The War Show

When I got a bad cold at the end of spring break, I turned to a traditional remedy: hours upon hours of uninterrupted television viewing. Because I, like many students I know, don’t have a television at school—in my case, this is less a principled abstention than it is a recognition of my tendency to procrastinate—the promise of hours of television seemed especially precious, like quinine in a malarial climate. Clutching handfuls of tissues, I dragged myself to the couch, turned on The Today Show, and settled in for a therapeutic television marathon that, I calculated, would culminate with The Price Is Right. I planned not to move until Bob Barker had reminded us all of the importance of spaying and neutering our pets.

But my plan had a flaw: I had forgotten about the war. Not the war itself, of course, but what ABC calls the WAR with IRAQ: war in its reality television incarnation. Because my recent television viewing has been restricted to such special events as President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address and the Joe Millionaire finale, the extent to which war had permeated regularly scheduled programming shocked me. I watched, supine, as a series of wildly divergent film clips unrolled on the television screen: in downtown Manhattan, hundreds of protesters were flopping onto the pavement to dramatize the war’s civilian casualties. In Iraq, dusty embedded reporters were squinting at the camera and gesturing towards the sand behind them. In the major networks’ morning television studios, anchors were grasping coffee mugs and transitioning smoothly between updates on Survivor and updates on America at War (as CBS has entitled its coverage of the current conflict), with no more segue than a slight deepening of their frowns. I flicked through the channels, but each of the morning shows featured the same peculiar pastiche of weather reports, human-interest stories and war. Every time the migration of little cartoon suns across the weather map lulled me into a comfortable state of sloth, the camera cut to a clip of bombs exploding over nighttime Iraq.

As a viewing experience, it was more traumatic than therapeutic. I had never before been quite so glad to see Martha Stewart.

As I watched Martha core Bartlett pears with a special sculpting tool (“You can buy this tool at your local art supply store, and it’s marvelous,”) the agreeable, television-induced stupor that had previously evaded me finally set in. Here at last was television as an escape. The glow of the studio lights and Martha’s instruction that we pay a visit to the local art supply store in order to properly core our pears leant television the air of unreality I had remembered so fondly. Gone was the uncomfortable immediacy of all those exploding bombs.

But as Martha arranged the halved, cored pears on their pastry crust (“This will puff up all around the pears and turn a beautiful golden-brown,”) I was haunted by the memory of those morning show anchors. The immediacy of the war hadn’t fazed them. Sounding chipper and grave by turns, they weaved the war in Iraq into Americans’ everyday lives as coolly as though reports on troop movements had always followed the weather forecast. Although I had been reading about the war in the newspaper and on the Internet, although I had briefly watched CNN’s “special coverage” over Fly-By peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in Loker Commons, I had not realized how thoroughly and seamlessly television programs had incorporated the war into their daily programming. The war I had become used to was an anomaly, its exceptional status denoted by extra-large newspaper headlines and regular protests. But this television war, forced into the familiar framework of regularly scheduled broadcasts, seemed almost as remote as Martha’s television studio kitchen.

As Martha withdrew the pear tart from the oven, I remembered a pair of women, the wives of men serving in Iraq, whom one of the television news programs had interviewed. The first woman said that she watched television news all day in the hope of hearing some news of her husband; if something happened to him, she said, she’d want to know right away. The second woman, cradling a days-old baby her husband hadn’t yet seen, said that she never watched television: it made the war too real.

Yet as I lay on the couch, tossing crumpled tissues into the wastebasket, the opposite danger loomed larger. That morning, The Early Show had interviewed its foreign correspondent immediately after interviewing the contestant most recently dismissed from Survivor. The odd juxtaposition startled me. I couldn’t help but wonder if both men were, in fact, stars of the same remote, contrived and engrossing genre.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.