Much attention has been paid in academia to the phenomenon of the mass media’s role in the dissemination of information. Theories about the role of the news in not only reporting events, but shaping their essential character have become so widespread – thanks to the efforts of a small army of trendy French poststructuralists – that any further discussion of the subject verges on cliché. This is a risk I am willing to take.

The industry of reporting news, and tragedy in particular, has exploded in the aftermath of September 11. An interesting pattern can be seen in the media’s dissemination of reports on disasters and tragedies. To illustrate this, I will present the hypothetical situation of a bomb attack in a major city.

The actual, physical effects of a bomb effect only a statistically small portion of the American population. There are the victims themselves, as well as residents of the area whose life is altered in somewhat smaller ways through emergency responses. This impact is magnified exponentially when information (often conflicting and confusing – a consequence of the speed of its distribution) is sent through the numerous conveyors of knowledge available to competing news conglomerates.

This is where the news media begins to, in a sense, create news of its own accord. A bomb attack is not merely a tragedy for the people killed in its blast but, when streamed into the homes of millions of Americans, a larger psychological tragedy for all who see it. The significance of the event has been changed. It is no longer so much an issue of an explosion, but of a refutation of expectations created by (guess who?!) the news media itself.

Thanks to the dissemination of images, voices, and stories through our various media apparatuses, Americans have developed very specific expectations of what constitutes America (for a more snooty take on this issue, consult the works of Jean Baudrillard). We are presented with thousands of images of things working as they should: planes fly through the sky, New York City hustles and bustles, trains stay on their tracks. When we are presented with the opposite (planes crash into buildings, New York paralyzed by fear, trains bombed and derailed), confusion sets in.

America today is a land ruled by the media. So many of our ideas, our visions of what is truth and fact are conveyed to us at the speed of light (often only minutes after the occurrence itself) by our media through all its myriad methods. The speed of this conveyance does away with filters, eliminates time to digest information. We are a nation under assault from words, voices and pictures that seldom agree with each other, that often contradict each other outright. Rather than being liberated by this free press, we instead become beholden to its whims. It toys with our emotions, changing truths to lies and back again, sometimes within the space of mere hours. Television and the Internet run the nation (a statement no less true despite its contrived nature). Congress doesn’t have shit on the media. After all, who would know anything about Congress if they didn’t choose to report its doings?

This all seems pretty fucking bleak. But here’s a fun fact. At this very moment, I am on the Internet, writing about the dangers of distributing information through the Internet.

Isn’t irony fun?

As some of you may know, noted blowhard Glenn Beck has come up with yet-another nationalistic publicity scam. Seemingly in an attempt to appeal to the same people who unironically talked about teabagging Obama, Beck has come up with what he calls the 9/12 Project.

Beck’s stated purpose for the project is to “bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001.”

In the interests of Mr. Beck’s noble quest to unite America, I have compiled a list (neither 9 nor 12 items long) of ways we can all

They just can't wait to teabag Obama

(Red Staters and Blue Staters) help to win back that magical 9/12 feeling.

1. Keep you eye on that foreign-looking guy next door. You know the one I’m talking about: turban guy. He’s up to something.

2. Seal your house up with duct tape. Neglect no door or window.  A dirty bomb could strike at any time. An airtight house is a safe one.

3. Actually, to be safe, seal your kids up with cellophane. Dirty bombs spare no one, not even the young.

4. Start stockpiling ammunition and water. In the event of the terrorist apocalypse, every Good American knows it’s every man for himself.

5. Dress yourself and your kids in Red, White, and Blue. These colors don’t run and offer virtually endless  opportunities for accessorization. Also, horizontal stripes (such as those found on Old Glory) make you look slimmer (see item #6).

6. Eat plenty of Freedom Fries.

7. Be afraid! Fear is what keeps us together.

Follow these simple guidlines, and we can pull through this together. In the meantime, I’ll be in my apartment irradiating my mail against anthrax.

This morning, I rode my bike downtown to the bank. (exercise – healthy!) After depositing my check, I decided to stop for breakfast at the Main Street Cafe. For any readers unfamiliar with Kalamazoo, Main Street is a wonderful little breakfast and lunch joint. I don’t know if the waitress knows my name, but she calls me “honey” and always remembers what I order.

I am a creature of habits: gyro and feta omelet with a pot of coffee and a large orange juice. (cholesterol, hypertension – unhealthy! bad!) Afterward, I smoke a cigarette and read a book for a while. (lung cancer – unhealthy! bad!)

Following breakfast, I ride my bike back to my apartment (good!), which smells vaguely of stale beer. I threw a bit of a party last night. (liver disease – bad!)

As a very general rule, college students (myself included) are not the healthiest of individuals. We drink and smoke and stay up all night stressing about term papers. Fortunately for us, most of us remain dependents of our parents, and retain our insurance benefits, so long as we are enrolled as full-time students. If I keel over from lung cancer or liver disease or get hit by a truck while riding my bike (irony – good!), I will be provided with excellent, state-of-the-art healthcare.

I am sure by now everyone can tell where this article is going, eh?

Most people are not college students. Many of these people have absolutely no health coverage whatsoever.

To me, the much-publicized Healthcare Brawl 2009 seems like a bit of a no-brainer. People can’t afford cancer treatment, you

Also, Soylent Green is Grandma

say? Golly, we should probably get on that!

Of course, this is not the case.

This excellent article by Nicholas D. Kristof led me to a rather disturbing statistic. According to the National Academy of Sciences, more people die every year thanks to lack of health insurance than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qaeda doesn’t have shit on the inefficiencies of the American healthcare system.

We threw hundreds of billions of dollars worth of missiles and fighter jets and bullets at Al-Qaeda for their actions. I wonder what we’re doing about the 18,000 annual deaths a year caused by our own inefficiency.

The media is completely fixated on the hysterics of the right wing fringe which, it seems, is too busy worrying that Obama wants to grind up Grandma and turn her into cat food. They have yet to contribute anything constructive to the debate. Those that aren’t obsessing over “death panels” are busy arming themselves to the teeth. If there’s one thing the far right does well, it’s death fetishism.

This is not to say that the Democrats are blameless. Despite overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress, they have so far proved unwilling (I hope not unable) to pass a bill over the heads of a rowdy, but largely hapless Republican minority.

In the meantime, 50 more people will die today because they lack any form of health coverage. In a year’s time, I will graduate from college and join the teeming ranks of the American uninsured.

Frankly, I am terrified at the depths of our inefficiency.

The US Government’s privatization of war has taken a turn for the sleazy in Afghanistan, according to this article from Mother Jones. In a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, The Project on Government Oversight detailed a wide range of frat house antics perpetrated by private contractors (read: mercenaries) of ArmorGroup North America while guarding the US embassy in Kabul. According to Mother Jones, offences committed by the Government-employed mercenaries include “Drunken brawls, prostitutes, hazing and humiliation, taking vodka shots out of buttcracks.”

A typical scene in the American Embassy?

That’s right. Buttshots of vodka in the US Embassy in Kabul. Of course, this sort of Girls Gone Wild behavior pales in comparison to some of the more heinous acts committed by mercenaries in government employ, most notably the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians by trigger-happy Blackwater troopers. However, in a country as conservative and Muslim as Afghanistan, the fallout from news of ArmorGroup’s antics will hardly help with the efforts of the US Military and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to win the trust and support of the Afghan public. In the face of growing dissatisfaction with widespread corruption, and a rapidly-expanding Taliban insurgency, this news will only serve to increase already widespread resentment against those who many view as foreign occupiers.

Beyond the immediate consequences for American and ISAF soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan, these incidents highlight the folly of the increasingly popular practice of the American military of outsourcing jobs that would normally be filled by American troops to outside mercenaries. On the surface, the policy seems to make a sort of shortsighted sense. Hiring a private contractor to guard an embassy or diplomatic convoy frees up more soldiers to actively hunt insurgents and engage in combat operations. The American military is all-volunteer, with no conscripts and anemic recruitment figures. With an enormous portion of their resources devoted to fighting two wars, the military needs all the help it can get.

This highlights another problematic area in America’s military machine. Many of the men and women who sign up with corporations such as ArmorGroup and Xe (formerly Blackwater – they quietly changed their name in the midst of the PR fallout following the 2007 massacre) do so motivated by the higher wages and better benefits these companies offer in comparison to the military. The consequence of this is less oversight for these mercenaries and, judging from their affinity for bodyshots and bloodbaths, decreased discipline. The news of these incidents spreads and further ravages the reputation, not of the companies themselves, but of the American war machine and government they are associated with. In wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where winning favorable public opinion is paramount, these actions are completely inexcusable.

A possible solution to this problem is to raise the wages and improve the benefits offered to American soldiers. I am not advocating an increase in military spending – quite the opposite, in fact. The budget of the Department of Defense is inexcusably bloated, and an overall reduction of its spending would free up funds for other programs, such as education and healthcare. However, a readjustment of spending within the Department itself could do much to free up funds for grunts on the ground. The American military today is run by men who seem to still have one foot in the Cold War mentality of the 1980s. Multibillion dollar B-2 bombers and crackpot plans to shoot down missiles with laser beams from space are of little use to soldiers fighting a guerilla war in underarmored Humvees. Clearly, some fiscal soul-searching is needed in the Pentagon.

This trend of privatization of the military is deeply worrisome. And it doesn’t merely extend to the Department of Defense. Privatization extends to a shockingly diverse array of aspects of American life, including the prison system. This raises tough questions. Corporations exist for the benefit of themselves and their shareholders, not the American government or its foreign policy. Who are these people really serving? If we are going to employ them, can we at least implement some sort of effective oversight policy? Satisfactory answers to these questions are conspicuously absent.