In a medium full of revolting displays of hypocrisy and self-importance, Tom Brokaw gave a performance last night that was so hypocritical and so self-important that I wanted to make like Elvis watching Robert Goulet and shoot out the screen with a .38. Fortunately, I was unarmed, and the TV was my mother's, or there would've been a thousand jagged fragments of screen and a black, smoking picture-tube in the center of her living-room.
Brian Williams was interviewing Brokaw about Scott McClellan's new book, specifically citing McClellan's charge that media talking-heads like Brokaw were "complicit enablers" in selling America -- in-between decongestants and erection pills -- a criminal "war" that has already killed 4,000 Americans and, according to the respected medical journal The Lancet, more than one million Iraqi citizens. It was a special moment, or what passes for one, on The NBC Nightly News, with Brokaw and Williams sitting knee-to-knee on an open stage, signifying for viewers that this was Serious Stuff, and we should Pay Attention.
Williams teed it up for Brokaw, condensing McClellan's charges and then capping it with the insipid: "But does it have to be viewed in the context of the time?" (As if everything doesn't have to be "viewed in the context of the time." And as if that excused the nauseating way that every network anchor picked up the pompoms and put on the cheerleader skirts to holler "SHOCK! AND! AWE! SHOCK! AND! AWE!" when Bush told them to.)
Well, big surprise: a grinning Brokaw averred that their sickening cheerleading did, actually, have to be excused by the "context of the time." He then gave an answer that -- even by the standards of corporate media -- was so stupefyingly idiotic that I forced myself to transcribe it in full to make sure I heard it right.
"When the President says we're going to war, that there's the danger of the mushroom cloud, we know Saddam Hussein had been experimenting with Iraqi nuclear programs in the past, honorable people believed that he had weapons of mass destruction, there's the drumbeat of war... this President was determined to go to war, and it was more theology than anything else, and that's pretty tough to deal with."
Wow.
This is such a smorgasboard of gibberish -- such a litany of stupidities -- that a rational mind reels even trying to make sense of it. Even worse, it reveals the mindset of the so-called "journalists" charged with the job of speaking truth to power -- their mental and spiritual laziness, their knee-jerk reflex towards submission, their lack of any ability to learn from history. Worse yet, Tom Brokaw knew in advance this question was coming, and the answer he gave was -- to coin a phrase that will not catch on -- like spreading horseradish on horseshit and calling it an hors d'ouevre.
"Honorable people believed (Saddam Hussein) had weapons of mass destruction?"
Horseshit. Name one. You didn't have to be a rich and privileged member of the American inner circle, like Tom Brokaw, to know that Bush and Cheney were playing a second-rate game of three-card monte with their incredibly sketchy "evidence" of WMDs. You didn't have to be a self-described "historian" like Tom Brokaw to laugh at Colin Powell's grade-Z dog-and-pony show at the UN, when he pointed to a couple of blurry photos that could've been Lindsay Lohan's backside and claimed they proved we were on the eve of World War III. Nonetheless, the Tom Brokaws of the world jumped all over these lies like crack-whores competing for a john, and even now they feel no need to apologize for -- or even reflect upon -- their unseemly haste to believe.
And, thanks in large part to them, we not only have a million unnecessary graves, and a million shattered families; we have an American landscape strewn with the grievously wounded. With human faces melted into horror-movie masks. With once-healthy young hands burnt into cloven stumps. With once-strong minds now shorted-out forever thanks to the unbearable sights they witnessed in Iraq.
"It was more theology than anything else, and that's pretty tough to deal with."
This is gibberish that actually gives gibberish a bad name. I dare Tom Brokaw to visit the wounded and grieving in Iraq and America and give them this nonsensical "theology" excuse.
Near the end of their conversation, seeking a make-nice takeaway, a clearly embarrassed Brian Willliams lobbed Brokaw a softball question, hoping to elicit one tiny bit of self-reflection, but Brokaw actually made it worse, though such a thing didn't seem possible. Dig this: "A lot of us would like to go back, with the benefit of hindsight, but a lot of what was going on back then was unknowable... The CIA insisted he had WMDs, the US military thought so... There was the 'fog of war,' and there was 'the fog of covering the war.'"
Oh yeah? It makes you want to scream: exactly how foggy was it, Tom? So foggy that you couldn't fight the Orwellian rules laid down by the Bush-Cheney junta and actually bring us images of the carnage and horror inflicted in our names? So damn foggy that your correspondents had to stay forever "embedded" deep in the butt of that "US military" you're so eager to believe? So foggy that you couldn't see the dead bodies, or hear the screams of the women and children?
Brokaw concluded his bizarre and revealing monologue with an especially strange observation: "We often bump up against what I call 'the opaque world.'"
The Opaque World.
What an accidentally perfect description of the American corporate media. Opaque it was, and opaque it remains. At a dark time, when a sick and treasonous cabal led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld was furiously dragging America into a pre-fascist state (and doing their best to strip away that "pre" once and for all), our media was staring dumbly at an "opaque world." When criminal thugs were turning our country into a mindless war-state without civil liberties or simple human mercy, those smug faces starring on the Nightly News could only cheer them on. We need to remember how completely these men and women disgraced their profession--because, as Tom Brokaw's words make all too clear, it will definitely happen again.