Tuesday, March 25, 2003
A picture of one of the downed pilots in Iraq is broadcast on ABC News, amidst a report delving into the intricacies of war regulation under the Geneva Convention - what armies can and can't do to prisoners, what can be shown on TV and what can't... so on.
With camera crews from western and European countries literally crowding the soldiers in Iraq, its hard to se how the Geneva Convention is going to regulate coverage of anything now...
The fuss is over AL Jezeera's broadcasting live interviews/interrogations with catpured U.S. POW's , supposedly a violation of a number of international laws regarding war conduct. It's fucked up to watch.
in recent days, television has been fucked up to watch.
One of the two pilots looks alot like a buddy of mine. I'm sure i'm not the only person to watch these things on TV and think this, but i can't help it. I look at the kid on TV (he's a kid because i'm betting he's younger than i am), and i wonder where Dean Smith is.
Dean is my freind from middleschool who joined the Marines.
Each time i flip through the channels to find a War news broadcast, i think of Dean and i can't explain the feeling after that because i quickly change the channel. It sort of seems beyond politics now. We are helpless to do anything now but sit and watching very shitty, very awful things happen. I don't really get feelings of political indignance, a wish to stand up and be heard, or anything really...
So now with me, where there was interest and anger and passion about what was happening in the world, there's just kind of a hollow, baseless hope that things won't be as bad as they already are...
So this weekend, amidst the festivities surrounding Matthias and a bunch of other kids from my class coming back into town, TV would bring us quitely down from our own happy deleriums and cast an unsettling backdrop to everything we did.
At one point, I went outside the restaraunt where we ate on Saturday and sat with Dave while he smoked a cigarrette.
The news had been on before we'd left home, and the basketball games on TV at the restaurant were uninteresting blowouts. It seems to go without saying that we both think about the war alot now.
He tells me he's frustrated and i tell him alot of people are.
He tells me he wishes he was there in Iraq. He doesn't like the idea of people fighting battles to protect him when he could be doing the very same thing. He wants to be there. He wants to have a better purpose than he thinks he has now.
I tell him i wish no one were there. him or anyone else.
He and i disagree on things like this, and we let it go because neither of us want to fight about it. He finishes his cigarette and the hostess comes out to tell us we're being seated. She's all smiles, and we disappear inside to wrap some comfort back around our shoulders.
we do this with gaint 1 pound burgers.
I don't like thinking about the war as much as i do. I don't like writing about it either.
TO whomever is reading this, I'd rather you try and think about 1-pound burgers and how enormously good and crazy those are, so i went ahead and removed the second half of this post where i bitched about the war. What i wanted to post i already wrote, and the rest of it is me trying to figure out how i feel about something that is really confusing, and while i still believe what i wrote before, I don't think i said it the right way. If you're reading this and don't know what i'm talking about, that's just fine too.
so that being said...
pray, or whatever it is you do, for good people in the world
and don't forget about kids like Dean Smith.
With camera crews from western and European countries literally crowding the soldiers in Iraq, its hard to se how the Geneva Convention is going to regulate coverage of anything now...
The fuss is over AL Jezeera's broadcasting live interviews/interrogations with catpured U.S. POW's , supposedly a violation of a number of international laws regarding war conduct. It's fucked up to watch.
in recent days, television has been fucked up to watch.
One of the two pilots looks alot like a buddy of mine. I'm sure i'm not the only person to watch these things on TV and think this, but i can't help it. I look at the kid on TV (he's a kid because i'm betting he's younger than i am), and i wonder where Dean Smith is.
Dean is my freind from middleschool who joined the Marines.
Each time i flip through the channels to find a War news broadcast, i think of Dean and i can't explain the feeling after that because i quickly change the channel. It sort of seems beyond politics now. We are helpless to do anything now but sit and watching very shitty, very awful things happen. I don't really get feelings of political indignance, a wish to stand up and be heard, or anything really...
So now with me, where there was interest and anger and passion about what was happening in the world, there's just kind of a hollow, baseless hope that things won't be as bad as they already are...
So this weekend, amidst the festivities surrounding Matthias and a bunch of other kids from my class coming back into town, TV would bring us quitely down from our own happy deleriums and cast an unsettling backdrop to everything we did.
At one point, I went outside the restaraunt where we ate on Saturday and sat with Dave while he smoked a cigarrette.
The news had been on before we'd left home, and the basketball games on TV at the restaurant were uninteresting blowouts. It seems to go without saying that we both think about the war alot now.
He tells me he's frustrated and i tell him alot of people are.
He tells me he wishes he was there in Iraq. He doesn't like the idea of people fighting battles to protect him when he could be doing the very same thing. He wants to be there. He wants to have a better purpose than he thinks he has now.
I tell him i wish no one were there. him or anyone else.
He and i disagree on things like this, and we let it go because neither of us want to fight about it. He finishes his cigarette and the hostess comes out to tell us we're being seated. She's all smiles, and we disappear inside to wrap some comfort back around our shoulders.
we do this with gaint 1 pound burgers.
I don't like thinking about the war as much as i do. I don't like writing about it either.
TO whomever is reading this, I'd rather you try and think about 1-pound burgers and how enormously good and crazy those are, so i went ahead and removed the second half of this post where i bitched about the war. What i wanted to post i already wrote, and the rest of it is me trying to figure out how i feel about something that is really confusing, and while i still believe what i wrote before, I don't think i said it the right way. If you're reading this and don't know what i'm talking about, that's just fine too.
so that being said...
pray, or whatever it is you do, for good people in the world
and don't forget about kids like Dean Smith.
Comments:
Post a Comment
