Dustin M. Wax

While the rest of us complain about the media’s fawning over the Bush administration cronies and failing to deliver the real news, Bush is joining a long line of men living in the White House to complain that the media is raising uncomfortable questions that make it harder to carry out his war. Nixon did it, Reagan did it, Bush I did it, Clinton did it. I don’t know if Carter did it, but he didn’t really have a war he could call his own. Ford might have done it if he’d been in office long enough.

CNN reports “Bush frustrated with media coverage of war”. On one hand, I can’t help but wonder what planet Bush has been living on–it’s pretty clear that ratings and audience share are what drives the media, and for the millions of Americans with family, friends, and neighbors involved in the invasion, nothing short of “faultless” is good enough news. That this war, or indeed any war, is not faultless is anchor enough for the kind of sensationalism that is the stock in trade of today’s media.

But putting the nature of the media aside, Bush seems shocked because, as one of his spokesmen says, he believes the “war is going well”. Now, we may be on schedule, we may be achieving our objectives (whatever those are), but let’s face it–it’s a war, and wars don’t “go well”. For a long time I discounted the “chicken hawk” argument as the weakest link in the anti-war movement’s strategy, but now I’m not so sure. It seems as if Bush seriously doesn’t understand what being at war means for the people involved, from military personnel and their families to peace activists and, really, Americans of all sorts. And let’s not forget the Iraqis, and neither let us forget the rest of the Arab nations or, really, the rest of the world. War means people are being killed, and unless you are an executioner, people getting killed doesn’t “go well”.

The media is capitalizing not on American’s desire to see Bush’s strategy masterfully executed, but on our desire not to see blood unnecessarily shed. We have, even in my lifetime (though I was but a lad when the Vietnam War ended) seen government officials all too ready to futilely waste lives to gain or keep political leverage at home. Bush strikes even the most trusting among us as just cynical enough to follow in Nixon’s and Johnson’s footsteps. When even the Vietnamese, who know this nation’s military identity perhaps better than anyone, warn us that our forces are inadequate to the task at hand, and a bloody and difficult struggle awaits us ahead, Bush’s assurance that things are “going well” rings just a bit hollow.

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Last night, I came across CNN’s list of American and Coalition casualties, which includes photos and some basic information about the men and women (mostly men) who have been killed in action in the war against Iraq. It got me thinking about the Iraqi soldiers who are dying in the war, men whose faces we will probably never see (except as unidentified corpses in the sand). It is an interesting feature of our war-talk that we give special weight to the plight of women and children, but not men, and expecially not soldiers. Men are, it is understood, capable of taking care of themselves. Men support wicked regimes, not women (and, of course, not children). Men make the important decisions, and they make them capably and willingly, while women (and, of course, children) just follow orders. Men make up nations, while women (and, of course, children) are simply “their” women (and, of course, “their” children).

It bothers me that I am unable to feel as strongly about the deaths of men serving in the Iraqi military as I am about the women and children “back home”, the ones who prepare meals for, give pleasure to, take pleasure from, reassure, keep house for, and otherwise take part in the lives of the soldiers “at the front” (is there a “front” in this war?). This is not to spread the blame around, but rather to say that these are people just trying to live their lives in the best way they know how. They might not have chosen Hussein, any more than we chose Bush, but those are the cards they were dealt and, just like here, a lot of people choose to play the cards they are dealt. I’ve no doubt that, again, just like here, there are people who are resisting, who will even welcome this invasion as their liberation, and there are people who, again, just like here, are indifferent to the whole thing, but do the rest of them deserve to die? I don’t agree with this war, and I hold our soldiers responsible for their part in it, but I don’t want to see them die! Our soldiers are men and women that I probably wouldn’t be friends with, that I probably wouldn’t even have been civil to (nor they to me), that probably would disagree with me and what I stand for at every turn, but none of them deserved to die on the battlefields of some dumb bosses’ war, no matter how strongly they believed in the cause. And the same for the soldiers of Iraq.

As usual, Jeanne d’Arc at Body and Soul offers some wise and well-put words about the our reactions to war. Although she is speaking specifically about the deaths of civilians in the “explosions” that struck the market in the Shaab district of Baghdad, her words apply across the board to everyone who has to die on account of this war. “When people die like that, the only thing to do at first is grieve. The only thing to do second is celebrate their lives. Anything else is an abomination…. We understood that when Americans died. We need to understand that the same thing is true when Iraqis die.”

I feel for the men of both Iraq’s and America’s armed forces. They are doing something terrible, and many of them will die in the process. Others will come or go home with terrible scars, some physical, some emotional. Decades from now, movies will be made and books will be written, commodifying their suffering, and we will hold those books and movies in the highest regard, like we do Slaughterhouse Five, The Deerhunter, Johnny Got His Gun, Catch-22, and the rest. But right now, those men are really out there, really trying to at least act the part of “men” as well as they can. I wish I could say their sacrifice was worth it, but it never is. Men came back from WWII, the “good war”, the one everyone points to as the example of a war that mattered, and found black men hung from trees, drunken Indians laid out by “helpful” whites across the railroad tracks, and a growing Cold War that would forever throw the good will and integrity of our government into shadow.

I speak here from emotion, and nobody respects arguments from emotion these days. “Be realistic”, we are told. Well, I speak here unrealistically, as befits the Age of Unreason. Men and women are dying. Not the ones who will benefit from this war, not the ones whose freedom is at stake, but the “expendable” ones, and I don’t want to think of people–any people–as expendable.

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Protest Records is giving away an assortment of free mp3s, including works by Cat Powers (“Rockets”, “Maybe Not”), Sonic Youth (“Youth Against Fascism”), and the Beastie Boys (“In a World Gone Mad”). Some of the songs seem like “special releases” for the current war, some are old-timey hits from previous albums. There’s 19 tracks up now, organized into 2 “volumes”, but it looks like they expect to have more tracks available, as the menu goes up to “Vol 10”. They also have a selection of stencil graphics you can download and use however the fancy strikes you.

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Librarians are amazing people. Next time you are in a library, make a point of being extra-special nice to your librarians–they know things you will never be able to fathom, and they secretly fight some of the biggest battles for your freedoms.

The jackbooted thugs in office must’ve taken this into account when they wrote the USA PATRIOT Act, because when they wrote the part about FBI agents being able to access your library records on the flimsiest of excuses, they imposed a “gag order” that made it illegal for a librarian to tell you, or anyone else, that your records had been requested, or even that the FBI had paid a call at all. S/he can’t even tell a lawyer under the terms of the Act as originally passed (the director of my local public library tells me it is her understanding that the regulations have been changed to allow a librarian to speak with a lawyer, but she isn’t completely sure).

So what’s a librarian to do? On the one hand, the ALA code of ethics, and most state’s laws, require absolute confidentiality with respect to a patron’s library usage. It’s a free speech thing–what good is it to say you can say or write anything you want if other people are not free to listen to or read anything they want? On the other hand, the law is all too crystal clear–open your mouth, go to jail. In a perfect world, librarians would all be willing to go to jail to defend your liberties (and you’d still pr’y poke fun at them behind their backs, you ungrateful cur!) but we live in the real, messy world where librarians have families, children, and responsibilities, and not all of them are able to live up to your lofty ideals.

But librarians are far from rolling over in this matter. Two recent articles, one in CounterPunch , “Librarians as FBI Extension Agents” and one in Slingshot, “Hey, There’s a Federal Agent In My Book!”, point out, librarians are finding creative ways to fight back and to expose the USA PATRIOT Act for what it is. While the USA PATRIOT Act expressly forbids librarians from saying when the Feds have paid a visit, it does not forbid them from saying when the Feds haven’t popped by. So librarians all over the country are hanging signs saying “The FBI has not visited this library today”. If that sign’s down, you know to tread softly; if you have reason to believe the Feds are snooping on you, better lay low for a while. I’d feel bad giving this advice to known terrorists, but let’s face it: given a) the ineptness of the FBI these days, and b) the over-zealous broadness with which they are casting their nets, it is much more likely that they’re spying on you because you gave $20 to an organization that has ended up on the list of suspected terrorist organizations, or because you protested outside the Department of Justice, or because you wrote an article much like this one, than because you have anything remotely to do with terrorism.

Do yourself a favor: if you use your local public library, do what I did–fire off an e-mail to the director or head librarian or whoever on their website’s “Contact Us” page looks like a likely candidate and ask them how things are going. Find out what your library’s policy is and how you can take part. Or just let them know that you support them. I got a real nice e-mail back, and an invitation to drop in and introduce myself next time I’m in the library.

And maybe next time an author like Michael Moore needs the librarians of the world to unite and get his book published, the good ones will be able to fight the good fight, instead of rotting away in jail.

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Jeanne D’Arc of Body and Soul offers up an incredible examination of the way war, any war, intersects with our day-to-day lives. Her experiences might not be typical (I hope they aren’t!) but they are telling, and it is a testament both to her and to her writing that she can share them the way she has. Should be required reading.

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