Cody
Williams
My Views
Spin This
Americans, for the most part, are good people. We, in the vast majority of housing tracks, apartment buildings, on city blocks of row homes, in trailer parks, off country roads and in suburban sprawl, live comfortably compared to the images beamed back from the rest of the world on our television sets. We are a trusting people and really like being Americans, black, white, brown, red, yellow alike. Being an American, to us, is a good thing. Yes, we have our differences, but still we live together in relative peace. A woman’s choice, right to life, civil rights, bearing arms notwithstanding, we manage.
We vote for politicians who we feel articulate our issues and concerns in the public forum. We trust these politicians. And dutifully we respect the decisions they collectively make, abide by the laws they establish, and when asked to, our young men, boys and women diligently go off and fight in wars our politicians tell us that to win is in our national interest. Sometimes, in those wars, our young people die. At home we receive back our dead, bury them to a bugler playing Taps in a graveyard near a lone tree on the grassy side of a shady hill at mid-day, with friends and family gathered around us. We accept the American flag from the draped casket of our fallen, neatly folded into a triangle and we embrace it, hold it tight to our chest, close to our heart, that red, white and blue flag that physically will now always replace the presence of that one person we lost. And we shed tears. All of us.
We are a trusting people. We trust to death.
And we want to believe that the politicians we elect, if are not right in the decisions they make, at least they are honest. We’re a believing people.
I watched a young soldier who lost both of his eyes to shrapnel from a bomb tossed into the military Humvee he was riding in Iraq. Blinded, he still believed in the cause we in Iraq fight for. In his darkness he still believes his government sent him to war for the right reasons. He still supports President Bush. He told the reporter that he wished he had his eyesight again, so that he could go back into Iraq and help his fellow soldiers, who he had left behind.
I sat at a bar recently and had a conversation with a young Marine and father who was preparing for his second tour of duty into Iraq. He was proud to go back. I asked him why. He said, “Do you like your television?”
Odd question I thought. “What does my television have to do with your fighting in Iraq?”
“Well, do you like your refrigerator?” he asked.
“My television and my refrigerator were threatened by the former Iraqi regime?”
“No, your way of life is,” he said.
This guy sincerely saw himself, risking death in Baghdad, Fallujah or some other Mid Eastern desert stopover to protect the comfortable lives we Americans have come to expect each day we get up and send our kids off to school, each night we go to bed after watching late night comedy, each Sunday we walk into the doors of an open church.
On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush looked at a document handed to him that warned of a possible terrorist attack from the group of radicals led by the then little known Osama Bin Laden. The highly confidential Presidential Briefing Memo (PBM) suggested New York City as a possible terrorist target and possible high-jacking of commercial airplanes. Some folks have criticized the President for not handling that information correctly, for not acting on it in ways that could have prevented the September 11th attacks that year. Could he have? Who really knows? However, the President, his National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, along with his administration chose to ‘spin’ the questioning of his handling of that memo in a particular way. They steadfastly held that the August 6th PBM was an “historical document,” that did not require immediate action, nor did it suggest “actionable” steps to be taken.
President Bush and his Secretary of State Colin Powell, when it was apparent to the rest of the world that Saddam Hussein did not pose an imminent threat to America, nor did he have Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) chose to ‘spin’ the perception and reasons for our going to war as a “preemptive strike on a terrorist regime that was sure to attack us” had we not acted first.
With the increase of our young folks being killed and maimed in Iraq daily, Vice President Dick Cheney ‘spinning’ the bad news into good, is now saying the war in Iraq is a “tremendous success.”
Politicians retain expensive D.C. consulting firms that specialize in spin, making bad news look good to the public.
Both Democratic and Republican operatives strictly adhere to daily ‘talking points’-- the day’s spin memo.
Half the American voting public, trusting and good people for the most part, are ready to re-elect the current White House administration because they do not see the administration's spin as spin, but as truth. They, like most of us, take the folks elected to office to represent us at their word. They want to believe in them. They want to trust them. They want to know these folks are protecting us and are doing the right thing. They want to believe that losing their sight, risking their lives in battle, dying or embracing that flag taken off their daughter’s coffin before lowering her body into the ground happened because of the reasons our government told them. That our government wouldn’t spin lies into a type of the truth.
We deserve more than spin.
Americans, good trusting people, deserve the truth from those who we elect.
We simply don’t deserve political spin.
© Cody Williams 2004
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