Has Any Candidate Noticed? The Investigative Storytellers Have Gone Missing

I think of one thing over and over.

The caskets. Those very few photos and brief film clips of the caskets.

That Rumsfeld and others said no one could see, look at, photograph, no, no. no. The caskets coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be viewed. Some horrible something will happen… we cannot say what

I wonder, since a cell phone user photo-filmed the hanging of Saddam after the entire event was declared off-limits to the press.

I wonder, since paparazzi with lenses longer than their arms, take thousands of unflattering photos of film stars half naked behind the sheer curtains of their own homes.

I wondered, since Michael Moore convened with a student at Columbine to secretly film everywhere inside the high school after Frank deAngelis, principal of the school, had absolutely forbidden any press, cameras, or media of any kind from entering the building for any reason. The “nobody gets to film in this school” footage of every nook and cranny of Columbine was carried in long sequences in Moore’s film, Bowling For Columbine.

Thus, I have wondered how it has been that the press in the USA was told ‘no film’ of the returning heroic dead. Are we to really believe that our courageous in-close press, just like obedient children, caved and said, “Ok, as you wish”…? And that was that?

Why have we no renegade film of all aspects of our dead? Why have we so little play of film from vet hospitals in the States, and near none except a phony ‘rescue’ of a female soldier from hospitals in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why do we have so very few stories of the Iraqi families, the Iraqi refugees, the people who have literally tried to walk with their children and a few days food, out of the fire zones?

Why do we see no long and episodic stories about the children of fallen soldiers? Why do we not have interviews with any of the old people from Afghanistan, from the USA, the ones who say exactly what they think, and without muffling their true thoughts?

Why have we no nightly paraplegia report? WHY are commentators still calling human beings, sons and daughters, “troops?”, as in “Tonight, two troops died.” How did language about the loves of someone’s life come to be named as units instead of souls?

Why have we war, without SEEING it? Why do we have war without HEARING IT? Why do we have war without FEELING it, and daily?

Asleep. Not by self will. Put to. Put to sleep. By others… by their removing all stimulus to our senses… our senses being the only ways we have of perceiving the world and its condition… and what we ought, or not do, next.

Images and sounds and smells and voices and memory are what keep us awake; hunger and thirst for meaningful story keeps the mind alive with new ideas and promotes action.

Without the close-in, hidden stories, the opposite occurs.

Removing images, sounds, smells, voices, words, cries, and memories is precisely what puts a people to sleep, causes them to fall unconscious. And remain that way. And meanwhile, whomever suppresses the vital ‘inside stories,’ runs the show. The entire show.

A show without critics, without onstage voices. A show with an audience spellbound only because they’re tied into their seats while blindfolded and rendered deaf. In this show, there are endless numbers of actors shuffling across the stage and out the back door into the ‘theater’ of war. All the action takes place there, out of sight and hearing of the audience.

And, I still think of the caskets. I ask myself, Have we time-warped to living back in old Soviet Russia? where no person is allowed to take a picture of a titmouse or a telephone pole for fear of being arrested because, “It is forbidden. And, we cannot, will never tell you why.”

And I am still asking what happened to the close-in tellers, the journalists who have power and contacts and resource… and guts… enough to peer in, pry into… and pour the ‘real deal’ stories back out to us.

Saying all the mainstream media moguls have pulled back on financing their investigative reporters is not good enough. There are mavericks everywhere. Something else is wrong. Something else.

I only know this: Coming from a country that was constantly over-run by one marauding tribal group after another during its several thousand year old history… my old country father, Jozsef Pinkola used to say…

“To blind the people, you only have to do one thing:
Kill all the storytellers.”