ELIOT KATZ
UNLOCKING THE LANGUAGE ROOM OF WAR
The late poet Allen
Ginsberg, who was a teacher and friend, knew that issues of media and language
were crucial to our prospects for building a real and humane democracy in
Later in the same poem,
Allen called all "Powers of imagination" to his side and wrote the memorable
line, "I here declare the end of the War!" Allen's idea was that, in
the poet-prophet tradition, what can be imagined can one day be made real.
Unfortunately, it is rare
to find anything close to that level of imagination in our mainstream media,
which these last few years has all-too-often seemed locked in the language of
war.
Locked in the language of
war, it's impossible to find another way out.
Locked in the language of
war, the corporate media too often locked out sensible antiwar voices, failed
to tell the public often enough that there was no connection between Saddam
Hussein and 9/11, and failed to highlight strongly enough that weapons
inspectors before the war had followed U.S. intelligence agency leads and had
not found any WMD's.
Locked in the language of
war, the mainstream press was unable to untangle the adminstration's
knotted and contradictory prewar justifications, just as it has been unable to
highlight and explore the recent Freudian revelations of President Bush saying
that Iraq has been a "catastrophic success" and that his
administration is constantly looking for new ways to harm our country.
Locked in the language of
war, no mainstream media outlet has devoted sufficient attention to the
question of how many Iraqis have been killed or seriously injured in this
unnecessary adventure.
Locked in the language of
war, the mainstream media failed to explore alternative ways that solidarity
might have been expressed with the Iraqi people without bombing and maiming the
people the neocons were claiming to want to liberate.
Inside the language of war,
we continue to get sound-bite explanations and historical amnesia.
Locked in the language of
war, the major media failed to point out that the Bush administration was
effectively declaring bankruptcy of the imagination by undertaking the illegal
and immoral precedent of preventive war.
Locked and lost in the
language of war, the corporate media's half-hearted apologies for their pre-war
coverage inevitably come too late and not nearly deep enough.
Look at the magnifying lens
through which the media has tried to find any tiny instance of violence on the
part of those of us protesting the Bush agenda here in NYC this week. What if
that lens was used instead to look at the death and destruction caused by war?
Why isn't that magnifying lens, for example, used to look at the dangers of
depleted uranium weapons, which were used so widely in this Iraq war and which
seem to have been causing cancer and birth defects in Iraqi civilians as well
as American troops since their use in the first Gulf War. After this week of
news coverage, I've come to think that in order to get the mainstream press to
focus more closely on whether Depleted Uranium ought to be banned as a weapon
of widespread destruction, we would need to announce that the DU missiles are
lining up for a peace march and that some of them are anarchists.
Of course, it's not only in
the area of foreign policy that our mainstream press shows its lack of
imagination. Night after endless TV night, the networks cite changes in the
stock exchange as an implied indicator of the state of the American economy, an
indicator that sometimes seems to lodge in the subconscious even of Americans
who don't own much or any stock. Instead of, or in addition to, stock exchange
numbers, imagine what would happen if CBS ABC CNN FOX MSNBC gave us nightly
figures for the increasing number of homeless people in America, whether the
number of those going without health insurance is up or down, whether more or fewer
people around the world have access to clean water tonight? With such daily
scorekeeping, wouldn't our elected leaders be more likely to find the resources
to address these urgent social needs?
Too often these days, led
by Fox, cable TV news seems to news what professional wrestling is to
wrestling. There may be nuggets of geniune news and
analysis in there somewhere, but those nuggets can be difficult to find beneath
the hype, the bluster, the pre-scripted storylines, and the limited scope of
so-called experts and ideas. Professional wrestling may get good ratings, but
that doesn't make it honest. And that doesn't mean it provides the information
on which a thriving democracy depends.
While we work to challenge
and improve the mainstream media, it is lucky for the planet that we have the
fast-growing independent media; that we have inventive writers and artists
envisioning and sketching more humane possibilities that might one day be made
real; and that we have millions of creative citizens of the world, many of whom
have come to rally in NYC during the Republican convention to expose the
harmful and unjust policies of the Bush administration, to "press the
press" as my friend Danny Schechter the News Dissector puts it, and to
unlock the doors that hold the language of war in place and speak out in myriad
ways to move our country in a new direction--one that reflects our most
progressive democratic, egalitarian, peaceful, and ecological principles.
[Eliot Katz is the author of three books of poetry, including 'Unlocking the Exits' (Coffee House Press). This article was given as a talk at the March on the Media, 9/1/04, NYC.]