Clear Channel Communications holds "support the troops rallies" that are little more than harassment and intimidation of previously planned peace demonstrations. They pull artists from their play lists for the sin of making their opinions known. Their "war updates" are little more than a re-packaging of the White House line. Worst of all, they destroyed Baltimore's classic rock station, playing too much Fleetwood Mac and not nearly enough AC/DC.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that Clear Channel is the lousiest corporation in America. With all the competition, it may be hard to choose just one company to be America's lousiest, but I think I can make a good case for Clear Channel, which has spent the last several years buying up local radio stations and cleansing them of any character in order to save money. Say what you will about pork-addicted defense contractors, sweat shops and polluting chemical companies -- when push comes to shove, they make things people (and governments) need. Nobody needs a company whose main goal is to buy up good things and make them worse in order to increase profits.
That being said, I was nonetheless listening to B-104.3, a Clear Channel station, last Friday afternoon. They run war updates every half hour and advertise them with the following tagline -- "stay informed, stay alert, stay united," which, roughly translated means, "listen to our station, be paranoid and shut the heck up." Following an update, the DJ, whose name is "Ledge" according to the station Website, decided to make a speech on the war. It took a while for him to get the words out. Long pauses don't make for good radio, but there he was, pausing between each choppy sentence, as if to give the illusion of genuflection. Then again, serious words about serious events may not come easily to someone who usually spends his shift behind the mic giving out concert tickets and announcing another "commercial free 43." In the middle of his stop-and-start ode to the effectiveness of the Bush propaganda machine, he said something along the lines of, "you know... I've always felt... that no one is truly free... when others are oppressed."
You know, "Ledge," I feel the same way. The oppressed people of the world need a superpower that can speak up for them and break their chains of oppression. For example, they need our help in Turkmenistan, where dissenters are horribly tortured and the only major growth industry is constructing monuments to the President, who calls himself Turkmenbashi and forces students and government workers to study his autobiography at least once a day. Well, that and providing us with airfields.
So we need Turkmenistan. How about Belarus, where journalists are imprisoned and opposition politicians die in mysterious "accidents," one by one. Why can't have an "Operation Belarussian Freedom"?
Maybe we shouldn't focus on former Soviet republics -- they've had such a tough time of it recently. What about Zimbabwe, formerly the breadbasket of southern Africa? It is suffering under a self-imposed famine. Its president, Robert Mugabe, starves his opposition, orders their imprisonment, rape and murder and compares himself proudly to Hitler. Elections are always rigged, and whatever productive land is left is always at the mercy of roving bands of thugs, who can seize it at will. Independent media is shut down whenever it may appear and foreign poll monitors and civil rights groups have been kicked out of the country. The Zimbabwean military would be even easier to blow to bits than their Iraqi counterpart -- we could really make a difference in Zimbabwe if we wanted to.
"It's about human rights and freedom and all that," the little devil from the Bush communications office sitting on my shoulder interrupts, "Iraq also has weapons of mass destruction that directly threaten our national interests."
During the current war, there have been several occasions on which the public was told about caches of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, then later told that they didn't find anything after all. As of the writing of this article, there have been no confirmed finds.
What if we don't find any illegal weapons? Will Americans start asking the administration why we didn't invade lush and picturesque Zimbabwe instead of dusty Iraq? According to an April 4 poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times, a majority of Americans said that they would still support the war if no weapons of mass destruction were found. I suspect that the reason why this war was so neatly and tucked into the War on Terror was because a majority of Americans believe that some or most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi, when none were. Who would correct them? Certainly not Clear Channel, for whom one third of their war coverage mantra is "stay united."
As polls show us, the overwhelming majority of Americans will refuse to oppose a war if it seems inevitable or is in progress. This suits the Bush Administration perfectly, since its strategy since the Florida recount has centered on the "aura of inevitability," or creating the impression that their agenda will be passed anyway and the opposition can either be on the winning side or the losing side. Needless to say, America likes winning.
So does the lousiest corporation in America.
Charles Donefer can be reached at cdonefer@jhunewsletter.com.
