Joe Bageant, 2004: Sleepwalking to Fallujah:

35 years ago [...] there was little, if any, mythologizing of Vietnam’s warriors, much less patriotic news spasms ejaculated by embedded reporters between the commercials. News was duller then. Certainly not as entertaining as the Jessica Lynch story of a fetching, innocent young blonde wounded while supposedly blazing away at the face of evil itself, only to suffer multiple wounds, then be rescued from some fly-ridden Iraqi hospital (more radio crackling and gunfire please) by her comrades in arms. After this stirring rescue we were served the titillating dessert of the subsequent doctor’s report: She was sodomized by the sweaty stinking bastards! In the television news business it just does not get any better than that. Pass the corn chips, please.

With television news like that, who needs a rational explanation as to why we are at war? The entertainment value alone is worth it. And therein lies the problem for those of us in that last generation of people who gained most of what they know from reading: We need a tangible explanation why we are spilling so much blood and bullion in that god forsaken desert pisshole. Still no answer. Or no new one at least. Oh, there is the standard line that goes, “We are defending democracy and liberating a people from oppression.” That old saw was getting mighty dull even back in my day, when it was used to explain Vietnam.

I cannot remember a time when the American public ever asked any important questions of its national leadership. In the American scheme of things, that is the media’s job, media frames the question and the public asks it, after having been appropriately bludgeoned over the head with it.