Watching the Ten O’Clock News from Rockford, Illinois a few nights ago, I learned about the death of Andrew Patten. A graduate of the public high school in nearby Byron, Illinois, Patten is one of ten United States Marines killed by an anti-occupation bomb last Friday in Fallujah, Iraq.
The story on Channel 17-WTVO – Rockford’s ABC affiliate – was quick and to the point. Patten enlisted three months after graduation. He was 19 years old. Now he’s dead, felled by mysterious Iraqi “insurgents” in a region that U.S. commanders claimed was “under control.”
Viewers heard from one of Andrew’s former classmates, a cheerleader who was interviewed during a break in a basketball game. We also heard from Andrew’s high school wrestling coach.
Both of the interview subjects agreed that Andrew’s death was tragic. But the tone of their comments was rather upbeat. Andrew’s demise, they seemed to feel, was an almost positive event. Andrew died, both observed, selflessly trying “to do something good for his country.”
The cheerleader was “proud to have known Andrew.” The coach looked pleased describing Andrew as “a fallen hero.”
The story was over and it was time to move on. WTVO didn’t miss a beat. The anchorman’s face went from stern solemnity to holiday cheer as he delivered a quick and happy piece on a Christmas parade in nearby Rockton, Illinois.
After a series of commercials that included an advertisement directing us to a local shopping mall “for all the stuff you love,” a syndicated “news” reporter gave us tips on “how to cut your holiday gift costs.”
Did you know that “the average couple” spends $1500 on Christmas presents each year? The presenter of this sobering information advised us to reduce our seasonal expenditures by “doing what Santa does: make your list and check it twice.”
There was nothing especially unusual in the way young Andrew Patten’s tragic death was handled on WTVO-17. The station followed the standard local TV modus operandi on local troop deaths in Iraq: brief sound clips from high-school friends and teachers on the fallen champion’s patriotic sacrifice and on to the next story, some commercials, and the sports. The interview are used to put a positive, patriotic spin on the Bush administration’s reprehensible murder of yet another young, well-meaning American in occupied Mesopotamia.
It’s bad enough that Bush’s monumentally illegal, immoral, and brazenly imperialist occupation of Iraq is actually quite bad for Andrew’s country, not to mention the Iraqis and the cause of global peace. This miserable, mass-murderous conflict drains tens of billions of dollars from desperately needed domestic programs. It is helping fuel the nation’s skyrocketing fiscal and trade deficits. It is encouraging extremist Islamic terrorism, worsening America’s terrible image abroad, and further de-stabilizing a region of critical strategic
significance in the world economic and state system.
But the really despicable thing is the way local television news makes the maddening loss of American life in the criminal war on Iraq into a routine, acceptable, and practically banal fact of daily experience.
Local news authorities should be pressured to stop normalizing an unjust and disastrous war that exploits noble love of country to satisfy the failing imperial ambitions of the Bush-Cheney White House. It is unacceptable for broadcasters to fold the deaths of Andrew and other dead GIs into the regular and unremarkable register of the
commercialized quotidian.
Many young Americans would like “to do something good for their country.” They deserve a better outlet for that patriotic ambition than participation in an illegitimate war that most of the American populace now opposes even as dominant media continues to hide the full story of why that war was launched and how it is being fought.
Americans deserve better from their nation’s supposedly free and independent media. That media is supposed to help the citizenry protect itself from high state deception, not actively participate in the propagation of deadly imperial lies by supporting the banalization of evil and the related pseudo-patriotic normalization of unnecessary
overseas death.
Paul Street (pstreet@niu.edu) is a Visiting Professor in U.S. History at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004, order at www.paradigmpublishers.com); Segregated Schools: Race, Class, and Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge:2005); and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: 2005
Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of more than ten books and numerous essays. Street has taught U.S. history at numerous of Chicago-area colleges and universities. He was the Director of Research and Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League (from 2000 through 2005), where he published a highly influential grant-funded study: The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (October 2002).
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