A Good Lousy Hand

“Everybody talks about the weather. Not us.” Forty years ago, that was a slogan of the German Socialist Student Union.

That was then. Now we talk almost exclusively about the weather. It was no longer just the suffering overseas – first Burma then China – but our own Midwest. Iowa experienced floods the likes of which had never been seen before. Whole regions were nearly submerged. Thousands of people were traumatized.

Eager to avoid repeating the apparent disinterest he displayed about Hurricane Katrina victims in 2005, President Bush nonetheless missed setting the right tone once again. He said the people would come out of this disaster stronger than they had previously been. “Sometimes in life people are unexpectedly dealt bad cards. What matters is how those cards are played,” he said.

Contrasted with 1968, the weather has now actually become a political subject. Global warming is, without question, the cause of increased heavy rainfall. No mention of that in the television reports, however. Treatment of the misery caused by the disaster is simply a mixture of horror and sentimentality.

At the same time, the weather still retains its function as a diversionary tactic. That was clearly illustrated on June 12th. It was a day of monumental historical significance, but regardless which of the three main networks one watched for “news on the half hour,” the first seven minutes were exclusively dedicated to the bad weather.

The real sensation was only reported as an afterthought: the Supreme Court decided by 5 to 4 that prisoners at Guantanamo had the right to question the reasons for their captivity in civil court before they were tried by military tribunal.

After six years of the Bush administration waging war according to its own rules, bounds were finally set. The United States was to conduct itself as the nation of laws it claimed to be. The false alternatives presented up until then had been rejected. The majority clearly said, “liberty and security are compatible.”

Despite that, that’s not how it was first reported. Instead, viewers were first warned that the court’s decision was dangerous because it limited the effectiveness of the US government; prisoners released would immediately return to anti-American acts of terror. The reporters acted astonished and distraught. How could it actually come to pass that the courts would tie the president’s hands like that?

In the following days as Barack Obama praised the decision to close “the black hole” of Guantanamo which was a disgrace to America, John McCain was calling it “one of the worst decisions in the nation’s history.” Now he intends to bypass the court by introducing legislation in the Senate allowing the creation of special courts.

The fate of the 270 prisoners, meanwhile, is still up in the air.