Thursday, September 25, 2008

Dexter Filkins: 'The Forever War' ... by gimleteye

Lewis Lapham writes in this month's Harper's Magazine: "What we now know as the "news media" serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell the truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless." It is a statement resonant of many observations made on this blog in respect to the shortcomings and failures of Miami's mainstream media.

Lapham's acerbic focus has been trained for years at the economic and political elite on Wall Street and in Washington whose greed and hubris lead exactly to this point; the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But if you would like to experience an example of journalism that defies in its every sentence the malaise that Lapham condemns in the fourth estate, then you must read the new book by Dexter Filkins, whose career began at the Miami Herald, 'The Forever War', based on his four years as a war correspondent for The New York Times in Iraq.

The hubris and mismanagement by the Bush White House that lead to the war has been documented in several excellent non-fiction books by both journalists and participants. What has been lacking is a clear picture of the war from the ground and through the eyes of ordinary Iraqis. No more.

The American taxpayer is wedded to the on-going convulsions of a nation where roaming packs of dogs exhibit more social behavior than many humans.

Americans have grown dispirited by the war. The Tyndall Report notes that between January and June 2007-- last year-- network news coverage devoted to the war in Iraq totaled 1,229 minutes. In the same period this year, the number dropped to 300 minutes. This is a place where tens of thousands of young American soldiers, scarcely adults, have shed their blood, injured and dying.

We are hopeful, but we are not sure, we are anxious and we are turning off from this national nightmare now matched by a serious national economic crisis: the forever war feels like a burning tire around America's neck-- exactly how our enemies would have it.

Filkins manages the heroic act of seeing in terse and concise observations the particulars of human tragedy in Iraq (and also, in briefer glimpses, Afghanistan); both ours and theirs, but mainly-- theirs.

Such an unflinching account of the war in Iraq could not help but inflict a cost on its writer. This cost defies Lapham's observation of the mainstream media: there are journalists who plunge into the darkest places and report back to us the real expressions of human nature.

With 'The Forever War', Filkins joins an pantheon of war correspondents who helped us observe the tragedy of an earlier war, Vietnam: David Halberstam, Phil Caputo, and Tim O'Brien, to name a few. We are lucky to have such clarity at a time when ignorance and the pursuit of false values right here at home burns deep and bright as phosphorous.

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