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June 25, 2008

An Urgency of Joy

By Robert C. Koehler (Tribune Media Services)

The culture of war goes quietly about its business. Last week, Congress fed it another $162 billion, perhaps with some nostalgia: This was the final war-funding request of the Bush administration, the lame-duck, despised status of which making absolutely no difference in the dispatch with which the money was delivered.

Yes, there was some protest - 155 nay votes on the funding amendment, to 268 yea - and we can take a little wan heart in this trend, but the protest strikes me as largely symbolic. I fear that while the anti-war-funding contingent in Congress may want to be on record as morally correct, it understands that the war is inevitable and cannot be opposed in some structural and career-endangering way.

This was evinced a few weeks ago by the cryptic words of House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.), who, as reported on CQ.com, said that he "opposes giving any more funding for the war but felt he had a professional obligation to produce a bill that can pass."

Moral stands of this sort, which are not seriously meant to change or even challenge the status quo, are a dime a dozen, and do not serve the huge constituency of Americans who grasp the danger we're in and want far more than a withdrawal from Iraq - who want a withdrawal of the culture of violence from every aspect of American life, especially from its unholy triumvirate: the economy, the government and popular culture.

The important message I have for this constituency, which I took away with renewed clarity and fervor from the conference I attended last weekend - "Building a Culture of Peace in the Heartland" - is that knowing what we're against is not enough, and at best will generate the occasional symbolic "nay" vote on some inevitable piece of war legislation.

This was the Midwest regional gathering of an organization called the Peace Alliance, which was established four years ago to promote and lobby for what is currently known as HR 808, the House legislation that would establish a Cabinet-level Department of Peace and Nonviolence; it was first introduced by Dennis Kucinich in 2001 and currently has about 60 co-sponsors.

I whole-heartedly support this legislation, which among much else would establish a peace academy and coordinate and fund the best of the violence-prevention and restorative-justice/healing programs that are proliferating around the country, because it would bring a level of peace consciousness to our government that is currently absent. The legislation, I believe, would also help these disparate groups understand that each is part of a larger whole - a dawning global culture of peace.

Peace Alliance co-founder Marianne Williamson, who addressed the conference, illustrated the difference between being "against" (anti-war) and "for" (pro-peace) by talking about the two most significant documents of the nation's founding. "The Declaration of Independence," she noted, "states, 'we are not that' - a monarchy, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few. The Constitution states, 'We are this.' You need both," she said. "One is not enough."

Furthermore, unlike the Declaration of Independence, which denotes a single historic stance, the Constitution has been evolving for 200 years, adjusting to the contours of current events but more importantly expanding its protective reach as the nation has grown in awareness.

A culture of peace may one day simply be called a culture of common sense, but right now it's a radical leap in consciousness beyond the fear that continually fuels the culture of war and violence - the culture of us vs. them - which has exacted from the human race, over the last seven millennia or so, an ever-increasing share of its material and spiritual treasure and has set us on what Williamson called a "line of probability" that will culminate one day in environmental or nuclear catastrophe.

"It is the 11th hour, but it's not 11:59 quite yet," Williamson said. "There is still time."

Such was the urgency of this conference - an urgency, you might say, of joy and creativity. This is "deep democracy," she said. "Deep humanitarianism. Every time you teach a child to read you are a peace activist. The opposite of war is creation."

HR 808, and the subsequent numbers by which it will be known as it is reintroduced in congressional session after congressional session for years if not decades to come, is a small but crucial component of this paradigm shift in human consciousness.

I'm positive that one day we'll figure it out: Every dollar spent on human betterment and nonviolent conflict resolution yields returns that are almost incalculable. Every billion poured into the chasm of war is lost forever.

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Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

© 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Posted by mwblog at 06:06 PM | Comments (1)

June 12, 2008

Now What?

By Robert C. Koehler (Tribune Media Services)

Funny how we can't seem to hear the truth until it's uttered by a professional liar.

Thus Scott McClellan, who was George Bush's press secretary for three years, beginning shortly after we invaded Iraq — the very Scott McClellan who personified lock-step obedience to the cause — has acquired sudden street cred as Someone To Listen To, as he tells us what we already know. Our society may not convene truth commissions, but it does publish tell-all books by ex-aides of the powerful, which feed us pieces of truth in the form of scandal.

McClellan has given the country a bit more (unwanted, embarrassing) self-awareness than it had a week ago, prior to the release and subsequent media splash of "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." His book raises a lot of questions, but only one that matters: Now what?

So, OK, we have the word of an insider that Bush was a delusional egomaniac, the war was a sham from the get-go, and the media fawned and gushed and enabled when they should have . . . what? "Asked tough questions" is hardly adequate as a description for what they should have done. They should (at the very least) have listened to the war's opponents, and respectfully and in exhaustive detail presented their case against the war — correct, it turns out, on every point — to the American public before it began. They should have exercised skepticism in their pre-war coverage, yes, but even more importantly, intelligence and courage.

In this fleeting moment, while McClellan's gift of unavoidable awareness still shimmers in the consciousness of popular culture, I want to urge that we peer into the future at the same time that we squirm with uneasiness about the recent past.

Thanks to the truth window that McClellan opened, we now know, for instance, that: "The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings," according to Jessica Yellin, who was an MSNBC reporter in 2003.

And: There was word from above to "really squash any dissent," according to Katie Couric, a co-host of NBC's "Today" when the war began, who said, "I think it's one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism."

And just in case we've forgotten, Jeff Cohen, who was then senior producer of Phil Donahue's primetime show on MSNBC, reminds us that the show, the network's most-watched program, was canceled three weeks before the war started. "Trust me: Too much skepticism over war claims was a punishable offense," he wrote recently for TruthOut. "I and all other Donahue producers were repeatedly ordered by top management to book panels that favored the pro-invasion side. I watched a fellow producer get chewed out for booking a 50-50 show."

And so a C-student's fantasy war was given a free pass through the media, which formed itself with interlocking groupthink into the world's most formidable PR agency — and the already broken nation of Iraq was bombed into civil war. A million dead. Four million displaced. Three trillion dollars wasted.

Now what?

Keith Olbermann, who interviewed McClellan last week, asked the question we all should be asking: "Scott, are they doing that now about Iran?"

"I certainly hope that that is not the case," McClellan said. "But . . . I don't know."

It could happen again. War with Iran is not off the table. It could happen before the year is out, before the next president takes office. We now know, as the guilty secrets about the Iraq war trickle out, that the corporate media has a systemic flaw, a cowardly predilection for what was once called yellow journalism but should probably simply be called another form of war profiteering.

McClellan's book could have more than just titillation value if we let it, if we demand more than patriotism-themed infotainment from our news purveyors. In the perfect storm of "media-crity" that followed 9/11, the major news organizations abetted a crime against humanity.

The war on terror is in fact far more than a small president's pipedream of historic greatness. In that it is unwinnable — with a premise no less preposterous than the eradication of evil — it is meant to be a permanent war. This is the present situation and the present danger.

Now what? Let the media begin redeeming themselves by telling the truth about it — by rediscovering their intelligence and courage

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Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

© 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Posted by mwblog at 07:58 AM | Comments (0)