0303210508
DETROIT FREE PRESS
030321
Friday, March 21, 2003
METRO FINAL
1E
MITCH ALBOM FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Copyright (c) 2003, Detroit Free Press
DON'T COMPARE WAR TO A SPORTING EVENT
Afew days ago, after President George W. Bush gave his final ultimatum to
Saddam Hussein, MSNBC began broadcasting a countdown clock. It was small but
it was always there, during every report, during every newscast, a silent
reminder to set your VCRs, make sure you didn't miss it, must-see TV, the
countdown to war. You could flip on the tube and know it right away: only
4:42:03 until "time's up" for Saddam. It was, to bend a sports term, a true
shot clock.
Or, from another sports idiom, a countdown to the Big Dance.
Strange, isn't it? This is the time of year you normally pull up a chair and
drop in front of the TV set, watching college basketball from light until
dark.
Today, March 2003, we once again pull up the chair and drop in front of the TV
set. But we flip on the war. From morning until night. The parallels are scary
-- scary enough to require this reminder: in basketball, games are lost.
In war, it's lives.
Sadly, our experience of war these days often barely differs from our
experience of sports. Both are done mostly in front of TV sets. Both involve
analysts and broadcasters and live reports and sideline reporters. Both
involve similar phrases, such as "point of attack" and "knockout blow."
I even heard a cable TV news specialist Thursday talk about an Al-Samoud
missile and ask the producer to show the audience "the baseball card we have
on this one."
And up, indeed, came a baseball card, with a photo of the missile on it, along
with statistics, such as range and power.
The chewing gum was apparently optional.
Winners, losers and worse
Now, in sports, the distance the TV puts between you and the action is paid
for in intimacy. You can't smell the hot dogs. You don't feel the shiver when
some college kid sinks a 30-footer at the buzzer.
But you get it. You understand what's going on. You see the whole game, you
know what you experienced: the winner won, the loser lost. On we go.
The danger in applying that standard to watching war is that the loss of
intimacy can lead to something more important: the loss of sensitivity. Danger
is not conveyed. Fear is not conveyed. Bleeding and stepping through mud and
yanking on a chemical weapons suit is not conveyed. Children screaming is not
conveyed.
Death is never conveyed.
But death is what this broadcast is about -- not the "sudden death" of sports,
not death to the dream of an NCAA title. Death, as in the end of life, the end
of all things that we know and breathe and cherish and love. When you consider
that, flipping the channels seems almost callous.
All too familiar scenes
In recent days, there was debate over whether the NCAA should continue with
its men's and women's basketball tournaments. This was as silly as the debate
over the Oscars. What does it matter? They are another form of non-war life,
like going to work or eating in restaurants. Even debating the NCAA
tournaments give them an importance they don't deserve.
What concerns me isn't the sport on one cable channel, but the war on the
other. Did you not find, in watching Thursday, a distinct feeling of deja vu?
A flashback to 1991? The green-black screen, the firefly lights of tracer
bullets, the sudden explosions, punctuated by a reporter's voice. It all felt
so . . . familiar.
But we must be careful. Having watched a war before doesn't mean we understand
it any better. Like some of you, I have family in this combat. Here is what I
have learned from that family: You don't know war if you are outside it.
It's like this. A Vietnam veteran named Tim O'Brien once wrote about how you
tell a true war story from a fake one. It's in the details:
"After a firefight," he wrote, "there is always the immense pleasure of
aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil -- everything. All around
you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you
tremble. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You
want justice and decency and human concord -- things you never knew you
wanted.
"You're never more alive than when you're almost dead. Freshly, as if for the
first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world. . . . At the
hour of dusk you sit in your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning
pinkish red . . . and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the
world could be and always should be, but now is not."
No sideline reporter will tell you that. No analyst. No anchor. No ticking
clock. This feels like a sport, but it is not a sport, it is not our evening
entertainment, it is not just graphics and baseball cards of bombs. This issue
isn't whether games should go on. The issue is thinking war is one of them.
Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or albom@freepress.com. Catch "The Mitch
Albom Show" 3-6 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760). Also catch "Monday Sports
Albom" 7-8 p.m. Mondays on WJR. To read Albom's most recent columns, go to
www.freep.com/index/albom.htm.
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