Don't Cry For Me

This weekend while up on the north shore (see the pictures in my collection) I had the opportunity to complete two totally unrelated books. The first "Moretta, Dragonlady of Pern" is one of the series by Anne McCaffrey. The second "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America" by Frank Rich was written just a while ago and is very scary story indeed.

These stories made me ask myself questions, in light of certain celebrity deaths, of why I cried for whom. So in the last few weeks my inventory is as follows.

Walter Cronkite. Who in my generation or earlier didn't love Walter Cronkite. I trusted in his integrity and honesty and whatever evil was ever found out about him, I never heard it. He symbolizes to me the death of something very important in our culture. Trust in the media. Which is why Frank Rich's book hit me so hard. There are good journalists out there, but you have to dig to find them. Which is sad. Our news anchors are perfect portraits of the perfect people. We get our news in small snippets, getting smaller and less detailed as time goes on.

We don't have time to read, we need it in 120 characters or less it seems to make it worth our ever so valuable time. The media knows it. It wants ratings and success. But Walter never worried about that when he gave us his editorials. He questioned presidents, heads of state, anyone whom he felt had crossed the border of proper behavior. And that is what the press did for us. It made us confident that there were watchdogs out there, making sure our elected officials played it straight. And we trusted they did this for us.

But Bush turned this whole thing upside down. And now with Walter dead, I am not sure what media outlet I can really trust. The golden age of journalism has given way to the age of marketing. Liberal or conservative, we should all be after truth.

Moretta. Okay so she is a fictional character. But she died doing a duty that was forced upon her by other leaders. I guess I read this before Rich, but at the time, crying over the death of Moretta I realized I had never really mourned the death of all who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and others who have died in service of our country in recent years. I have shed tears over Vietnam, those who died and were inflicted with so many emotional and physical wounds. But not so with Iraq.
Why, why, why.

And then I read Rich. I never thought about it much, though I had read about it in many alternate press publications. Bush blocked those images of death very effectively. The Iraq war until recently was a simple cleanup operation. No one was dying there. But even old liberal, don't believe a word of what they tell you me, got caught up in his own life enough to let myself forget that there even was a war. At least now there is a backlash, at least now our government admits mistakes, but it is certainly not front page news.

So then I cried for our country's armed forces. The people who have elected service and are subject to the decisions of leaders tucked safely away. One can argue they chose the life, but it doesn't mean we can't honor them with our tears. And then for the Iraqi people whose life was miserable before and may be worse now. And then all the victoms of war, be they the fighters or the public. For none of the decisions to do this are theirs. They are made by leaders with no real concept of the cost. Modern war is meaningless, petty, and downright sucks. It is about power or wealth or both. There is no real good reason for it, given the cost.

So who didn't I cry for? Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett for sure. Though I cry easily, these people are not people that I think matter much for the world. Their deaths are just part of a culture that spends more time on its media icons than on things that matter. Like war. Like healthcare. Like feeding the hungry. I would guess our government will likely grant someplace a bit of money for a Michael Jackson memorial way faster than figuring out how to help our vets or fix up healthcare.

Why? Look at what America cares about, and then ask "If I were a politician, what would get make the most people like me in the least controversial way?" Answer, anything but what really matters.