There, You Picked The Flick

I'm sure you didn't miss Terrorist Attack, which ran at the nearest telly near you, 72 hours non-stop, last week. It had towering infernos, rogue airplanes, mind-blowing implosions. It also had a shadowy near-mythical villain, a wan, robocop President, and the usual cast of men behaving importantly. After mauling my remote for most of the past week and tracking reality television, I'm not so sure whether Terrorist Attack was the mother of all disaster movies—was it louder than Independence Day, or more campy than Godzilla?

Let me do a reality check. What was on show? Spectacular shots of planes hitting the twin towers at various angles and orange-hued explosions every 10 minutes, and Palestinian refugees celebrating the attacks at a Lebanon camp on the half hour (there is now a debate whether the networks dug up old incendiary footage). Then there was President Bush and New York's mayor Rudy Giuliani and governor George Pataki in an I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine live telephone conversation which looked and sounded straight out of a crappy, low-budget Cold War Hollywood thriller. One network even had lachrymose studio interviews with victims' relatives—"It must have been painful," said a bleary-eyed coiffured interviewer, "to lose your husband, right?"

There were also the usual suspects, hardline former US officials—Madeleine Albright, Alexander Haig, Norman Schwarzkopf—pushing the retribution line. And Congressmen and Senators, Republican and Democrats, breaking out in chorus of 'God Bless America' on the Capitol (by the way, in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's state-run television was also playing the wtc collapse to a homegrown hate dirge, 'America is Falling').

What was, however, abundantly clear is that American television networks were in a quality free-fall, especially in the first 72 hours of uninterrupted airtime on the work of what Stephen King calls "cut-rate, low-tech stealth guerrillas". Where was the context, the history, the alternative voices, including the Arab ones? Even as 'America under Attack' first metamorphosed into 'America's New War' and then 'War Against Terror', the channels were not asking the hard questions. Nothing about the biggest American intelligence failure since Pearl Harbour, nothing at all on how suspects had entered the US from all over the world, some of them had lived in the largely-wired country for up to a year. No investigation either into its smug and lax airport security. Between the exploding towers shock show, all that the networks waxed hysterical about was the imminent Armageddon and how most American people were ready to go to war, bodybags or not. Well, that was much better, of course, than the New York Post in print running a headline that would put Bal Thackeray's Saamna to shame: Kill Those Bastards.

There was no context, no sense of history. The networks shrieked that such an incident had never happened in America's history. Forget the fact that in August 1814, British soldiers had sailed up the Patuxent river and torched the White House, the Capitol, the Library of Congress; and the government had to be evacuated. Nobody in America had ever heard of using airplanes to destroy buildings, gasped one hysteric anchor. Forget the fact that the teenagers who gunned down their classmates at Columbine High School had planned to finish the day by hijacking a jet and flying it into the World Trade Center.

Last week's network television was only an extension of the isolationist American foreign policy. It was, as Susan Sontag lamented, a campaign to infantilise the public. By the way, many anchors also wore American flag pins on air. Journalism be damned, jingoism reigned. Ah well, Terrorist Attack turned out just like the pulp Hollywood disaster flick which arrives fairly regularly at a theatre near me.