It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Just when the government's plan to keep photographs of huge numbers of soldiers' coffins secret falls apart, conservative media corporations try to do Bush's censorship for him. This morning, we learn that the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns eight ABC television stations, is refusing to broadcast the Nightline news program on which the names of all the hundreds of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq will be read. The Sinclair Broadcast Group says that merely saying who has been killed in Iraq is an intolerable "political statement".

Well, where was the Sinclair Broadcast Group when the names of all the people killed on September 11, 2001 were read? They had no protest then, of course, because that "political statement" benefitted George W. Bush. Is the death of huge numbers of Americans in Iraq, which will apparently continue for some time, not enough of a national event to merit some respect? Apparently, in markets like St. Louis and Columbus, Ohio, people will only get to know the names of the dead when it supports the Republicans.

Now, predictably, conservatives are favoring this kind of censorship. Over at the Weekly Standard, they're saying that reading the names of the dead in Iraq is "a stupid statement." Gosh. This is the same magazine that argued that sending soldiers to Iraq was a really smart idea.

Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 6:17 AM. # (permalink)  




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