Words of war: Oscar excess, Washington fear.

Hollywood Disconnect

AMERICANS flipping channels between war coverage and the Oscars were treated to a rare instance of defining clarity. While Hollywood displayed its paler feathers on ABC, a series of POWs from the first Gulf War appeared on the all-news channels to tell of their experiences while captives of the Iraqi military in 1991.

Their testimonials cast a stark light on the disconnect between much of Hollywood and the rest of us. The irony of watching people accepting awards for acting, make-up and sound effects while men a few remote clicks away were recounting tortures endured at the hands of our current enemies was nearly numbing.

I kept thinking that these men were the ones who should be parading across a stage to accept awards amid the thunderous applause of an adoring public. Surely, the actors in their studied black and lesser adornments were embarrassed to display themselves on such a night. Maybe some were.

Having witnessed our soldiers' dead bodies displayed as trophies for the Arab world--and absorbing the news that five others were prisoners of people whose regard for the Geneva Conventions parallels Saddam's concern for Kurdish day-care issues--one might have expected the Academy to cancel.

But no, protested the cliche minders, "the show must go on." Such a notion might have made sense in America's 19th century circus era--as in a lion is loose, let's not panic the spectators--but is today N/A. Not applicable.

Hollywood is not entirely to blame for its distorted sense of importance. We're all willing enablers. We (and I include myself in this) love watching the beautiful people.

Which is precisely what made their strut 'n fret so inappropriate just now. Regardless of one's political views toward the war, we're in it. We're there. Soldiers are at grave risk; some are wounded or dead; others face a lonely terror and probable pain.

The real stars Sunday night were the humble, plainspoken former POWs. No frills, no gush. Just the facts and a few nods in the direction of honor, duty, country and family. Even as these former prisoners of war described events and circumstances that would make anyone wince, their faces betrayed nothing of pain.

-- Kathleen Parker, Orlando Sentinel 

Clergy vs. Parishioners

INTO the category labeled "Silly Things Said bout the Iraq Crisis by People Not Named Michael Moore' I hereby drop the following comment from the Right Reverend Frank Griswold III, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States.

"I'd like to be able to go somewhere in the world," Griswold said a few weeks ago, "and not have to apologize for being from the United States."

Griswold wants to volunteer his apologies for being an American--or rather, as he antiseptically puts it, for "being from the United States." And the reason is that he himself shares the belief he ascribes to "people everywhere I go": that the U.S. is "greedy, self-interested and almost totally unconcerned about poverty, disease and suffering."

This is a dark view the bishop holds of his country. What's most interesting about it is that few of the 2 million U.S. Episcopalians Griswold is supposed to lead show any signs of agreeing with it.

Has the crisis in Iraq exposed a crisis in American organized religion?

Doubts about the "moral legitimacy" of the U.S.-led efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein were expressed by the conference of US. Catholic bishops, along with top officials of every mainline Protestant denomination.

Typical was a condemnation issued by the General Board of the United Methodist Church on March 13, expressing "deep sorrow and regret over the pre-emptive attack on Iraq. The invasion marks a new military posture by the United States of America."

The people in the pews seem to understand the distinction between religion and politics, according to a poll released last week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Only 11 percent of respondents said religious leaders had a "great deal" of influence over their views on the war.

This is bad news for contemporary church leaders--especially in Protestant denominations that make fewer claims to hierarchical authority than Orthodox or Catholic traditions. The reason we are supposed to pay attention to such church leaders is that they are, after all, leaders; their statements aim to be collective expressions of a larger community. It won't look good if the larger community they represent turns out to be nothing but other church leaders.

At that point Bishop Griswold and his colleagues will appear to be just one more advocacy group, left alone on the fringes to ponder how they grew so distant from the people in their pews, and so close to Michael Moore.

--Andrew Ferguson, Bloomberg News

Keeping Perspective

So let me see if I've got this straight. We are at war. We are under a heightened terror alert. Washington being a prime target for attack, security there is especially high. Concrete barricades. Stepped-up potrols. Public buildings closed. The city has been secured to within an inch of its life.

And one farmer on a tractor shuts it down.

OK, maybe that's not quite accurate. Dwight Watson did not shut Washington down when he drove a tractor into a pond near the Lincoln Memorial claiming to have explosives and a willingness to use them. But he sure did paralyze the heck out of the downtown area. Traffic snarled and drivers did, too, as police closed a major thoroughfare and waited him out. The confrontation lasted two days.

For the record, Watson didn't have any explosives and he surrendered without hurting anyone or being hurt himself. Turns out he's just a 50-year-old tobacco farmer from North Carolina whose life has taken a rough bounce.

Free societies have always been vulnerable to the whims of the individual--the "lone gunman," if you will. It is part of what freedom means. That vulnerability didn't begin on Sept. 11, and it won't end with the Iraqi war.

For all the canned foods you hoard, for all the gas masks you stack in your closet, for all the duct tape you have at the ready, you cannot prepare for everything, cannot anticipate every eventuality. And if you could, would you want to? What sort of life would that be?

Your humble correspondent has nothing against preparedness. Readiness is good. But realism is, too. Perspective is, too.

The only alternative, the only way to ensure that we are always as protected, safe, secure as possible, is to live under lockdown. Which is no alternative at all.

-- Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald

Not a Game

THIS is the time of year you normally pull up a chair and drop in front of the TV set, watching college basketball from light until dark.

Today, we flip on the war. From morning until night. The parallels are scary--scary enough to require this reminder: In basketball, games are lost.

In war, it's lives.

Sadly, our experience of war these days often barely differs from our experience of sports. Both are done mostly in front of TV sets. Both involve analysts and broadcasters and live reports and sideline reporters. Both involve similar phrases, such as "point of attack" and "knockout blow?'

I even heard a cable-TV news specialist about an AI-Samoud missile and ask the producer to show the audience "the baseball card we have on this one?'

And up, indeed, came a baseball card, with a photo of the missile on it, along with statistics, such as range and power.

Now, in sports, the distance the TV puts between you and the action is paid for in intimacy. The danger in applying that standard to watching war is that the loss of intimacy can lead to something more important: loss of sensitivity. Danger is not conveyed. Fear is not conveyed. Bleeding and stepping through mud and yanking on a chemical weapons suit is not conveyed. Children screaming is not conveyed.

Death is never conveyed.

But death is what this broadcast is about--not the "sudden death" of sports, not death to the dream of an NCAA tide. Death, as in the end of life, the end of all things that we know and breathe and cherish and love. When you consider that, flipping the channels seems almost callous.

A Vietnam veteran named Tim O'Brien once wrote about how you tell a true war story from a fake one. It's in the details:

"After a firefight," he wrote, "there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil--everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and decency and human concord--things you never knew you wanted.

"You're never more alive than when you're almost dead. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world. ...At the hour of dusk you sit in your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red... and you are filed with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not?'

No sideline reporter will tell you that.

- Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press 

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