This passage from Sheldon S. Wolin’s, Democracy Incorporated, might explain why the war in Iraq is making such a small impression on the American psyche:
Virtual reality has about it the character of unreality, of transcending the ordinary world and its common smells and sights, its limiting rhythms of birth, growth, decline, death and renewal. For Americans, the chosen people of advertising, technology, capitalist orthodoxy, and religious faith, the greatest triumph of virtual reality is war, the great unexperienced reality…War is an action game played in the living room, or a spectacle on a screen, but in either case, not actually experienced (Pg. 12).
Incidentally, his book is as thought-provoking as it is readable.
Happy 4th, everyone!
