Couch potato combat

Last year I noted in this column that the U.S./NATO foray into Kosovo wasn’t such a perfect idea. This year, it’s time to say: I told you so. From all accounts, the mess there is evil, wicked, mean and nasty, and nobody involved, our troops included, can be regarded as a hero.
Meanwhile, Russian atrocities in Chechnya remain un-parried by NATO. Why is that? If NATO is the world’s enforcer of morality, then why not clean up the Chechnya mess? To do so, of course, would mean taking on the big, bad Russians, and that’s not a fight that NATO’s glamour boys want to confront.
Better to bully fifth-world, backwards countries than to mess with a legitimate force. A press conference with Really Cool maps and dashing generals is one thing. A real, live, two-way war when the other guy can shoot back with guns as big as yours is quite another.
I don’t know what it is about sending shock troops into distant lands and unfathomable situations that stimulates the psyche of modern America. I do have a theory, though: vicarious violence sells.
Movies, television shows, and even video games are orgies of carnage, and it SELLS.
Military campaigns have morphed into entertainment. Desert Storm was more of an orchestrated television series than it was a real war. In a real war you need two sides. Sure, to pump up the tension for the show, Iraq’s military strength was hyped, but nobody with more than two operating brain cells thought Iraq could hold out for more than a matter of hours.
It’s a winning deal all the way around. Politicians gain popularity for offering such great entertainment. Couch potatoes get their thrills. The military gets to justify its budget. Defense contractors get good marketing and build credibility.
Kosovo was also great entertainment for couch potatoes. The shame of what is happening there, though, isn’t such great entertainment, so the luster has worn off of this one. Despair not, though, another show in the series will come along, somewhere, somehow.
Middle America harbors a lot of profoundly unhappy people. If the only gratification they get out of their hum-drum lives is watching troops on the television shows between their Prozac doses, then who am I to complain? They can’t pull me into their crusades, and they can’t stop me from laughing at them. I’m happy with that.
What America won’t be happy about is when–not if, but when–somebody on its growing list of enemies decides to hit back. If you step on enough toes, someone will decide to get some pay back. Americans have notoriously short memories. Some other people have notoriously long ones.
When the day comes, the ones who will be most freaked out about it will be the couch potatoes. In the age of super-effective mass media, the only thing that spreads faster than complacency is hysteria.