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Soldier on the battlefield

Note: Posted on Dan Gillmor's blog in response to one who had taken offense to President George W. Bush's lighthearted comments at a Washington Press Corps dinner:

> Bush has no right whatsoever to make these kinds of jokes.

Well, then it's a "Good Thing" to turn your back on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and the "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno.

Claiming offense shows a brittleness of perspective that happens when one overlooks that there is a difference between fantasy and reality. It is dangerous to be unwilling or unable to tell the difference because style can overcome substance. That happens easily in a highly interactive world. The "talking about talking about an issue" becomes more important than talking about the issue itself. Do that and the door opens for demagoguery to fog your brains and kindle knee-jerk reaction.

Unwilling or not, you are a soldier on the battlefield for our future who needs to appreciate that media act like a magnifying lens held over the map of reality. Through the lens you can see detail more clearly, but the price paid for that is distortion of perspective. Events under the lens seem larger than life.

Using the lens, a battle is being fought to see whether your will to persevere can be undermined by actions in the theater of war or by fuzzy thinkers at home.

If you value your own stable future, you had better value the future of the Iraqi people. To do so, courage and clarity of thought are needed. Courage and clarity come from understanding what is valuable in Democracy that is worth fighting for. Although it is not generally taught in schools, that should be easy. Constitutional democracy permanently codifies the humility that comes from understanding there always may be a better way of doing things. It institutionalizes openness and manufactures an umbrella of mutual self-protection built in to a process of peaceful change. Those under its protection understand the need to protect yourself against those living the law of the jungle who don't.

Part of a journalist's job has to be to inoculate readers to defend themselves against incursions by guerillas who try to undermine the will to understand what is valuable and why. At the same time, another part of a journalist's job is to help sharpen readers' own participatory skills. After all, we are in a race toward civilization in which there is no guarantee the good guys -- whomever believes in the process of continuous, peaceful change-- will win.

We live on a cusp in history because science has put so much power in the hands of any zealot that no corner of the world is safe from it. Whatever you may feel about American mistakes in the past, no nation has done more to promote freedom than ours. And while the United Nations might eventually lead the effort, its track record is abysmal and its charter does not address when a nation might forfeit sovereignty or why.

The only corollary between today and the Vietnam War can be drawn from the Colonel's monolog in Apocalypse Now, where decent fathers and sons became guerrillas, willing to suspend their morality to win. We don't have to suspend morality. We have to have the strength to stand up to those who do and who use the lens of the media to magnify it for selfish gain instead of progress towards civilization.

    Posted by: sbw on April 11, 2004 11:12 AM

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