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[infowar.de] The Big Lie Of Jessica Lynch
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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Published on Friday, September 5, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle
The Big Lie Of Jessica Lynch
A $1 Mil Book Deal, Zero Memory Of Any "Rescue" And The Worst Book
You'll Read This Year
by Mark Morford
Hey, remember that dramatic CNN footage of that big statue of Saddam
Hussein being toppled by U.S. forces in that Baghdad square a few months
back, during the "war"? Remember how powerfully symbolic it was supposed
to be? Remember, later, seeing the wide-angle shot on the Internet, the
one of all the U.S. tanks surrounding the square and the whole bogus
setup of how they staged the event, complete with a big crane and some
strong cable and strategically positioned "citizens" cheering their
"liberation" as the statue fell, as just off camera, a handful of
genuine Iraqis loitered nearby, looking confused and bored? Remember how
you felt then? Like this little black worm had bored into your skin and
was crawling around in your small intestine and you had the perpetual
urge to go off into the corner and eat pie and slam double scotches and
scream at the state of BushCo's nation? The Jessica Lynch story is just
like that, only much, much worse. These are the things that make you
wince and sigh. These are the things that put it all in perspective,
make you realize what the Pentagon and the military hawks really value.
These are the things that make you realize, goddammit, here I am working
every day and struggling to make ends meet in a BushCo-gutted economy
and all I really needed to do all along to make a million bucks is stage
some sort of bogus wartime heroics and sell it to a war-numbed American
populace for $24.95 in hardback, and, boom, Range Rover City. Jessica
Lynch. You know the one. The sweet, American-pie 19-year-old soldier and
kindergarten-teacher wanna-be whose army squad took a wrong turn in Iraq
and was, apparently, ambushed. And some of her comrades were killed and
she was taken prisoner, full of stab wounds and bullet holes, and she
was whisked off to a ragged Iraqi hospital and held for eight days by
vicious Iraqi guards and ostensibly abused, and later supposedly
"rescued" in the most daring and macho made-for-TV moment of the war by
elite teams of hunky U.S. Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALs. Wow. Except
that it never really happened that way. Except that Lynch herself
doesn't remember a single thing and all the nurses and doctors and
eyewitnesses on the scene say the Iraqi fedayeen guards had fled the day
before the "rescue," and there was no danger whatsoever, no resistance
of any kind, the U.S. forces could just walk right in, and they knew it.
And the hospital doors were wide open, and the nurses and doctors had
gone out of their way to provide decent care for our precious Jessica,
considering the circumstances, and doctors even tried to return Lynch to
U.S. forces themselves. And despite U.S. claims, Lynch had no knife
wounds or bullet holes at all, just a few broken bones, and the dramatic
and violent "rescue" was really just inane and silly and entirely faked
and yet America bought it, hook, line and Rumsfeld, because it was on
TV. And now, here we are. Jessica and disgraced N.Y. Times reporter Rick
"Oh my God do I need a gig" Bragg just inked a $1 million book deal to
tell her nonstory, titled "I'm a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story,"
not "Oh My God You Are Such a Sucker for Buying This Book I Mean Wow."
Because this is how we fabricate our history. This is how we spin our
patriotism, how we bake our jingoistic cake, the Lynch tale the most apt
and definitive myth of the war so far. Because Jessica's story, much
like WMDs and Saddam's nukes and biotoxins and Orange Alerts and our
imminently prosperous economy and Jenna Bush's ostensible prowess with a
beer bong, does not rely on truths. We do not rely on first-hand
reports. We do not rely on anything so piffling and small and dangerous
as honesty. We rely, simply, on PR. We believe the TV images of the
bogus "rescue" at the expense of common sense because we are a nation
drunk on the idea that the U.S. can do no wrong and TV would never lie.
And goddammit if Hannity and Rush and O'Reilly say it happened like
that, it must be true, and damn you America-hating libs for daring to
question the integrity of our armed forces when they are out there right
now protecting us from, uh, what was it again? Higher gas prices?
Israel's scorn? Dick Cheney's pallid sneer? Something like that. Look,
there is no war without spin. There is no war without outright lying to
the populace, without trying to coerce a wary nation into supporting our
unprovoked savagery by way of Hollywood-style set pieces performed
specifically to deflect attention from the brutality and the decapitated
children and the still-dying U.S. soldiers and the burning bodies by the
side of the road. This is nothing shocking. This is nothing even
remotely unusual or uncommon. The fabric of war consists not of gallant
battles fought by hardy soldiers for some noble collective good yay yay
go team, but of manufactured tales of valiant brotherhood and purebred
heroism designed to make the vile pill slightly less bitter. War is, of
course, vicious and primitive and disgustingly violent and not the
slightest bit gallant, and America has rarely been more thuggish in its
short history than when we annihilated Afghanistan and Iraq lo these
past few years, the world's greatest bloated superpower hammering down
on two nearly defenseless, piss-poor nations in the name of, well,
petrochemical rights and strategic political positioning. It's not a
war, it's a gang beating. Uncle Sam wants you. And, hence, we need the
sugar. We desperately need the sweet, teary-eyed images of flags and
salutes and stunning "rescues" to make it all go down smoothly, to
suppress the collective recoil, the national gag reflex. After all, who
wants to see burning babies and crying mothers and hot screaming death
on prime time? Show me Old Glory waving in slo-mo! Ahh, that's better.
We need, in short, pretty 19-year-old memory-impaired soldier girls
being rescued by manly SEALs wearing bitchin' night-vision goggles and
yelling "Go! Go! Go!" with lots of explosions and helicopters and maybe
a cameo by Bruce Willis looking squinty and tough, with the Pentagon
cameras rolling and everyone's adrenaline pumping like at a horse race,
except for maybe the baffled Iraqi hospital personnel who were calmly
taking care of Ms. Lynch when the U.S. storm troopers swooped in and
knocked them down. Of course, this isn't about Jessica herself at all.
She has served her country bravely and is probably very sweet and at
least partially articulate and is just in it for the quick wad of cash,
and what the hell she doesn't remember a damn thing about the rescue
anyway, which makes her the perfect one to write a whole book about it,
with Bragg along to, ahem, "fill in the blanks." Ain't that America. And
we can just imagine how the Pentagon brass doubtlessly winked at Jessie
and said hey sweetie, you go girl, take the book deal, and the movie
deal, and the commemorative plates by the Franklin Mint, it would be
good for the country if you go along with the ruse, there there now,
that's a good little soldier. Jessica Lynch is but a puppet, a toy, a
convenient TV-ready canvass onto which we can project our impotent myths
of patriotism and war, spit forth by the BushCo military machine to ease
America's pain, to assuage that increasingly nagging fear that we have
committed this horrible thing, this irreversible atrocity. In short,
Jessica's myth helps numb the idea that we have removed a pip-squeak,
nonthreatening tyrant from power and left behind a reeking miasma of
violence and bloodshed and thousands of dead citizens, more rabid
anti-U.S. sentiment and mistrust and global instability than Saddam (or
Osama) could've ever dreamed. And little Ms. Lynch, she is America's new
doll. She is our little G.I. Jessica, all safe and clean in her
homecoming fatigues, her imaginary story ready to grace the nightstands
of the happily gullible across America. Because really, why bother with
all that icky messy nonfiction, all that violent unsavory fact, when
straight fiction is so much more, you know, patriotic?
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday
on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never
does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly
e-mail column and newsletter. ©2003 SF Gate
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