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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

War is not the only option

Why is it that people who want peace are the object of such derision? I'm speaking chiefly about the occupants of IU's peace camp, but also about our national inability to conceive a response that is anything less than annihilation. Is it because we're only given the tools with which to imagine war? \nIn an excellent essay, the critic Elaine Scarry suggests that in terms of their responsibility during war time, American citizens have been castrated. In her words, we have been marginalized and infantilized. \nShe cites the following reasons:\n• The president has at his command weapons of such destructive power and convenience that he no longer needs the direct help of drafted soldiers.\n• The president can create international coalitions to fund a war; he no longer needs to do so with American tax money. \nAnd because Congress has become so eager to authorize an act of war, the president no longer needs to work for the approval of our elected representatives.\nScarry was writing in the mid-1990s, so we can add to her list the recently shown fact that when running for office, the president does not need a majority of our votes in the first place. Since the president hardly relies on Americans for anything, we are far removed from any real decision-making. Add to this that it's already difficult to consult the public during wartime, and it becomes clear why war on the home front has become a one-way conversation with the television.\nThe Gulf War consumed Scarry's attention, and she suggests that "the whole population sat watching in fascinated immobility." \nNot much has changed.\nThe problem with television is that it implies a condition of inevitability. Rarely, if ever, do Dan Rather and Peter Jennings give us the impression that war, or anything else, is optional. The news is rarely about what could happen, a discussion of the possibility and not the impossibility of change. \nThe playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith suggests that we have lost our metaphoric capabilities, that we can no longer look at something and imagine what it could be. That's because Americans are now in the business of being told what is. \nThat's why, when I sat watching the Peace Campers in Dunn Meadow do a peace dance for the Indianapolis news media, I couldn't help imagining the segment's intro. Just imagine someone with big hair, a big smile, behind a big desk: "Let's turn now to Bloomington and Indiana University, where a bunch of hippies are dancing around a drum in pursuit of a hopeless cause: peace."\nAs the peace dancers pounded out a rhythm and chanted that war was not the answer some passers-by behind me yelled out, "Then what is the answer?"\nAs Americans, I don't think we are able to imagine an answer other than war. Peace has been painted as cowardice, laziness and treachery. Novelist Alice Walker's suggestion that we fight terrorism with love was practically hooted at. \nColumnist David Broder wrote with incredulous adulation of the president's sending food along with the bombs (cold comfort to someone whose house gets hit). \nAnd at a press conference, President George W. Bush actually said he can't fathom why anyone would hate America, forgetting that when entire countries are starving, the wealth displayed on television's "Dallas" (one of our most popular exports) must not play too well outside the United States.\nAs far as the war goes, the rest of us are out of the loop. Thank God we've got TV to tell us that America is blameless, righteous and out for the kill!

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