"The Good Germans"

Frank Rich yesterday, giving the public some of the blame for the Iraq debacle:

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

D. Sidhe replies:

...Americans, for the most part, are in a permanent state of exhaustion and panic. They're falling behind financially and they know it, and they know even more that this makes them moral failures. Because that's what they're told....

The news you get says the war is going fine, or it's not, there's horrible shit going on, but war is hell, right? and you have twenty minutes on the bus to sort out the actual story from the conflicting news on the way to your second job, while you're worrying about bills and the kid's cough and your boss who keeps grabbing your ass.

... And there's other things like global warming, which you don't have time to understand, you've heard talk about genocide in some place you haven't heard mentioned often enough to remember, and now they're talking about war with Iran, or was it Syria, and what the hell is going on in Afghanistan still?

... I don't think guys like Rich realize how desperate most of his fellow citizens are from day to day. They're exhausted. They're nearly frantic about the future. They're constantly in pain, and you'd better believe that takes a toll. And then they're blamed for not carving out the sheer volume of time it would take to get through the propaganda they're deliberately being fed by Rich's employers.

.. calling those people "good Germans" is not helpful, nor is it especially fair. What the fuck does Rich expect them to be doing? Get arrested in massive numbers? Is he going to take care of their kids and pay their bills and explain it to their bosses? ...

There's more, and you should read it all -- and Frank Rich should read it all. Much of the public simply doesn't have the leisure he has. What they glean from the media, too often, is happy talk from right-wing propagandists as well as from people who don't think they're right-wing propagandists, some of whom publish in Rich's own paper.

(Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)