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US Air Force Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers (R). File photo. - Source: Reuters -
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An 18-year-old policy ended at Dover Air Force base in Delaware , as the casket containing the mortal remains of Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers was returned to the US.
The ABC reports the coffin was watched by seven family members, one of whom was weeping, and a gaggle (why gaggle, I don't know, it just seems to fit) of press.
Since 1991, and the first Gulf War (remember that?), the US military had maintained a policy of keeping the arrivals of war dead off-limits from cameramen and women, and - by implication - the American public.
During Iraq's zenith of newsworthiness, or bloodshed, before the surge and buying off of America's enemies, much agita was distributed in the media about how this was another instance of George W Bush trying to inure Americans against the consequences of his experiment in Iraq.
Perhaps my legendary inattentiveness is to blame, but I don't recall that the debate ever ranged back as far as George Herbert Walker Bush (or 41, the 41st President), on whose watch the policy began, or William Jefferson Clinton (42) who allowed the policy to continue.
It's an unfortunate (but maybe also its most vulgar and best) characteristic of the news that tradition, history, or precendent are either squeezed out or ignored. A consequence of time pressure, perhaps, but also a reflection that a news story must tidy. The viewer or reader must depart with no questions unanswered.
Problematically, life itself is an epic of messiness, and the issues that regularly make news, death, shootings, war and horror, are almost uncontrollably untidy, and banal.
The slaughter of three cops in Pittsburgh a few days ago was incited by an argument between a mother and her 23-year-old son over his dog urinating in the house.
Forgive the divergence. The point I'm trying to make is that while the decision to make visible the consequences of America's foreign wars is laudable, it is one that isn't part of the grand separation between W-ism and Obama-ism. It goes back much further than that.
And it transcends that fallacious argument of privacy that is so often made on behalf of the powerful out of faux concern for the weak. The ban was in fact briefly revoked after the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000. What the state makes, it can - if circumstances are deemed convenient - unmake.
This may be something President Obama, sunning himself at present in European relief and adulation , might consider as he increases America's presence in Afghanistan.
The idea that American presidents should be tough and bellicose too is a relic from a bygone era. Think of Teddy Roosevelt who spoke softly but carried a big stick. It's a feature that W can't be blamed for inventing, and that Obama, despite his reverse magic trick with the coffins, feels he must emulate.
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