Anybody else watching the really pixelly live footage CNN is airing? They’ve got a camera with the 7th Cav while it’s rolling across southern Iraq. They just stopped in the middle of a Bedouin camp and the Bedouins just woke up to find themselves in the middle of a gigantic armored formation. And the satellite feed is so grainy that it looks ike a web cam.
Talk about Surreal.
I’m watching it right now. It’s so unbelievably compelling, and they’re just sitting next to some goats.
The idea that we are getting live footage of a war in progress, from the front lines, is just amazing to me.
While the going’s good, this must be awesome for the families of soldiers - I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a loved one so far away and have so little information. I’d like to think that they are happy just to get this grainy web-cam style footage of their son’s or husband’s (or wife/daughter) unit in action.
Did you see it while they had the night vision on it? Dark green blobs on a pixelated slightly lighter green background. Pretty useless, though the daytime stuff is nice.
I keep looking at it and thinking about posterity. There’s never been a war this rigorously documented. We’ll get reports, articles, and maybe books from journalists from several nations and we’ll get hours upon hours of actual video future historians can pore over.
Except perhaps for Steve Bauman, who will instead pour over them.
And then in thirty or forty years, Fox News can run a documentary on how the entire war was faked for the cameras by a clever government conspiracy. It’s all good.
It’s amazing, but creepy in a way as well. “War as entertainment.”
If they can do that - why couldn’t they stick a camera to the nose of any of the missiles we launched? I need my smart bomb movies!!!
Chet
Oh My Fucking God.
Just when it couldn’t get any more surreal, they get the wife of the Company Commander leading the 7th Cavalry’s charge across the desert to talk about her husband while we’re watching live “vehicle-cam” video of his troop racing across the fucking desert.
And Aaron “Aarogant” Brown wants his reporter to somehow get Captain Lyle on the phone so he can talk to his wife. Nevermind the fact that Captain Lyle is probably got his hands full at the moment, leading the charge into enemy territory and all that.
Can I picket outside CNN headquarters with a giant sign saying “No Blood for Ratings!”?
This is reality TV, not that other crap.
It seems to me that both MSNBC and FOX have better quality feeds than CNN.
Because most of the missiles and bombs aren’t optically guided anymore, and it would add extra weight to the bomb. Oh, you were just kidding weren’t you. :)
I agree. Last night, I got out a bag of chips, put my feet up on the couch and decided to “watch the war” for a little while. Incredibly surreal. It reminds me of a Civil War story where, in one of the early battles, people set up chairs on a hillside to watch a battle in a valley below.
I feel like I’m waiting to watch people get murdered and since I can’t do anything about it, I might as well enjoy the spectacle. Bizarre.
Suddenly, it’s even more like a reality-TV game show: Saddam is offering cash prizes for killing various types of U.S. and British soldiers. Capturing one alive is even more lucrative.
I forgot to mention the 200 Polish soldiers. They may even be worth more, since they’re so rare.
I heard about that. Crazy, huh? As if keeping the enemy out isn’t motivation enough. Maybe he should throw in a free trip to the French Riveria.
That was Manassas - not far from my hometown. And things didn’t quite go the way those spectators thought they would. I contemplated that as well as the fact that this charge was being lead by the 7th Cavalry - Custer’s old unit.
I’ve definitely got mixed feelings, at best, about this war but if it keeps on going this smoothly maybe we will see the ‘happy Iraqi’ after all. That would turn world opinion back to our side. How can you be furious at folks who’ve liberated rather than conquered somebody? If we’re really living up to our own hype, which any rational person has reason to be skeptical about given our track record as a country and this administration in particular, than - boo-yah. Let’s help these local folks fix the neighborhood up and the rest of the world can shape up and join us when they get around to it.
I’m a pretty hardened cynical case but I have to admit watching CNN and the BBC (on CSPAN-2) last night I was pretty inspired. Still, this is one thing and reconstruction is another. If we really let the UN get back on board and handle reconstruction as well as administer the oil industry for the Iraqis (rather than handing it off as spoils to American corporations) we could really pull this out. I almost hate to say it, I’m almost elated to say it, but I coulda been wrong about this one.
Still, I’ll wait and see how it goes.
That was me.
The French have already turned them all in.