When I get in the car I start button-pushing my way through the stations to find something I want to listen to. Frequently all I find are commercials or sucky music and I end up listening to the public radio news/talk station.
Most of the time I would have been better off (or at least my blood pressure would have been better) listening to inane commercials but lately something very strange has been happening. I've heard stories that support the troops in Iraq. I mean honestly supportive, not the "we support the troops but..." ones that are used as an intro for a rant against them.
I heard one opinion piece that said Haditha is not My Lai and Iraq is not Vietnam. The really weird part was that this wasn't followed by another opinion piece implying that the first speaker was (a) wrong, (b) insane, and (c) a moral deviant.
Another piece discussed the TV show The Human Behavior Experiments and compared treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib with a psychology experiment at Stanford in the early 1970s.
In this experiiment, students were randomly assigned into groups of either guards or prisoners. "In less than a week many of the guards had of their own accord turned sadistic, while prisoners grew anxious and disturbed. Some of the photographs from that study are eerily similar to the Abu Ghraib snapshots: naked prisoners posed in sexually humiliating positions with bags over their heads." This doesn't excuse the soldiers' behavior but it sends the message that none of us can be absolutely sure what we would do in similar circumstances.
All of this is so unlike what I'm used to hearing on this station. I don't know what to make of it.
Posted by marybeth at June 6, 2006 01:59 PM Other Stuff