{"id":20935,"date":"2012-08-20T13:38:14","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T12:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=20935"},"modified":"2012-08-20T13:41:23","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T12:41:23","slug":"nbcs-war-for-fun-and-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/08\/nbcs-war-for-fun-and-profit\/","title":{"rendered":"NBC\u2019s War for Fun and Profit"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new reality show of soldiers and celebrities playing war games showcases our national religion: military worship.<\/em><\/p>\n

A new military-themed reality show<\/a> from NBC, entitled \u201cStars Earn Stripes,\u201d debuts tonight. The show \u201centhusiastically melds warfare and fame,\u201d as a Washington Post<\/em> review<\/a> today put it.\u00a0It features eight celebrities (using the loosest definition of that term) \u2014 such as husband-of-Sarah Todd Palin, former Superman Dean Cain, and former boy band member Nick Lachey \u2014 paired up<\/a> with \u201cmilitary and law enforcement veterans, including a Green Beret, a SWAT officer, two Marine sergeants, a retired member of the Delta Force and two Navy SEALs\u201d, whom NBC hails<\/a> as the \u201cBad Ass Operatives.\u201d They\u2019re all under the \u201ccommand\u201d of Gen. Wesley Clark, who once actually thought he should be President, as he co-hosts this reality show with former Dancing with the Stars <\/em>host\u00a0Samantha Harris (subjecting oneself to the two preview videos below, one wonders how much NBC had to pay to purchase Gen. Clark\u2019s dignity in full: probably more than the Terror group MEK paid him<\/a> to become its loyal shill).<\/p>\n

Together, says the LA Times<\/em><\/a>\u00a0quoting NBC, the \u201cstars\u201d and the Bad Ass Operatives will participate in \u201cmissions reminiscent of counterinsurgencies that have taken place all over the world,\u201d with \u201creal bullets\u201d and \u201creal danger.\u201d Just in the first episode, says the Post<\/em>, \u201cthey have to leap out of a helicopter into a lake while weighted down with automatic weapons and full gear; swim to a motorized raft; wade ashore under enemy fire; destroy a lookout tower with a grenade; shoot at paper \u2018enemy\u2019 targets with live rounds; wade through mud to seize the enemy\u2019s ammo cache and then, finally, blow it all to kingdom come.\u201d In this maiden episode, one of the Bad Ass Operatives marvels at Todd Palin\u2019s skill in performing one of these tasks, and exclaims: \u201c[He] is an animal! Good God! . . . . He\u2019s just straight-up Rambo!\u201d The Bad Ass then adds: \u201cNext time I go to war, I want Todd Palin on my side.\u201d Another Bad Ass Operative vows to take \u201cNick Lachey, guy in the boy band, and turn him into Nick Lachey, bad boy guy with a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Needless to say, this is all being done To Honor The Troops. The winner will receive $100,000 to donate to a military-related charity of their choice. Referring to NBC\u2019s claims about the purpose of the show,\u00a0the Post<\/em> says it is all done \u201cto raise awareness about how hard our fighting forces work, how much they sacrifice, and so on and so on, until it begins to sound like nebulous praise.\u201d Reflecting broader cultural realities, the show\u2019s Bad Ass Operatives are treated like deities (one of them \u201cstarts to feel self-conscious when Cain, his teammate, won\u2019t stop fawning over him\u201d).\u00a0I wonder how actual troops who face real danger to their lives feel about having NBC exploit The Troops and convert their combat burdens into a fun reality show with feigned \u201cdanger.\u201d And, of course, the substantial profit NBC hopes to make from selling commercials won\u2019t be donated to veterans groups at all but will be tallied up as corporate profits \u2014 but that\u2019s all just totally incidental to the Honor The Troops goal motivating all of this.<\/p>\n

The ways in which this is all so sleazy, repulsive and propagandistic are too self-evident to require much discussion. There is, though, a real value: here we have a major television network finally being relatively candid about the fact that they view war and militarism, first and foremost, as a source of entertainment and profit. Recall the incredible April, 2003, speech<\/a> given by then-MSNBC-star-war-correspondent\u00a0Ashleigh Banfield regarding how NBC and MSNBC, then owned by military supplier GE, benefited from propaganstic war coverage in Iraq, a speech that (as she clearly anticipated when she delivered it) caused her subsequent demotion and then disappearance from MSNBC and cable news:<\/p>\n

I suppose you watch enough television to know that the big TV show is over<\/strong> and that the war is now over essentially \u2014 the major combat operations are over anyway, according to the Pentagon and defense officials \u2014 but there is so much that is left behind. . . .<\/p>\n

That said, what didn\u2019t you see? You didn\u2019t see where those bullets landed. You didn\u2019t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage?<\/p>\n

There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you\u2019re getting the story, it just means you\u2019re getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that\u2019s what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t journalism, because I\u2019m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid of a horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn\u2019t see what it took to do that.<\/p>\n

When I said the war was over I kind of mean that in the sense that cards are being pulled from this famous deck now of the 55 most wanted, and they\u2019re sort of falling out of the deck as quickly as the numbers are falling off the rating chart for the cable news stations. We have plummeted into the basement in the last week. We went from millions of viewers to just a few hundred thousand in the course of a couple of days. . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I\u2019m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people\u2019s opinions. It was very sanitized. . . .<\/p>\n

This TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there\u2019s nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.<\/p>\n

War is ugly and it\u2019s dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It\u2019s a dangerous thing to propagate. . . .<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.<\/p>\n

What this NBC sleazefest really reveals is the way in which reverence for all things military has become America\u2019s national religion, seamlessly embedded into virtually every cultural event. I recall this email I received<\/a> from a friend in South Florida last September after he attended an NFL\u00a0football game in Miami:<\/p>\n

Let me describe the patriotic display at last night\u2019s NFL opener. Men with machine guns at all entrances, to scare off the terrorists. Pat down on the way in, to make sure [my wife] and I weren\u2019t carrying plastic explosives. A moving national anthem with troops out on the field spelling out U.S.A. A moving tribute to the thousands who perished in 9\/11 and to our nation\u2019s brave response to that atrocity (which was, of course, the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world). A U.S.A., U.S.A. chant. Then a Stealth B2 Bomber flew over the stadium, followed by fireworks. At half time, a US Army paratrooper squad jumped out of a plane and landed on the field. Maybe next week they\u2019ll shoot some missiles from unmanned drones.<\/p>\n

Venerating the military is such a common American cultural ritual that one barely notices when it happens any longer. This morning, ABC News<\/em>\u2018 Jake Tapper pointed to a fun, playful video<\/a> of his ABC News<\/em> colleague, Pentagon correspondent Luis Martinez, jumping out of a military airplane with\u00a0the Golden Knights, the U.S. Army team that regularly parachutes into football stadiums during halftime as the adoring crowd cheers. In the four-minute video, Martinez plays the role of the hapless clown, acting goofy and nervous with his manly, stoic military guide, Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Figel,\u00a0over whom Martinez openly slobbers and to whom he is symbolically tied as he jumps.<\/p>\n

That worshipful, tongue-wagging fun and games with the U.S. military might not be the most appropriate activity for someone who is supposedly an adversarial reporter covering the Pentagon would never occur to any of them, because, like NBC, they\u2019re just practicing America\u2019s national religion \u2014 military worship \u2014 and who would ever object to that? Martinez was the reporter who gave anonymity to military officials<\/a> to smear Michael Hastings over his Rolling Stone<\/em> article that ended the career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, allowing the anonymous officer to claim \u2014 falsely \u2014 that the quotes used by Hastings were off the record. Martinez\u00a0did the same<\/a>\u00a0when he gave anonymity to a military officer to falsely attack a story by Jeremy Scahill exposing the network of secret prisons in Somalia which the U.S. effectively operates. Nobody practices this religion of military worship like the Pentagon Watchdogs who work at the nation\u2019s major television networks.<\/p>\n

Experiencing great fun and pulsating entertainment from sending one\u2019s military off to war is hardly unique to our time.\u00a0Adam Smith\u00a0lamented<\/a>\u00a0this warped dynamic back in 1776 in his\u00a0Wealth of Nations<\/em>:<\/p>\n

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies<\/strong>. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement<\/strong>, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s actually necessary that America have a network reality show that pairs big, muscular soldiers with\u00a0adoring D-list celebrities \u2014 hosted by a former Army General along with someone who used to be on Dancing with the Stars<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 as they play sanitized war games for the amusement of viewers, all in between commercials from the nation\u2019s largest corporations. That\u2019s way too perfect of a symbol of American culture and politics for us not to have.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

This weekend, on MSNBC\u2019s Up With Chris Hayes<\/em>, Rachel Maddow denounced<\/a> the Romney campaign for using an out-of-commission battleship as a prop for its Vice Presidential announcement, condemning such efforts to exploit the military for political ends as \u201coffensive,\u201d especially given that Romney and Paul Ryan have no military service. Moments later, literally, MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry gushed about all of Obama aggressive\u2019s military policies that give him such a hard-core political advantage; he has such \u201can impressive record on foreign policy for hawks,\u201d she explained, including \u201ccontinuing to prosecute wars, the drone attacks, the death of Osama bin Laden.\u201d Wars, drones, and the killing of an unarmed accused Terrorist and the dumping of his corpse into the ocean: behold what is now praised on MSNBC as impressive political assets, all in the midst of condemning the exploitation of the military for political advantage by someone who has never served.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/span><\/strong>: Nine Nobel peace laureates have called on NBC<\/a> to cancel this show,\u00a0pointing out that \u201cwar isn\u2019t entertainment\u201d and \u201cpeople\u2014military and civilians\u2014die in ways that are anything but entertaining,\u201d\u00a0adding: \u201cTrying to somehow sanitize war by likening it to an athletic competition further calls into question the morality and ethics of linking the military anywhere with the entertainment industry in barely veiled efforts to make war and its multitudinous costs more palatable to the public.\u201d The list of those peace laureates singing the letter includes 1984 winner\u00a0Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1987 winner\u00a0President Oscar Arias Sanchez, and 2003 winner\u00a0Dr. Shirin Ebadi, though \u2014 shockingly \u2013\u00a0it does not include the 2009 winner and current American President, Barack Obama (the one who, according to MSNBC\u2019s Harris-Perry, has \u201can impressive record on foreign policy for hawks\u201d: quite a strange attribute for a Nobel Peace laureate). Numerous anti-war groups have also been circulating a petition against the show and \u201cwar-o-tainment,\u201d which can be signed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

UPDATE II<\/span><\/strong>: Several commenters predicted what future episodes will likely entail, including this from 2millionlightyearstoandromeda:<\/p>\n

The celebrity with the fewest points will spin a giant wheel and have to endure whatever \u201cenhanced interrogation technique\u201d it lands on. (NBC has assured its affiliates that if the wheel lands on \u201celectroshocks to the genitals\u201d all naughty bits will be censored.)<\/p>\n

The celebrities with the most points move on to next week\u2019s episode. There they will lead a caravan of Humvees through downtown Hollywood spraying bullets at anyone who looks like they may have ever cracked open a Koran.<\/p>\n

The celebrity with the most \u201cmilitants\u201d killed will be showered in a celebration of depleted uranium confetti and receive a $100,000 check which will be donated to the defense contractor of their choosing.<\/p>\n

Viewers at home who text the word BUGSPLAT to NBC will be entered to win a day with a CIA drone operator!<\/p>\n

There you will learn how to launch a precision drone missile and kill a militant (plus his entire family, friends and all his farm animals)!<\/p>\n

Nobody should give competing network executives any ideas.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 salon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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