Bigelow does the impossible and humanizes “The War on Terror” through a narrative driven by the interplay between conviction and doubt. And Navy SEALs.
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| Hey, by the way, have you seen me in Mad Men? I'm actually pretty good. |
War (noun) - a conflict carried on by a force of
arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation; warfare, as by
land, sea, or air.
So here’s the deal. When you manipulate the definition of a word
to serve political and public relations ends, you invariably lose a great deal
of that word’s original context. And when
you do it to a word as powerful and influential as “war”, you lose, well,
context in its entirety. This is simply
the nature of linguistics. So as renowned
super smart dude James Childress once said, “In debating social policy through
the language of war, we often forget the moral reality of war.”
Now I don’t want to sound super
preachy or anything, but it is incredibly
easy to lose that moral reality when you substitute abstract concepts (“freedom”
as defined by Party A vs “terror” as defined by Party A (see the problem
already?)) for tangible entities (Country A vs Country B). The consequences are that rules are bent and displaced,
ambiguity reigns and prospers and the feedback loop for our conventional moral
reality is no longer applicable.
