[Peace-discuss] Fw: [pf] pic; & Oprah did an antiwar show

[Joan Cole]

This is a great image at the top of this article...
http://www.citypages.com/databank/24/1164/article11140.asp

----- Original Message ----- >
http://www.citypages.com/databank/24/1164/article11140.asp
>  - - Illustration By Steve Johnson And Lou Fancher - -
>
> ~ and the first part of the article *AND THE WAR CAME* by Steve Perry, is:
>
> I. Oprah Agonistes
>
> If your viewing habits are anything like mine, you probably did not tune
in to Oprah last Tuesday. I caught a teaser on Drudge. It was the day after
Bush's "48 Hours" speech, and the man who wants to be Rush Limbaugh's dog
was out having his morning run at the heels of liberal media. Oprah taping
antiwar show! Developing! Right, I thought. What might Oprah
Winfrey--Goddess of All Media, a figure nearly as shining and raceless and
apolitical as Tiger Woods--have to say about invading Iraq? That war is a
bad thing and harms children? That it causes distress and depression in the
middle classes?
>
> So I watched, and I am here to tell you: For anyone concerned to know
where the fabled silent majority is these days, it was a revelation.
>
> From the start the air was heavy and melancholy; Winfrey and her guests
(the ubiquitous Tom Friedman of the Times and a Middle East specialist from
Sarah Lawrence, Fawas Gerges) all seemed shaken by the quickening of events.
Friedman looked especially cowed. The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner spoke
as though he had just wandered in dazed from a particularly brutal Dr. Phil
taping. The thing is, he kept saying, America has to come to grips with the
way it has hurt the world's feelings. "We've been exporting our fears, not
our hopes," he scolded. Yet even the always-dependable Friedman could not
exactly endorse Bush's war. The administration needed an "attitude
lobotomy," he suggested. But now that we were going, "My column is gonna be
devoted to turning lemons into lemonade." No, I did not make that up.
>
> In spite of him, the mood of the broadcast was quietly and vehemently
antiwar. The most amazing segment came midway through, when Oprah lent her
seal of approval to a lengthy and fairly devastating bit of Michael Moore's
Bowling For Columbine--the scene in which shot after shot and caption after
caption recount bloody U.S.-sponsored coups and dictators while Louis
Armstrong croons "What a Wonderful World." Now first, you rarely see this
sort of thing on American television, and when you do it is always followed
by a litany of credentialed hacks telling you what hogwash it is. But after
the clip, and Moore's own pointed comments about our bloody empire, no one
tried to deny the veracity of the claims. Well, Friedman said wearily, you
could make a similar clip about Saddam. Right, said Gerges, and you could
make a dozen more about the U.S.! Friedman fell silent.
>
> What's so remarkable about this? So Oprah did an antiwar show, you might
say. She's not God.
>
> But you're wrong about that. Oprah is the author of the most successful
syndicated show in television history. She presides over one of the
largest-circulation magazines in the country, launched a scant few years
ago. She sells millions of books magically, simply by causing their names to
pass her lips. She spins the likes of Dr. Phil into gold. She knows the
pulse of workaday America better than you will ever know your spouse, your
children, yourself. Where the public taste is concerned, she is God. She
attained this status not just by telling her audience things they already
knew, as some of her critics have charged; Oprah's great gift is that she
never tells them things they will not want to hear.
>
> So you see what it means for her to step out this way. It says that, at
the start of a war that will not end in the present theater of battle and
may conceivably not end at all in this generation, the president of the
United States is already losing the hearts and minds of the American people.
A majority--or near majority, depending on the day and the poll--have
opposed waging war on the present terms. (Polls since early last week have
shown a large and predictable spike in support of the war, but that is an
emotional reaction and probably a fleeting one.) Not only that: A shockingly
large and heretofore unseen minority have begun to realize that their
country is an iron-fisted world empire that is despised on nearly every
corner of the globe. And now the most revered producer in American media
thinks that message is ready to go mainstream.
>
> This is something new under the sun.
>
>
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