one evening last week i attended a school board meeting in a small town. i had to give a speech at the "open mike" bit at the end of the agenda as part of my work. it was the last school board meeting of the academic year and so it was a particularly long meeting. it began with children's performances, awards ceremonies for gifted students, and teachers awards. after that, the school board did all of its business, approving budgets and resolutions before i finally got my opportunity to speak.
needless to say, i was there a very long time. i got home 6 and a half hours after i got into my car to drive out to the meeting. during the performances at the very beginning i couldn't even cram myself in the room where the board was meeting--it was so packed with proud parents and video equipment. so i hung out in the hallway instead. on the walls hung various memorabilia the school district had collected over the past century and a half: old photos of school houses and the town around it, american flags with fewer stars than we're used to, pictures of long-dead principals and teachers, and two framed front pages of the new york times. each page was from a different date, but both were from wartime. one was from world war one and the other was from world war two. as i waited for the hearing room to empty enough to give me a seat, i stood in the sweaty un-air conditioned hallway reading the headlines and stories of these old newspapers. there really wasn't much else to do.
neither newspaper page was from a particularly famous day during either war; there were no assassinated archdukes, pearl harbor attacks, or storming of normandy in the headlines. the papers were not saved because something big happened on that date, but rather it seemed they were saved and displayed to be a representative snapshot of a time when the nation was at war.
it was surprising to see just how much detail about the wars were reported. there were long articles stretching down the side of each front page about battles that i had never heard of before, giving details of who won or lost which territory and quoting generals talking in grandiose terms about what it all means for the overall war effort.
the war completely dominated each front page. the world war one page had no non-war related headlines. the world war two page had a single non-war story in small print crammed at the very bottom beneath the fold. there were a couple of stories that could have been reported as purely domestic matters, but each headlined linked the issue directly to the war effort. e.g. a headline about economic output put it in terms of wartime production.
i thought about those papers from last week as i looked at the front page of today's new york times. about 1/3 of the page was taken up by a story about a washed up pop star's acquittal. the "war against terror" was no where to be found at all--except for a small photo of saddam hussein in the lower-left corner and directions to turn to page A10 to read about saddam hussein's subdued appearance in court yesterday. if you open up to page A10 and read the hussein article all the way to the last three paragraphs you finally learn that over 50 war-related deaths were reported yesterday in iraq, most due to 45 people who were executed by insurgents and the remaining deaths from at least four suicide bombings. also on page A10 were the names of four american soldiers whose deaths were confirmed yesterday by the military.
with all the rhetoric about how we are a "nation at war" the contrast between the front page of today's new york times* and those two framed front pages i saw last week is really remarkable. we might be shooting and bombing people in other countries, but we're not really at war right now. at least not in the all-encompassing manner the term "at war" evokes when we think about the world wars. i wasn't alive during either of those conflicts, but comparing the pages of the "newspaper of record" makes the differences between then and now quite clear.
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*and, to be fair, of all the newspapers lined up in vending machines along my train platform this morning, the NYT probably had the smallest photo of michael jackson. in new york, mr. jackson had to share the glory with a story about new york's bid to host the 2012 olympics.
