From the dingy depths of my friend's basement (with beer in hand)

This book is pretty damn slanted. Rutherford approached the subject of the war and the Bush administration with the same bias that he rips on the news networks for possessing. I suppose that's neither here nor there, and anyway, since I don't like George W. Bush, I guess I don't care about that (plus, the book is for college, which I also don't care about).

The so-called "total coverage" of the war is, I suppose, a mixed blessing. It's good that the general public is at least somewhat informed of what's going on, and it's good that the armed forces have monitoring from a third party, no matter how sympathetic that third party might be. Nevertheless, when the media that feeds the public the information is inaccurate (much like my attempt at playing Led Zeppelin on my guitar), it's tough to make a case for round the clock war coverage.

I remember the surge of post 9/11 patriotism and I found it to be a bit trite. All of the sudden, people who couldn't tell you the name of the vice president and who bitched about high taxes and marijuana illegality hung flags from their cars and tied ribbons around the proverbial old oak tree. Everyone was fired up for the war on terror (which actually strikes me as a malapropism: isn't war terrifying, and doesn't it strike terror, so therefore, how can you fight terror with terror? You don't fight fire with fire, do you?)

In the same way, I remember how the media became enamored with the American serviceman. Not to knock the American Soldier (far from it; in fact, the friend who so generously gave me the beer(s) and let me write this nonsense on his computer served a year in Iraq), but he did become something of a larger than life character on the news. Embedded reporters rode in tanks, professing how professional and invincible and highly-skilled all the soldiers were. They were noble, too; here they were, fighting for both another country's freedom and to protect all us average slobs. The fact that all these servicemen were guys my age and who were more or less just like me (well, maybe their hair wasn't as cool as mine, but otherwise...) did nothing to damage their mythos. Toby Keith (he's a country singer) wrote songs about them, Hollywood made movies about them, and newscasters cheered them on. With retrospect it's easy to see that it's not objective journalism when the journalist is rooting for one side over the other. Can you imagine the outcry if ESPN SportsCenter said flat out "I want to see the Pittsburgh Steelers destroy the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl?" That's the equivalent of what the US media did.

The other thing I remember about round-the-clock war coverage is that sometimes I lost interest. Oh, the first couple days with the explosions and the (carefully censored) carnage caught my attention, but after awhile, I found myself thinking more about my car or how I could get out of going to class the next day than Wolf Blitzter Reports. Once in awhile I'd find myself weighing the attractiveness quotient of the female reporter and not listening to her message. Eventually all the grainy green footage where I didn't know what was happening became an affront to my ADD, and I put on The Simpsons instead. CNN had a lot of time to fill between Exxon and BSFS commercials, and what they filled that time with, while war related, wasn't enough to hold my concentration. The truth became clear: war was very often boring.

In closing, that's gotta be 500 words, which is plenty, especially when my beer is empty. Rock on.