Another Unnamed War: Hezbollah vs. Israel, Round One

What’s going on in the Middle East, namely the current conflict between Israel and the Lebanese political party Hezbollah, is undoubtedly tragic, but the real tragedy just might the American media’s clumsiness in covering the matter. You can’t really call Hezbollah terrorists since they hold seats in Lebanon’s government, but that’s how 90% of this country looks at them. It’s not their fault, they just listen to the “facts” on TV. I wish they could realize, however, that by this same definition our own Republican party would be considered terrorists too, and you can throw the Democrats in just for fun.

You know where my mother first caught glimpse of the current Middle East conflict: Access Hollywood. I’m not shitting you either. She first got a whiff of this horrifically historic battle on Access Fucking Hollywood. This is a problem and it has nothing to do with my mother, so don’t go there.

Death as entertainment is hardly a new curiosity. One could argue that mankind has had a fascination with death, especially on a mass scale, since, well, the dawning of mankind (I base this on nothing). So now I ask you this: Why do we have such a hard time calling this “conflict” what it really is, a war? We have no problem using phrases like “call a spade a spade,” and one could pontificate that a slogan like that is inherently worse than “calling a war a war,” even when you’re actually talking about war (it should be noted that the “spade” in this phrase predates any relation to the racial slur, though at this point I wonder how much that really matters).

What’s going on in the Middle East is more of a war than any conflict the United States is currently and openly engaged in. We throw the word “war” around like Brett Favre has thrown a football in last few NFL Playoffs, which is to say without any regard whatsoever. The U.S. loves all its little wars: The War on Drugs, the Cola Wars, the War on Terror, the Cold WarâÂ?¦even tiny real ones like the Gulf War. However, we rarely engage in any real WARS, in the traditional sense of the word. We invade, we preemptively strike but we hardly ever get our war on.

Now I’m going to get real ignorant on your ass.

This Lebanese/Israeli conflict is a war in its purest form: neighboring states colliding over years of stored up aggression with one penultimate event, which is actually quite miniscule in reality, acting as the catalyst. Some enthusiastic pioneers on my dueling television sets, my media headquarters, have actually labeled this new conflict, and all the other War on Terror wars, World War III. This is basically inflammatory and wrong, even if there is a bit of credence to it.

But for the most part our gratuitous, ugly media has refrained from using the “war” word in connection to Israel and their silly little terrorist friends to the North.

TO BE CONTINUED