Myth, Reality and Incestuous Amplification

 

When the C-5s and C-17s land at Dover Air Force Base there are no cameras or pressmen, only a mortician. But there is bunting of a kind. In a room off the mortuary, there are bags and boxes of ribbons, medals and uniforms to properly outfit the deceased before their frozen bodies are released to their loved ones. No elegies, but there will be epitaphs.

 

Embalmed and dressed to-the-nines, the young dead never really knew what they were doing.

 

Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing either but he knows enough not to stop-over at Dover Air Force Base. He prefers Honolulu to swoop up half-a-mil for his re-election campaign and then on to Crawford for another weekend away from Washington.

 

Wolf and Rice won’t be seen at Dover anytime soon either. Why puncture the myth!

 

“Decisions have consequences, and you can see the consequences here,” according to the head mortician at Dover, Karen Giles. (As reported by the Indian edition of Yahoo News.)

 

Neocons don’t like to hear about consequences. 

 

In his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges differentiates between “mythic reality” and “sensory reality”, (borrowing from Lawrence LeShan in The Psychology of War). In sensory reality we see events for what they are. In mythic reality we imbue events with meanings they do not have.

 

Ted Koppel gets to worry about his job: Brit Hume gets to interview Bush. The myth must be sustained.

 

President Bush is no news junkie. He doesn’t listen to or watch news programs. (He never has and this was obvious during the 2000 Presidential campaign.) He relies solely on his close aides to keep him abreast of current affairs. (Mahiavelli must be pounding his coffin lid.) Spoon-feeders in residence include Rice, Cheney, Rove and Evans. This has not gone unnoticed in Moscow, Berlin, Paris and the caves of Tora Bora.

 

When world leaders talk to Bush they’re not sure whether the views he expresses are his own or an amalgam of the digests he gets from his staff. (It’s possible he has no strong views of his own.)

 

Fearful conversational dept will expose his ignorance, Bush hides behind clichés, gestures and simplistic Biblical references. He appears shallow and detached. Fertile ground for mythic reality.

 

Rumsfeld took a stab at sensory reality in his conveniently leaked memo undermining the sunny good-news image preferred by Bush. Chief positive spinner attacking the spin. “The harder we work, the behinder we get,” acknowledged the Secretary of Defense.

 

Rum and Cock have some talking to do!

 

Meanwhile, a few journalists in Iraq are reporting that it’s very hard to get information, to get into hospitals and, if they happen to witness an incident, their equipment will be confiscated. They need to keep reporting. We need some reality.

 

“The chief institutions that disseminate the myth are the press and the state. Mythic war reporting sells papers and boosts ratings,” writes Chris Hedges. 
12:24:36 AM