I saw something on TV this weekend that was particularly disturbing. Condi Rice was giving a speech at a church (I think it was Baptist, but that’s beside the point). She trotted out the line ‘bring terrorists to justice, when possible, and when it’s not bring justice to the terrorists’. Immediately following that last phrase people on the stage and the audience called out ‘Amen’. My own fear is that an increasing ubiquity of home movie style war footage will only make the killing feel more commonplace, and take away the power it has now to shock us into action. That wars fought increasingly by remote control will remove us further from the terrible consequences of war.

For me, an understanding of modern warfare without actually being in it starts with Chris Hedges’ book ‘War is a Force that Gives us Meaning’. It’s simultaneously disturbing, enlightening, perplexing and sobering. Hedges’ words are the only things that enable me to even begin to make some kind of sense of what we see in the movies you talked about here.

I do hope somehow, again, perhaps naively that this connected medium, someday, will make it increasingly difficult to substantiate the killing of other people. It just strikes me that the coming generation of always-on connected kids will be far too…

and you’re not naive for believing in the power of this medium. change is bound to happen to the SOP of business, entertainment, politics and communication (it already is), so if change can happen there, well, we’re the ones on the other side of that equation… it might be a huge extrapolation to believe that human nature *will* change to the point where we don’t kill each other, but i do believe in the path where communicative technology is taking us…

thanks for the post.