Watching football the other day on FOX, a preview for the FOX Sunday "comedy"
The War at Home came on. In the commercial, the daughter is trying out to do something that apparently is not within her list of strengths and the father comments, "She has as much change of doing that as we do of finding Osama Bin Laden."
And that stopped and gave me pause. When did the hunt for Osama go from something serious to the punch line on a lame FOX sit-com?
I understand that part of comedy and satire is to take away the power of some things. I mean, look at what
South Park has done for Sadaam Hussein.
That said, I think what bothered me most was that the hunt for Osama has lost its urgency and relevance and become nothing more than a lame punchline to a bad joke.
After 9/11, I had this vision of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards from
The Searchers heading over to the Middle East to hunt down Bin Laden. In
The Searchers, John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter spend five years on an obsessive quest to find the kidnapped niece and rescue her from the Comanche Indians who took her after slaughtering her entire family. Ethan Edwards is intense and unrelenting in his quest and never loses sight of his goal, which pays off when he finally rescues Debby (the niece) and brings her back home in the final reel.
Of course, I realize that reality can't be like a movie with a beginning, middle and end, but you know I'd still love to feel that maybe, just maybe there might be a happy ending to the story of finding Bin Laden. And by happy ending, I mean, seeing the man stand trial for his crimes.
What frustrates me most about the war in the Middle East is that we seem to be losing track of just what the goal was or should be. On 9/11, I wanted to see Bin Laden brought to justice and be made to answer for the crimes he has committed against this country, our people and the world as a whole. But as day after day goes by and you get the feeling that search to find him may never end and that it seems that this overall objective has largely been forgotten, it's hard not to get frustrated.
posted by Michael Hickerson at 9/20/2006 11:47:00 AM |
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