalistic courtroom accusation.  And "execution" seems not quite right either, for that carries with it the resonance of a quick and official, almost merciful, death at the hands of the state--or at least of professionals who pride themselves on a code of conduct.  Even "beheading" doesn't carry the right image, because there was no quick, clean slice as we imagine with a guillotine or even (forgive me, PETA) the hard snap of a chicken's neck as the cleaver smacks the stump.

This was, by far, something more primitive than any of that.  This was unprofessional, barbaric, and clumsy.  The hooded cowards in the video sawed the boy's head off while he screamed.  It was official only in the sense that it was sanctioned by the state where al-Quaeda operatives and their sympathizers reside in their foolish imaginations, a "nation" where Sharia law rules and great powers are at the mercy of brutal marauders with seventh-century values and twenty-first century weaponry. A nation that must never be brought into being.

The video of the act makes the tame still photos of the cruel yet idiotic mopes in the Iraqi prison pale by comparison.  It lays bare the difference between those we fight and those we are.  For America did not display her shameful photos in glory, but in penance.  There is no equivalent response in the soul of the American patriot to the leaping, gibbering joy of the barbaric madmen who revel in hacking off the head of an innocent, a stranger, a man who came only to help.

The video was deemed too repulsive to show.  Suddenly, the media became squeamish.  They had told us, with great sanctimony, that the posed photos of humiliation were a necessary truth that we simply could not turn away from.  To have hidden the photos from the public would have been false to the ugly truth about war that the media wanted us to know as much of as we could stomach.  Yet I suspect it had nothing to do with the public's need to know the truth, but only with the media's deep desire to tell the ugliest truths they can find about America and Americans.  Because the press powers-that-be knew (or, at least, hoped) that when we had reached our limit, our rage would turn not on the malefactors in the jails--but upon the figurehead/scapegoat president they so fervently wish to topple.

And so the members of the press, while still frowning to show the depths of their extreme displeasure, refused to display for the American audience any but a shadow of the screaming evil that fell upon Nick Berg.  Some showed a few still photos of the young man before the deed was done.  Almost none showed any of the video.  And once their brief moment of dim recognition was over, they went right back to showing us the full-color photos of American shame.

Shame on them.

Some might be surprised that I, a Christian mother of three small boys, enthusiastic recipient of traditional values-oriented emails urging my help in fighting porn and violence on television, would want the media to display such grotesque images.

But it is precisely because of those very values that I am outraged that the American media has chosen to depict what happened to Nick Berg with taste and decorum.

Because if ever there was a moment when the American people needed to see the full-face ugliness of the enemy we face, it was when that video rippled across the Internet.  If ever there was a time to set aside the politeness of international diplomacy, not to shy away from the blood-soaked rage that animates al-Quaeda and its allies around the world, it is right now.  If we don't comprehend--NOW--the depths of depravity we are up against, we will forever be at the mercy of the thug, the pirate, the gang.  Not only in Iraq, but in the everyday moments of our own lives. 

Yes, absolutely, for the soul of America, we must punish those who violated our core principles in American uniform by humiliating and maltreating people at their mercy in the darkness of a prison cell.  But for the same reason, we must go past the apology and the self-flagellation and remember what we are fighting for.  Senator Kerry and Senator Kennedy want to paint this military adventure as another Vietnam.  But they could not be more dangerously wrong. 

When we left Vietnam, ignominiously, defeated, denied the will to win by faux-idealists at home destroying morale as part of their "Question Authority" project, the Vietnamese people experienced persecutions, executions, and massacres on an horrific scale, and the killing fields of Cambodia ran red with the blood of intellectuals as the Communists rolled over them.  Though it is no longer popular to remember (indeed, it never has been, as we were not well-informed of it at the time), the result of American withdrawal was military and material catastrophe for the Vietnamese we had fought for, and generations of moral retardation in America. 

And there lies the difference.  When we left Vietnam, they suffered the murders; we merely grew sicker in the soul.  But today there are no borders left.  Already we have lost 3000 on our own soil (not even counting the international atrocities that prefaced the main event--the Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, the despicable drowning of wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro).  Already we know that their hatred of us will not be stopped by the civilized niceties of national boundaries.  They have come after us before.  And they will again.

If we believe, or come to believe, that it is somehow in our interest to leave Iraq to the Iraqis before they are able to stem the tide of terrorism, our leaving will not guarantee our security.  Instead, it will diffuse the firestorm of Iraq throughout the world, civilized and less so.  If we truly believe that running away will stop Americans from dying at the hands of Islamofascist terrorists, we are fooling ourselves.

They know where we live.