	Bob Hostetler > Writing

American Idols

by Bob Hostetler

Last week a record 65 million votes made nineteen-year-old Fantasia Barrino this year's winner of Fox television's "American Idol" competition. But the talented Barrino is not the only American idol making and shaping the news these days.

Our great nation has long been rife with idols, and not just the Fantasia Barrino kind. Nor is the typical American Idol the sort the Israelites worshiped back when they created a golden calf and worshiped it. No, our American idols are of a different sort entirely. And few of us realize the degree to which the daily barrage of news and views we receive via newspapers, magazines, the internet and on television is dictated by the philosophies and values we have exalted into modern American idols.

Instant gratification. We eat fast food, ride rapid transit, use instant coffee, bank at drive-thru windows, service our cars at Jiffy Lube, make copies at Quick Print, ship packages via Federal Express, get film developed at Fast Foto, dry clean our clothes at the One-Hour Cleaners, and pick up a gallon of milk at the Quick Stop. So it's no wonder that the American media-and to a far lesser degree, the American public-sound like a carful of six-year-olds on a cross-country trip: "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" It was true in the lightning-fast invasion of Iraq, and it has become even more characteristic of the period since the fall of Baghdad. Everything else these days happens overnight, why not the liberation and reconstruction of a complex, multi-layered, multi-ethnic nation? Shouldn't our troops at least be home by Labor Day? What's taking so long?

Image and perception. Why has Abu Ghraib received so much attention in recent weeks, and other more explosive and far-reaching stories and scandals have received only passing mention, if that? Because a picture is worth a thousand words, and in today's highly competitive, twenty-four-hour news cycle, if we don't have pictures (or can't show them, as in the case of Nick Berg's gruesome death) it's not news. That's why we're hearing so little of the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, which would already be an explosive international scandal…if anyone were paying attention. But there are no juicy photos, and therefore [insert yawn here].

Humanism. There are many reasons for the uproar over the humiliation and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And much of it is justified. It's inexcusable for American soldiers to conduct themselves as shamefully as some of those at Abu Ghraib did. But one reason for the hue and cry, particularly among the cultural elites who dominate academia, the news media, and the entertainment industry, is the damage such actions do to one of our most beloved idols: humanism. You see, we're supposed to be getting better as a human race. Such base behavior makes it look like, for all our efforts, the ancient Jewish prophet was right who said, "The human heart is…desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?" (Jeremiah 17:9, New Living Translation). We can't have that. We can't believe that. After millions of years of godless evolution, how can we, the enlightened elite (darn right there's a subtle bigotry at work there), be capable of such stupidity and cruelty? No. No, we've just got to believe of our human nature, as the Beatles famously sang, "it's getting better, it's getting better all time."

Comfort. As Max Boot wrote in last Friday's Los Angeles Times, "we have been spoiled by the seemingly easy, apparently bloodless victories of the last decade. From the Persian Gulf War of 1991 to the Afghanistan war of 2001, we got used to winning largely through air power. There were casualties, of course, but few of them were on our side….We forgot what real war looks like." We have more than forgotten; we have come to worship comfort to such a degree that we can't stomach the dirty, messy, bloody realities of war. Every casualty is a tragedy, but it's frightening nonetheless to imagine our response if Hitler and Tojo were amassing power today. It's inconceivable that Senator Kennedy, without a hint of irony, compares Iraq to Vietnam, when it will take seventy years like this past year (in which 800 Americans died in Iraq) to equal the toll Vietnam took in American lives. And it's probably quite encouraging to our enemies to watch politicians, pundits, and TV's talking heads become apoplectic over the cost of "Bush's war." How appropriate as we approach the 50th anniversary of D-Day on Sunday, to mourn the 9,000 lives lost on that one day... and the fact that we may never again summon such heroic will as nation because of the idols we have chosen.

This article appeared in the June 4, 2004 edition of the Hamilton Journal-News.

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