One man’s reminiscence of when the war began.
There are a lot of reasons not to like the Iraq war, but for a sports fan like me there was a single tipping point in which the issue was brought into stark relief. When the war began five years ago, I was sitting on my couch watching March Madness, the basketball tournament. All of a sudden, Dan Rather broke right into the middle of the action and threw us to combat footage. Everything was green from the night vision and things were blowing up all around. Not quite the stuff of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but certainly enough to ruin a good day of basketball.
The flip to action in Iraq had us cutting away from important basketball action, and I grew angry. It’s one thing to invade a country on false pretenses; it’s quite another to preempt crucial March Madness action with grainy, night-vision footage of stuff blowing up. From where I was sitting, it was like taking a crack-head’s crack-pipe. Addicts are prone to spells of anger when the things they need are taken away.
As my admittedly irrational anger subsided, I debated the relative merits of CBS showing footage of the Iraq War rather than their best-rated event of the year. CBS was the only network showing the basketball tournament, meaning that they already had many viewers when they cut to Iraq footage. Still, because all the networks were showing Iraq coverage, it would have been a savvy ratings move for a network to distinguish itself by showing something different, especially such a big ratings draw.
The obvious counter-argument is that footage from the Iraq War was so important that it transcended considerations of ratings. However, there weren’t worried families huddled around radios waiting for news from the front on the same scale as during, say, World War II. The war was certainly controversial, which added symbolic importance to footage.
This war has very little concrete effect on the average American, whereas the NCAA basketball tournament is the subject of intense loyalty and carries thousands of dollars in bets. Who would be so insensitive as to bet on the Iraq War, in which people are really dying?
Another interesting point is the dichotomy between real war and sport, a metaphorical war between manufactured opposing forces. Conventional wisdom is that real war always takes precedence over sport, but let’s think about that for a second. If I have more riding on the basketball game, does that make me inhuman? Probably — but remember we’re not talking about the war as a whole, just the viewing of these selected clips with grainy night-vision images of stuff getting blown up. Am I alone in thinking that watching basketball with great production quality is a better use of my time than watching grainy war footage? Consider the irony that if this were a fake war in a movie, the production would have been much better and people might have been less confused as to what was going on. (Although that’s not necessarily true. I watched Syriana in crisp color and still don’t understand it.)
In all seriousness, the Iraq War is real and has real casualties. But basketball is an American sport — almost American as football. So if you don’t like basketball, I would posit the possibility that you don’t like America. Don’t you like America?
This country is the land of sports like basketball and football (and baseball, too — nothing’s more American than sticking needles in your butt so you’ll play better). If you don’t like basketball, you can just get out. We live in a society that values freedom, and shouldn’t that include the freedom of choice as to what to watch?
For people who don’t have cable, a presidential address or war coverage immediately limits one’s viewing options to a single thing. This is simply un-American, and I will not stand for it.
Andrew Rist ’09 (arist@fas) is patriotic about TV rights and sports viewing — everything else is just background noise.