Stahl Web

I was at Indiana University for the past week giving a lecture on war’s increasingly intimate relationship to video games. After cocktail hour on November 11, Veterans Day, I settle into the hotel room to watch some of the old cathode ray tube. There was a story on Fox News about a California mayor who had decided to spend the day with the Occupy Wall Street movement rather than with the troops, what the station decided could be categorized as a “daily outrage” story. On ESPN they were showing the “Carrier Classic” game, a first-of-its-kind college basketball game played on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson, one of our aircraft carriers. Barack Obama was in attendance as Commander in Chief, baller, and fan. It’s worth noting that originally Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, which celebrated the November 11, 1918 end of World War I. Of course now the date has become a celebration of war itself by some artful reversal. Now instead of solemnizing war, we trivialize it. Instead of “never again,” we say “let’s go to the instant replay.”