If you pay any attention to public affairs and current events, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the Noise Machine and its companion accusation: “You failed to denounce Xxxxx. Thus you must support Xxxxx and a whole lot more … .”
One recent case in point is a full-page advertisement purchased last month in The New York Times by an anti-war activist group, . Its headline asked “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?”
Almost immediately, the fur started flying. “Who would have ever expected anybody to go after a general in the field at a time of war, launch a smear campaign against a man we’ve entrusted with our mission in Iraq?” asked Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.
President George W. Bush had to make sure that we understood that this went beyond one general. “I felt like the ad was an attack not only on Gen. Petraeus but on the U.S. military,” he said.
Hmmm. Iraqi insurgents also attack the U.S. military, and so the president wants us to make a connection. Questioning the general’s ability to provide objective information about his own plans and actions somehow equates with planting IEDs.
After the advertisement got framed that way and pushed into the Noise Machine, then the advertisement just had to be denounced, lest the non-denouncer be accused of supporting terrorists, favoring snipers and indulging kidnappers and beheaders while wishing for his country’s defeat.
This absurdity even reached to the U.S. Senate, which overwhelmingly passed a resolution “that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemns personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.”
They act as though Americans have never criticized a general in time of war.
But a Civil War buff can find scores of references to Gen. Ulysses S. “Butcher” Grant as an incompetent drunkard who squandered American lives; or Gen. Robert E. Lee as “Granny Lee” or the “King of Spades” for his defensive postures early in the war; or Gen. George McClelland as a closet Confederate sympathizer because of his overcaution in the Peninsula Campaign; or Gen. William T. Sherman as a deranged lunatic who put his entire army at risk.
In other words, it is absolutely normal for Americans to criticize generals for good or bad reasons. It is nothing new. You would think that the U.S. Senate, “the greatest deliberative body in the world,” could find something more important than a newspaper advertisement to discuss. We do, after all, have immense deficits, uninsured citizens, illegal immigration, home foreclosures and the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, just for starters.
The Noise Machine rolled on with the recent flap about the college newspaper editor in Fort Collins. For as long as I have known anything about college newspaper editors (and I was one at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley in 1970-71), they have annoyed and outraged people.
I did my share of it, back in the day, with some stunts that now seem pretty silly. But hey, that’s what college newspapers are for.
However, the Noise Machine revved up, and suddenly a rather ordinary event – college editor offends some people – became national news. Last week the Noise Machine was in full tilt over what Rush Limbaugh meant by “phony soldiers.”
Somehow, thanks to the Noise Machine, we end up focused on the messengers, rather than the real issue of whether the United States can reasonably hope to accomplish anything worthwhile by staying in Iraq. But on the other hand, it’s a lot easier to crank up the Noise Machine and fret about newspaper ads, college editors and radio talk-show hosts.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff and publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida.
