Scary stories

Nice rant from Stephen King at Entertainment Weekly (via Cursor) chastising journalists for skewed priorities, lack of perspective and editorial judgment, and general irresponsibility. The proximate cause of King's column was the obsessive coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, but the deeper cause is his clear frustration over the shallow, incurious nature of most reporting on the war in Iraq:

With the enthusiastic collaboration of the American news media, the sideshow has somehow become the main attraction in American culture; the weirder the guy, the bigger the headlines. It's sickening that it takes a columnist in an entertainment magazine to point out that more than 2,000 newspeople covered the Jackson trial — which is only a few hundred more than the number of American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq. On the same day that crowds gathered in Times Square (and around the world) to learn the fate of the Pale Peculiarity, another four suicide bombings took place in that tortured, bleeding country. And if you tell me that news doesn't belong in Entertainment Weekly, I respond by saying Michael Jackson under a black umbrella doesn't belong on the front page of The New York Times. …

The media first turned the trial into a freak-show by emphasizing Jackson's peculiarities rather than his humanity, and stoked the ratings with constant, trivializing coverage while other, far more important stories went under-reported or completely ignored in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Washington, D.C. The press might respond by saying, ''We gave the people what they wanted.'' My response would be, ''My job is to give them what they want. When he steps into a recording studio, it's Michael Jackson's job to give them what they want. Your job is to give the people what they need.''

I like Stephen King, but nothing of his I've read has scared me as much as reading The Atlantic Monthly the last few months. Richard Clarke's nightmare terror scenario in the Jan./Feb. issue apparently set the tone for the year. Titled "Ten Years Later," the piece looks back from 2011 at a second wave of terror attacks on the United States. The piece is fiction, but it's frightening — Stephen King frightening — because its premise is a terrifyingly real description of the persistent gaps in America's homeland security still ignored by our all-style, no-substance administration.

James Fallows takes his turn this month at looking backward from a fictional near future. His topic is less lethal, but scarcely less devastating: America's vast fical irresponsibility and the increasing likelihood of a catastrophic "hard landing."

Fallows and Clarke are both serious, thoughtful people who know what they're writing about. It's worth tracking down the hard copies of these (subscription only) articles, even though neither one is liable to help you sleep easier. (If anyone has a link to a "liberated" copy of these online, please let us know.)

It suggests something about the spirit of the times that Clarke and Fallows — sober, lifelong members of the "reality-based community" — are resorting to a kind of fiction to make the case for reality.

The other scary story in this month's Atlantic is Scott Stossel's summary of a Pentagon-style war game on dealing with North Korea. Here's how Col. Sam Gardiner described what he learned from the exercise: "I left the game with a firm conviction that the United States is focusing on the wrong problem. … Iran is down the road. Korea is now, and growing. We can't wait to deal with Korea. … The military situation on the peninsula is not under control."

That's grim enough, but there's also this:

Whereas Iraq did not, after all, have weapons of mass destruction, North Korea is believed to have large stockpiles of chemical weapons (mustard gas, sarin, VX nerve agent) and biological weapons (anthrax, botulism, cholera, hemorrhagic fever, plague, smallpox, typhoid, yellow fever).

That's in addition to maybe two, maybe 10, maybe more nuclear devices. All of which they're likely willing to sell to anyone who's willing to pay.

Such a scenario raises the possibility of a military intervention, but no one's even willing to pretend, Cheney-style, that such a step would be a cakewalk. The most optimistic possibility suggested in the war game came from Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who thought that a perfectly executed strategy might result in only 100,000 dead in Seoul during the first day of such a war.

The good news, sort of, is that North Korea is not sustainable. Even more than the former Soviet Union, it is doomed to one day crumble under the weight of its own contradictions. That's perhaps the best scenario for which we can hope. Yet, as with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this would mean a period of instability during which North Korea's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons would need to be secured to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. If this were to occur during the next few years, then the people responsible for securing these weapons would be the same people who failed to secure Iraq's suspected nuclear sites and who even now are refusing to fully fund efforts to secure the former Soviet arsenal.

Reading the Atlantic is not contributing to my peace of mind. It's almost enough to make me want to watch another hour of Larry King talking about the Michael Jackson trial. Almost.