BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
PREPAREDNESS FOR WHAT? What
better time to educate the country about terrorist threats than
September, right after the kids go back to school? After all, if you
can get people thinking about gas masks or how fast they can drive
out of the city if a dirty bomb goes off, they might have less time
to contemplate other matters ... like, I don't know, the presidential
election or something.
So you've got to wonder - or maybe
not - about the Department of Homeland Security's plans to kick off
National
Preparedness Month on
September 9. The timing alone sets off WMD sirens: the Republican
National Convention will have just concluded, and the third
anniversary of the terrorist attacks will follow two days
later.
Not that any of this could possibly
have anything to do with politics. After all, as Homeland Security
secretary Tom Ridge recently explained,
"We don't do politics." Never mind that his earlier terror warning,
right after the Democratic National Convention, amounted to little
more than a free ad for Bush-Cheney 2004, with Ridge hailing
"the president's leadership in the war against terror."
NPR's On the Media has a
splendid segment on this fiasco, which you can listen to in RealAudio
here.
Brooke Gladstone interviews Bob Harris, the author of
a
withering post at This
Modern World.
I do not necessarily subscribe to
the theory that Dick Cheney's got Osama bin Laden's head in a freezer
somewhere, ready for George W. Bush to pull out from beneath the
podium about midway through the third debate. But there's no question
that these people are willing to go a long way to keep
power.
Look at the terrorist arrest sprung
just before John Kerry's acceptance speech, a matter
that the New Republic has reported on in great
detail.
Here's a thought for National
Preparedness Month: what are your family's plans for dealing
with dubious political propaganda in the weeks leading up to the
presidential election?
posted at 11:47 AM |
1 comments
|
link
1 Comments:
Leaving aside the question of whether the campaign itself is a good idea, as well as whether the timing is non-political, it is quite clear to me that many and perhaps most Americans are in a 9/10 stage (threat level honey dew). Just one small example is the widespread use of flip flops. One can barely imagine footwear less useful in an emergency situation and yet Americans of all ages and colors wear flip flops as if the only thing bothering them is the fashion police (which seems to be on strike, but that's another issue).
So I guess the government's anti-terrorism efforts have succeeded in making Americans feel extraordinarily safe. Taken one step further, this means the USA Patriot Act can also be blamed for the prevalence of flip-flops, or Satan's soles, as they should be known.
Post a Comment
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
