Escape From Unreality
Thanks to Saddam's capture, the news gets real.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Let me count the things Saddam Hussein is not. Saddam is not Michael Jackson. Saddam is not Scott Peterson. Saddam is not Kobe or Robert Blake. He isn't Strom Thurmond's illegitimate daughter. He isn't Dennis Kozlowski's birthday party, and he didn't win "Survivor."
Saddam Hussein is real. Even though you saw it on television, his capture is real, and his capture is about something that genuinely matters. This past week Saddam's capture has dominated the news in print and on television. That means many things, but not least is that it means we all have been given a long overdue respite from the news as melodrama. For just a moment, the real has triumphed over the unreal.
In every living room with a television all over the world last weekend, people spent the day transfixed by images and discussion of one strange-looking man's passage from fugitive to prisoner, his descent from king to captive, his fall. The next day they read every account of a story too straight to spin.
This wasn't just another of the melodramas that make up the ersatz reality in which we swim day to day through the news. The "News at 11"--another building on fire, another car chase, another domestic murder--is now the way the events of our time are selected and presented, no matter the subject, all day long. The circus has come permanently to town and the big acts that we are asked to watch are not the trapeze artists, with their wonderful balance, but the freak shows. The first five Martha Stewart stories were real. The next 50 were largely about a freak.
It wouldn't matter, if there weren't so much of it. Melodramas used to be what we went to on Friday night, not every night. A freak is by definition an anomaly. But we are making the anomalous the norm. And because there is so much of it, the impulse to turn everything into sentimental melodrama or creepy freak shows is touching many formerly serious areas of life--the waging of war, national politics.
Once the embeds went home, the news about post-war Iraq was quickly turned into something mostly sentimental. The first several reports of American G.I.s killed by the enemy in and around Baghdad were real news. Iraq remained dangerous. But when for weeks, every G.I. death dominated front pages or led the TV news at night, one had to wonder what was going on. We were given detailed biographies of the dead and interviews with the survivors back home.
Out of all that could have been said or written after the war, these combat deaths became the biggest story of them all. One would like to think that the purpose (at best) was to convey the value of each life lost. But I doubt it. It must be seen as the sentimentalization (and exploitation) of men and women dying in war. What was tragic became maudlin. For a while the elevation of these deaths swept away any sense that something important was going on in post-war Iraq or that the war had some larger purpose.
Saddam's capture changed that. My advice is to stay tuned to the real reality television while it lasts, before Michael or Kobe or Scott come back and knock Saddam down to mere mentions in the news menu. We learned more about Saddam Hussein in one day last Sunday than we had in months. At one point, NBC's Tom Brokaw announced what turned out to be an astonishing six-minute or so filmed summary of Iraq under Saddam, including shots of Kurdish children lying dead in the dirt from Saddam's chemical attack, the million who died in the war with Iran, the slaughter of the Shiites in the south. At a stroke, our minds were directed at historic tragedy, not mere sentiment. (But it's creeping back; now we're supposed to wring our hands over whether Saddam should be tried by people who might execute him, poor thing.)
Similarly, our national politics has descended from Richard II to Punch and Judy. It's a little hard to think of Howard Dean as Bolingbroke amid a large cast of florid, overdrawn characters. The party's decision to stage so many on-camera debates led the serious candidates into statements and positions that escalated quickly into bombastic speeches as a device to stir up the primary voting base, which presumably sits out there in the audience like a mob howling for the head of the cartoon villain, George Bush. How else to explain Hillary Clinton's statement at a National Democratic Committee dinner in Miami this week that Mr. Bush is trying to "turn back the progress of the entire 20th century"? Booo! Hissss! Sic the blogs on him! To understand the difference, imagine the kind of speech that a Sen. Sam Nunn, Democrat, would have given as criticism of the president's course in Iraq. Whatever else, it wouldn't have been a pitch for applause from the cheap seats.
Amid all this, two oases of seriousness persist--the American public and the president.
Despite constant immersion in events today that are fashioned to produce either tears or rage, I think people keep a larger picture fixed in their mind's eye--the war on terror, the elements of the economy, the quality of institutional leadership. Someone in the Democratic opposition should get past the neurosis and notice that if nothing else, George Bush projects himself in every public appearance as a person of seriousness and focus. You don't have to agree with or even like this presidency, but it's not a circus. That's no small accomplishment in our time. For many people, Mr. Bush must come across as the one guy who is as centered as they are, who keeps his eye on the ball. Of course he doesn't have a patent on seriousness of purpose. Anyone in politics can try it. But most likely they won't. The script's been written. The show's the thing.
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