Frank Rich: Saving Private England

[kskiska]

IT'S almost too perfect. Two young working-class women from opposite ends of West Virginia go off to war. One is blond and has aspirations to be a schoolteacher. The other is dark, a smoker, divorced and now carrying an out-of-wedlock baby. One becomes the heroic poster child for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the subject of a hagiographic book and TV movie; the other becomes the hideous, leering face of American wartime criminality, Exhibit A in the indictment of our country's descent into the gulag. In the words of Time magazine, Pfc. Lynndie England is "a Jessica Lynch gone wrong."

Maybe that's true — we are just starting to hear Private England speak for herself — but there's a more revealing story in these women than the cheap ironies of their good witch/wicked witch twinship might suggest. Our 13-month journey from Jessica Lynch's profile in courage to Lynndie England's profile in sadism is less the tale of two women at the bottom of the chain of command than a gauge of the hubris by which those at the top have lost the war in both the international and American courts of public opinion. And the supposedly uplifting Lynch half of the double bill is as revealing of what's gone wrong for us in Iraq — and gone wrong from the start — as is her doppelgänger's denouement at Abu Ghraib.

Flash back for a moment to the creation of Jessica Lynch Superstar. It was in early April 2003 that the stories first surfaced about the female Rambo who had shot her way out of an ambush." `She Was Fighting to the Death' " read the headline in The Washington Post, an account that was then regurgitated without question by much of the press. Later we learned that this story was almost entirely fiction, from the heroine's gunplay to the reports of her being slapped around by her Iraqi captors to the breathless cliffhanger of her rescue. Meanwhile, Jessica Lynch herself, unable to speak, was reduced to a mere pawn, an innocent bystander to her own big-budget biopic. When she emerged six months later, Diane Sawyer asked if it bothered her that she had been showcased by the military. "Yeah, it does," she answered. "It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong."

This wrong was not committed by accident but by design. In the revelatory new documentary about Al Jazeera, "Control Room," opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, we are taken into our own Central Command's media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action. The Lynch episode came at a troubling moment in the war; our troops were being stretched thin, the coalition had mistakenly shot up a van full of Iraqi women and children, and three Marines had just been killed in the latest helicopter crash. But as we see in "Control Room," the CentCom press operation was determined to drown out such bad news by disseminating the triumphant prepackaged saga of its manufactured heroine no matter what.

more…
http://nytimes.com/2004/05/16/arts/16RICH.html?pagewanted=1

[susu369]

1. Excellent

that last paragraph in the full article is a must-read.

:kick:

[scarletlib]

2. NYT took Mr. Rich off the editorial page just before war got underway

and put him back into the arts section. They said he was just so needed in the arts section.

They wanted to silence the voice of a great writer and admin. critic.

I laugh each time he gets an article printed criticizing bushco et al using the arts as his launching point.