Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Last month, Dawn noted that one of the catechisms required of celebri-journalists who pontificate on "roundtable" TV shows billed as "news" is that we all know that the war on Iraq is not about oil profiteering. Indeed, why would they name it Operation Iraqi Freedom unless it was about... Iraqi freedom?

Another tenet of faith required of these talking heads is assertion that Americans are a "peaceloving people." Given our inherently pacific nature, the implicit logic goes, if we find ourselves at war, it must be because we've been mightily provoked--it couldn't be our gentle-souled fault.

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Even for those afflicted with the most severe ahistoricity (and thus oblivious to the dozens of American-led wars, conflicts, police actions, assassinations, and covert actions undertaken with plausible deniablity--in this century alone...), a simple perusal of American pop culture would lead anyone attempting a candid assessment of the American psyche to the inescapable conclusion that we are, in fact, a remarkably violent people: our movies, TV shows, video games, and real-life streets are saturated with guns and people ready to use them. And we are being led by a remarkably bellicose man from a remarkably barbaric state wherein a record number of prisoners (most with skin even browner than Arabs'...) are killed every year.

The overseas press, though, has not overlooked the complicity of American "journalists" with the jingoistic clap-trap spewed up by the administration. Indeed, Dawn has read mainstream reports from five continents all noting that censorship of the American press has been unnecessary since presspeople themselves have happily repeated party-line propaganda as fact. And why shouldn't Tom Brokaw be a cheerleader for war? His network is, after all, owned by General Electric, one of the planet's largest arms manufacturers. He who pays the piper, calls the tunes....