When I returned recently from two weeks away, which included two weeks away from television, meaning two weeks away from 21st-century reality, I surfed into a cable station in search of news and discovered a "Live" report, which said they were draining a lake in Aruba.
I am embarrassed to admit that I thought the Aruba murder story had faded. The embarrassment is that I'd underestimated the staying power of Media Mom Beth Holloway Twitty, mother of Natalee, who disappeared in Aruba on May 30 and is almost certainly dead.
This summer we have two Media Moms who came to dinner--the Aruba Mom and Cindy Sheehan, the Iraq War Mom. If you watch cable news in the evening, you are sharing it nightly with Cindy and Beth. The big difference between the two is that half the country doesn't hate Beth Twitty yet.
Media Moms come and go. There was Jon Benet Ramsey's Mom, Terri Schiavo's Mom, Laci Peterson's Mom, Elizabeth Smart's Mom and the Murdering Mom Susan Smith. Michael Jackson had a Mom, but she couldn't compete with her son for airtime; or maybe the lawyer told her there was no upside in sharing her torment with the country.
Cable news has a lot of airtime to fill. The problem is, it pumps a lot of that air into its Media Moms, and the result is often slightly weird. Cable takes familiar tales of tragedy and pathos, death and desperation, finds a person to carry the narrative, often a Mom, and then every night fills the Mom with more air until, like a balloon in Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, she turns into something not quite real, drifting past us night after night.
Greta to Natalee's Mom, Beth Twitty: "Take me to the Internet cafe. It's a downtown area, main area of, a commercial area on Aruba or in Aruba. You walked in the door, and what was the first thing you saw? Did you see Deepak right away?"
Paula to Cindy Sheehan: "Cindy, you have said rather pointedly that you refuse to pay federal taxes now because you don't want to fund this war and yet you continue to enjoy government services and I'm wondering how you justify not funding a war but at the same time also the tax money perhaps not going to schools, not going to health care, not going to the nation's infrastructure?"
Cindy--what with everything else--now has the weight of the nation's infrastructure on her shoulders. Looks like she'll take it.
It's clear enough why Beth Twitty joined the circus. Sometimes good things happens under the spotlight of the media's center ring. The Elizabeth Smart kidnap story swung through the news for eight months, and eventually they found her. Beth Twitty conjoined the normal appetite for Agatha Christie mysteries with cable's dependency on human melodrama and thereby forced a sluggish Aruban criminal-justice bureaucracy to do something other than let her daughter's case drift away. Good for her, though one hopes her 1,500 minutes of fame allow her to go back to Alabama as the same person who left.
Cindy Sheehan may grow into the most potent Media Mom yet. In this version of the parade, the Cindy balloon is doing battle with the President Bush balloon. One side wants to make the Cindy balloon bigger, while the other wants to blow a hole in it.
"Go, Cindy, go. You're the one. Stop this criminal and his insane war."
"Cindy, go away. You're a left-wing nut babbling, 'I want to put this war on trial.'"
The ethereal Cindy floats past every night on three channels. So much is happening all around her at Camp Cindy in the Crawford ditch. Two nights ago, hundreds of pro-Cindy "vigils" were held across the country, organized largely by MoveOn.org.
Probably Cindy is getting what she wants, but this Media-Mom event may be taking the country to a place it should want to avoid, whatever one's views on the war.
Losing a son in war and simultaneously losing perhaps half the nation's sympathy is quite an accomplishment, but that's the way it works now. Modern media has become an either/or, for-or-against world. They create Media Moms because Moms are sympathetic figures. But ultimately the audience in the new electronic Colosseum--a video-game experience for couch potatoes--turns thumbs up or down on most of these Moms. After a few weeks, people were either rooting for Terri Schiavo's desperate Mom or saying she should shut up and go away. How edifying.
Now we've got Cindy Sheehan, Media Mom superstar. She's using her center-ring moment to divide an entire country over a war (fought by volunteers), to get the blood boiling and people into the streets, again.
Yes, Cindy Sheehan is entitled to say what's on her mind, blah, blah, blah. But the rest of us are equally entitled to understand that the same forces that washed the moral and political complexity out of the Schiavo case are gathering again inside the U.S. to do the same to Iraq.
No doubt, the news from Iraq is wearing people down. Progress is pedestrian and death is not. But this is not the moment to blow the country over it. Want a Vietnam-like revolution over Iraq? Want a war of absolute moral claims? Better think twice about it. The eminent legal scholar Alexander Bickel did just that in 1975, reflecting on the price paid back then and likely to be paid the next time: "If we allow ourselves to be engulfed in moral certitudes we will march to self-destruction from one Vietnam and one domestic revolution to another."
Never underestimate the power of a Media Mom. Sometimes for the better, but here it will be for worse.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. <SECTION:CONTENT_FOOTER>
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You won't find a single post of mine degrading Cindy's pain. I just think she is being used all the while what's left of her life is falling apart. Sad:sad3:
