Day 20

Do these "ad" stories come from press releases, or does some reporter encounter them and really think,"people need to know about this?"

May 25 there was a long piece that had taps playing in the background, over a flag and an honor roll of names, preceded by a homily about how these people had given their lives for freedom. This is a religious ceremony, not a news report. It brings to my mind a question, which is a reporting question as well as a political one: what does this rhetoric mean? Is it objective or subjective? Is it literal or does it have some figurative meaning? I think the plain reading of the report is objective and literal: this course of military service and this death in particular promoted freedom. (There is also an implicit assumption that the U.S. military member promoted freedom willingly: that it was not the enemy that promoted his own freedom by causing the death of an occupier.) But since the literal truth of all this is controversial at best -- no one appears to be happy with anything that has come out of this war, Americans are less safe and less free, Iraqi and Afghani women, secularists, local religious minorities, and various groups are confronting new oppression, and everyone else is under the gun, living in ruins, confronting multiple humanitarian disasters -- since the claim of actually producing freedom is a weak one, I think the report relies on ambiguity that maybe this is what the soldier was seeking to do: it was his or her subjective purpose. In this case, there would be the problem of generalizing, not having the soldier to ask anymore, not knowing how views may have changed, and finally, not being able to fully interrogate what each meant in expressing this purpose. It is also a bizarre interpretation given that the soldier is a subordinate who has given up most decisionmaking power, is under both orders and intense indoctrination and coersion to do certain things, so the question of what they were objectively seeking when they did something largely fades under the assumption that what they did was not even their choice. There is also a problem in this analysis because if an objective standard is used, then the enemy is also fighting for some positive goal, whether freedom, the security of his family and people, rigteousness or divine grace, national dignity and sovereignty, et cetera. Finally, is it literal? To be literal, one must be thinking what the words mean and not simply repeating them as some kind of rehearsed prayer or shibboleth. They way they are used, this seems unlikely.