== Free iPhone with Every Outrage! = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Bored with the 'war' on Iraq? 4,000 dead merely induce shrugging? Need an incentive to keep caring?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/03/28/notes032808.DTL&nl=fix

It is a time for a radical rethinking. It is a time to reconsider it all, to perhaps reassess how we are presenting and digesting America's most costly and lost and unwinnable and brutal and ignoble and inept and insidious and depressing war that's not really a war; it's time to revolutionize how it's all packaged and broadcast and pumped like hot sticky misery into the heavily narcotized American cultural bloodstream because, oh my God, we are sick sick sick of it all, and only getting sicker.

This is the problem: People are getting bored. Check that: People are already bored, insanely so, have been bored for a few years now, so utterly and thoroughly jaded and burned out on stories and pictures and woeful tales of Iraq and death and Baghdad and cluster bombs and burned-out trucks and limbless soldiers and flag-draped coffins and photos of a grinning George W. Bush posing with a horribly burned, mutilated U.S. soldier, it might as well be Lindsay Lohan snorting blow off the dashboard of an Escalade.

We have now accomplished 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Did you see that headline? Did it cause anything but a stab of pain and a heavy sigh and a need to click a different headline, maybe the one about cute baby polar bears in Germany? Did you simply mash and mix that inglorious number with tales of wretched economic meltdown and torture and health care system collapse and roll it all into a little ball of sadness and hurl it at the wall of forgetfulness? You are not alone.

Yes, 4,000 dead soldiers was a miserable milestone indeed, one that doesn't even hint at the roughly 100,000 wounded and brain-damaged and clinically depressed U.S. soldiers and simply shrugs off the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a number which is probably far closer to 1 million but hey, they're just civilians and they were stupid enough to live in Iraq in the first place and therefore the military couldn't care less about them and besides, all those stats are just boring too, so who's counting? ...

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Mark writes what I think and feel in almost every one of his columns.

"Of course, all the widespread boredom and ennui is completely understandable, similar to having some sort of inoperable tumor growing deep in your heart for so many years it eventually becomes the norm, The Thing That's Always There, so ingrained and embedded into your being that you can't even remember a time when you were free of it. And so every morning as your chest convulses and your body withers a little bit more, you just sigh and shake your head and accept the misery because, well, what the hell else are you gonna do?"