3/21/03

So I'm watching Star Search, of all things, on CBS. Rachel (my fiance) likes it and it's refreshing to see talented people do their thing without ego baggage. Arsenio Hall remains one of the most annoying people ever born, but in an endearingly, fungus-like way. 

Then Dan Rather appears on my screen, telling me air raid sirens have gone off in Baghdad. Nothing happens, a live picture is put up, which shows a stunted cityscape from a low rooftop. I could hear, then see the occasional car go by near the bottom of the screen. Dan must not have been paying too much attention, as he was talking about seeing lights in the sky as reported by David Chater from SkyNews, perhaps anti-aircraft fire, then another little van goes by on the screen, and Dan says, "what's that noise?" and

"BANG!"

There's this unholy explosion and Dan can be heard in the roaring backwash saying "Holy..." to himself before recovering long enough to echo what I had just spoken aloud in my living room: "That's incoming."

So we're off.

The bit about the initial strike being a target of opportunity to take out Hussein is bunk - it's part of the get-out-of-town-in-48-hours-or-else mentality, just to show we weren't kidding. It also was a good way to get the TV part of the war started. The simultaneous operation in Afghanistan? My cynical side says it is also PR related, a way to prove that the Bushies can chase terroristas and take on big bad Saddam at the same time. CSPAN picked up the BBC, which had a brilliant piece late last night about the effect of the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf beating, and twelve years of sanctions and isolation on Iraq's ability to maintain a working military. They haven't much with which to defend themselves, which, given that it has come to the inevitable violence, is a good thing. The quicker it ends, hopefully, the fewer lives are lost.

The NCAA tournament started today. CBS has gone to 24 hour a day war slaughter coverage so the games have been moved to ESPN. I take pleasure in this orgy of basketball each year, and have vowed to limit myself to no more than two minutes of TV coverage of the illegal invasion every two hours, and very little on the Web. There won't be much real information to digest, and all of the military hardware fetishism displayed on TV fails to give me the hardon it is designed to, and the Web news is mostly all variations on exactly the same small crumbs. I can't do the September 11 overload again - I feel quite sick already.