The Daily Background

From the new CBS news poll:

“Which comes closest to your view about movies being made about the current Iraq War? Do you think it is appropriate for movies to be made about the Iraq war at this time, or is it too soon?”

With all due respect to 61% of Americans, you’ve got to be effing kidding me.

Was it inappropriate for M*A*S*H to be made during Vietnam? Of course. World War II lasted less time than Iraq, and during WWII, virtually the only films that were released centered around the war. Did anybody complain about that at the time? No, of course not. During Iraq though, there has been a deliberate effort by those in power to stop the reality of war from hitting middle America. They’ve orchestrated rules to stop flag-draped coffins from appearing in newspaper pages, rules to stop photographers from taking photographs of wounded American soldiers, and cooperated with the Iraqi government’s outright ban on all journalists at the sites of car bombings and other large-scale violence.

There is a very concerted effort to protect the American public from the realness of this war: it started when Bush told people to go shopping and the Pentagon’s public relations people decided to only embed journalists with far-from-the-front-lines brigades that they knew would never see action, and has continued to this very day.

Despite all the supposed transparency of this war and all the hoopla put up by the press about how Americans were going to experience war in a way they never had before, the truth of the matter is that we as a country experienced Vietnam in a much more real way than the PR-coordinated manner that we’ve been allowed to view Iraq. And even the PR-coordinated Iraq is a mess. Imagine what the real Iraq is like.

The idea that artists should somehow muzzle themselves because it is “too soon” to produce work of any kind– whether it be film, books, music, photography, paintings, whatever– about this war is absurd. Let’s have more movies about the war, not less.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog