Transcripts

[MARCHING MUSIC] (SINGING) Country tis of thee

Sweet land of liberty

Of thee I sing

SPEAKER 1: This is a piece called August of 1990. And where it comes from is during the Gulf War, the Gulf Crisis. At the time I started doing it, I was saving tapes of broadcasts. And I just couldn't quite make connections between the facts as they were presented, facts in quotes that were presented by either side, and what kind of turned up on TV.

And everything was slickly packaged, and everything had a theme song. And every time you heard something about the war, it had a little familiar tag to it. So you could say, oh yeah, this is this network's version of the war. And so none of it added up in my mind. So I took many broadcasts and all kinds of tapes of things that I'd gathered from various sources.

And I chopped significant little bits out of them, things that stuck in my head, things that would have been soundbites in a newscast that you would have heard, but even shorter than that, just one word or two words. I'm not pretending to uncover any truths. I'm basically saying this is kind of the message I'm getting from this. And why is it so different for everybody else? What am I missing?

AUDIO CUTS FROM RECORDING: 1990, August 1990. I will never send young men and women into battle. Join the fight, Persian Gulf Crisis. A superpower. Who should live? Who should die? Aligned powers World War II. Leaders who use citizens as pawns deserve and will receive the scorn and condemnation of the entire world. Citizens as.

SPEAKER 1: My main goal in writing this piece was to turn the media, the broadcast media machine, on itself. I use many of the same techniques that they use to get their message out there in a hurry, like soundbites and the juxtaposition of one thing against another, then in quick succession, which accomplishes their task of putting an image in somebody's head. And then it's there and it's gone, you're on to something else. But that imprint has been made.

You would hear things like the Gulf War crisis. You'd hear that over and over again. And so that would just trigger you into the right mode to accept whatever was going to follow. So all of these pieces that we remember from the war are filed where we file commercials and where we file that whole section of the media that is disposable. So it was a war that seemingly had no lasting impact. And I think it's very different than that. But that's the impression that I imagine many people have.

AUDIO CUTS FROM RECORDING: Stan Quail's job crisis management. Young men and women. They shouldn't let daddy's go away this long. Special report, Persian Gulf crisis. Hell on Earth. This is an act of war. We must stand up to patriotism. America. Line in the sand. Maybe oil is worth dying for. They shouldn't let daddies go away. Special report.

SPEAKER 1: And it's a very cynical piece. I mean, that I think that comes through. And I think that I wasn't intending it to be so. I kind of wanted to be fair about it and get as much of each side and of all sides as I could. But as I got into it, I realized that what drove me to do this was, I was kind of angry in the first place that this was all taking place. And I felt like there wasn't a whole lot of thought being given to why.

The real reasons we were there, I felt, were being obscured. And I thought we were there to protect our oil interests. I thought that was rather obvious. But at the same time, the humanity thing was being played up so big that it was almost un-American to say anything other than that.

AUDIO CUTS FROM RECORDING: Believers in God. Disease. America. America. Gasoline. Act of war. By the disease. Superpower. Flexibility. Oil. No flex. American. Oil. No flexibility. Oil. Flex. Oil. Flexibility. Believers in God. Disease. Evil enemies. Flexibility. American. Flexibility. God. No. Oil. Flexibility. Flexibility. The disease. No. Enemies. No. American. Enemies. American. God. Flex. Evil. Flexibility. Flexibility. God. Oil. No flexibility. Act of war. Fight a disease, a disease. Flexibility, flexibility, no flexibility. Flexibility, flexibility, no flexibility. Fight a disease. Flexibility, flexibility, no flexibility.