Sleight of Hand

So now we get down to the business of retrying pop star Michael Jackson in the media. Serious business, of course, Bush, since it involves a lot of money. The general attitude seems to be, not: this man has been judged innocent by a jury of his peers, who listened to months' worth of testimony and carefully weighed their verdict; but rather, the man is obviously guilty, so what went wrong? Why did the prosecutors fail to prove their case? How could they have done it better? Was it the mother's fault?

Those of us who subscribe to the notion of what Hillary Clinton famously called a "vast right wing conspiracy" see a pattern here. It has to do with the tactic used by skilled magicians to deceive their audiences into looking elsewhere while they get their trickery done: if you manage to distract them with a sideshow of some kind, they'll never see what's actually happening in front of their eyes. It has been happening in the media for years. Give the American public a good murder case, a celebrity trial, a disappearance, a convenient scandal, and you can get your business done without their even knowing it.

So now it's Michael Jackson. And the young woman who has mysteriously disappeared on the island of Aruba--a poignant story, certainly, when friends and relatives appear on the television screen, their emotions raw, ripe for exploitation by interviewers who'll ask anything to squeeze out a tear. Before that, there was the "Runaway Bride" (who still pops up from time to time: it seems there's a little life left in that one.) And Scott Peterson. And Robert Blake. Not to mention the Brad Pitts and the Angelina Jolies, Tom Cruise and his latest enamorata--Nancy someone?--and so on. The stories we can be distracted with are endless. And it's not that they are not gripping, basically human stories. It's the promience they receive, to the exclusion of the greater issues of the day, which need some thought, some critical analysis, some serious consideration.

What chance, for example, does the release of six new British memos on the build-up to the Iraq war stand against the re-trial of Michael Jackson? The contest is not even close. The first of these eye-opening documents was released weeks ago, and caused scarcely a ripple in the American media. It has taken the undaunted CPR work of countless bloggers and a few hardy journalists and columnists to keep it alive. And now, with the release of six more, roughly contemporaneous memos, we know for a fact that you, Bush, with the enthusiastic encouragement of your Rice, your Wolfowitz, and with the connivance of the British government, were busy planning for your war and cooking up your brazen concoction of justifications long before the American public was presented with your supposedly reluctant, supposedly last-resort decision to go to war.

We shouldn't be surprised. If we had been paying attention all along, we would have known what you were up to. But no. We were distracted. I forget what it was that was distracting us at the time. Perhaps it was the great search for Scott Peterson's wife, thought to be pregnant at the time of her disappearance. Perhaps by the discovery of her body, and that of her recently-born baby. No matter. We were distracted. We were looking the other way, whilst you and your people were getting on with the real business of the nation.

So now we have Michael Jackson to keep us happy and preoccupied. And Natalee Holloway. And Tom Cruise. And meanwhile, 23 more Iraqis die in a car bomb attack. And global warming threatens. And Africans starve, while you, Bush, are busy thinking up ways to disguise the stark fact that this great nation is prepared to do next to nothing in the fight against global warming, and to hand out no more than a pittance to the suffering people of this world, so that you can continue to reward your corporate backers and extend your tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

Sorry, Bush. Today I am disgusted.