Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Notes on the War:

:: A lot of bloggers I read have commented on the sanitary aspects of our media's coverage of the war, with special focus on CNN's coverage. I'm told it sometimes borders on "cheerleading", and the coverage is strangely insistent on showing war-from-a-distance: bombs erupting, loud booms rolling across the Iraqi landscape, et cetera. I don't have cable, and I'm really watching as little of it as possible -- I'm becoming more and more prejudiced toward the written word these days -- but I've been referred to some very disturbing images on Al'Jazeera. (I mean it. These images are graphic. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

This is the side of war our media almost never shows us.

The language of war is necessarily loaded with terms designed to dehumanize the business, but when I see some of the language out there that not only advocates war, but celebrates it -- when I see it becoming an entertainment that we plop down to watch, much as we would to watch Survivor or the World Series -- I think we need to force ourselves to look at images like this, and remind ourselves that real human beings are dying horrible, violent deaths, on both sides of the conflict.

I am not a pacifist, and I think there is moral justification for this war (as I've said before, what scares me is not the war but our Administration squandering that moral justification afterwards and my suspicion of less-than-moral motives at the heart of it). But I can't help but feel a bit nihilistic about a world where such things are as common as they are here.

:: But if the pro-war side gets too heady in its enthusiasm, the anti-war side has its own underbelly and it's just as gross. I've been advocating an end to anti-war demonstrations, mainly because they're pretty much irrelevant now; by continually protesting the war, we lose focus on the fact of the post-war world, which is where the success of this war will ultimately lie. But another, smaller reason I advocate ending the demonstrations is to shut up people like this. I can't help but note that the guy holding up that sign, on the right-hand side, is wearing a ski-mask.

:: Finally, I found a bit of humor in the BBC's airing of the minutes leading up to President Bush's address to the nation the other night. I've wondered why Bush doesn't address the nation from his Oval Office desk more; earlier last week he did it from what I think was the East Room at the White House (I could be wrong), and other addresses have come at other locations, most notably his address regarding his decision on stem-cell research, which seemed to come from his kitchen in Crawford, Texas. But what I found funny here is not that Bush would have a stylist primping him a bit, but that she's so diligently primping the back of his head, which we would never have seen. Did she shine his shoes, too?