When The Wind Blows Again
Omens, omens everywhere.
US ships’re massing in the Straits of Hormuz. John Bolton’s all over the media saying Iran is making a nuclear bomb, lying barefacedly despite all the evidence to the contrary – and Americans believe him. A mistranslation of Ahmahdinejad’s speech that makes him into a holocaust denier is now received wisdom, as is the message pushed by every major network news broadcast, every WH press conference, every Right-wing pundit and talk-show host – Islam’s bad, Islam’s fascist, Islam’s violent. Even the Pope’s on-message. Oh yes, and Iran is Islamic, so Iran’s violent too and therefore the fons et origo of all terrorism.
So Iran must die.
Add to this the Republicans continual failures at warfare. They failed in Vietnam, they failed in Central America, they failed in Gulf War I. They failed everywhere. Now here’s the biggest failure of all, Iraq, and they’re facing a ballot-box reckoning at home. The one thing Americans will not tolerate is failure – so what to do to make them look strong again? Why, pull out The Big One of course.
All the puzzle pieces are being locked into place for a pre-election October Surprise. But it won’t be a ground war, the US Army is too broken for that. Nope, this all about a nuclear strike. It’s time for all those born again Centurions that Bushco’s evangelical allies have been incubating in the USAF to prove their loyalty to the Commander in Chief (and of course to fulfil their god-given purpose as the bringers of the apocalypse, let’s not forget that) .
Those of us of a certain age see nuclear war as the ultimate abhorrence, the End of All Things, mutually assured destruction. All our lives from early childhood the mushroom cloud has been the shadow over our shoulders. The younger generation? Not so much; that’s the one good thing Reagan ever did for the world. But nuclear war is a brand that’s notoriously difficult to sell.
Hmmm. What to do?
Go back to marketing basics that’s what. Offer a new, improved, technologically shiny nuclear war, one that’s survivable, one that only hurts bad people, not like us, oh no, not like us.
A drama about what happens when a nuclear mushroom cloud suddenly appears on the horizon, plunging the residents of a small, peaceful Kansas town into chaos, leaving them completely isolated and wondering if they’re the only Americans left alive. Fear of the unknown propels Jericho into social, psychological and physical mayhem when all communication and power is shut down. The town starts to come apart at the seams as terror, anger and confusion bring out the very worst in some residents. But in this time of crisis, as sensible people become paranoid, personal agendas take over and well-kept secrets threaten to be revealed, some people will find an inner strength they never knew they had and the most unlikely heroes will emerge.
Yay! American exceptionalism wins again! Even puny nukes cannot defeat it!
This deliberate decision to lie to the public about the consequences of nuclear war may be the most cynical of the things the US media-politico-military combine known as Bushco has ever done. Letter From Here (h/t Avedon ) puts it much more eloquently than I can:
More than 20 years ago, in the early years of the Reagan administration, loose talk about “survivable nuclear war” created a huge outcry, here and abroad. ABC produced a TV movie called “The Day After.” While operating within the constraints of network TV, the show tried to communicate some of the true horror of a nuclear war. The Reaganites learned their lesson and shut up.
Now, little more than two decades later, CBS is about to show nuclear war as something that happens elsewhere, off-camera except for a mushroom cloud or two on the horizon, nothing that can’t be survived by good people learning to work together in a small town far from Ground Zero. Yeah, right.
Call me a cynic, but I don’t think it’s any accident that this show is airing at the very time that the Bush administration is trying, through a disingenuous combination of leaks, diplomatic initiatives and gradually escalating threats, to build support for a preemptive strike — possibly with nuclear “bunker busters” — against Iran. And while they insist they haven’t made up their minds to go to war yet, chances are — based on past performance — they’ve already made their decision. It’s not a matter of “if,” but “when” — and how to sell it.
The neocon strategists know they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of selling another preemptive war to the public through rational argument. What they can do, without ever discussing the real issues, is make emotional appeals to their base, get them worked up, and then use them to bludgeon political opponents of preemptive war.
Who knows? “Jericho” might do the job. On the one hand, it stirs anxiety about nuclear war, and thus builds support for a “preventive war” against Iran. On the other hand, showing nuclear war safely going on in the background while people are fine and going about their lives in the foreground helps desensitize the audience to the horror of nuclear weapons and makes nuclear war less unthinkable. It helps erode taboos about a U.S. nuclear first strike — should that become necessary to get rid of those underground labs in Iran.
It just might work.
A little interesting sidelight: Jon Turteltaub, one of the show’s creators, appears to have had most of his projects since 1992 financed by Disney.
Well, well. What a surprise.
Read more: Middle East, Neocons, Bush, Bolton, Iran War, Nuclear War, Nuclear Strike, TV, Propaganda, CBS, Jericho, Disney
