The Sound of Silence
by Clay Risen

It used to be that if you took a NATO conference, a few dozen world leaders, a city full of students and a nice spring day you could bet safe money on a mass protest of near-riot proportions. Throw in a major military conflict brewing in an until-recently-unknown lesser-developed country and it was post time.

But all bets were off in Washington last weekend. Despite it being host to the largest meeting of heads of state anywhere since the end of World War II, downtown Washington was quiet. Too quiet. A quick stroll past the grounds around the White House turned up a few Euros on vacation, a few mounted policemen and a few pathetic agitators, one whose sign said "stop bambing in Kosovar." Not quite '68, or even 1991. I've seen more people protesting the federal mohair subsidy.

Just a few months ago the media discovered that the American people were sick and tired of hearing about the president's sexual peccadilloes. They wanted a return to substantive issues, so said the papers. And so Clinton was acquitted, and we all got back to business. But fast forward a few months, and surprise - we're staring down the barrel of what will probably be the longest and costliest American military engagement since Vietnam. And the most errant. The Kosovars are all either dead or evicted, and the Yugoslavs are only more resolved to ride out the storm.

But you won't hear a peep out of the public. In the late 1960s, Americans woke up to the realization that their leaders in Washington had written them a death sentence, committing hundreds of thousands of young people to a war that they knew all along they couldn't win. There were protests, and there was upheaval.

Now jump to 1999. Every other day we hear about dissension in the military leadership, about the failure of air strikes to do anything, about the lack of any plan what so ever among Clinton's foreign policy team - despite our commander in chief's exhortations to the contrary. We're no longer talking exit strategy, either. By default, we're in it for the long-haul, and things will get a lot worse before they get any better.

But we don't seem to care. We treat it like a video game, a harmless simulacrum of pain and death and technological superiority. We seem to enjoy it, even need it as a break from the everyday. "Have you seen the way that bomb homed right in on that window? Those are so much cooler than the ones I saw in Iraq," I heard someone tell a buddy on the train the other day. It's ironic, because at the same time that we marvel at the technical improvement in laser bombs since the Persian Gulf conflict, we are all too convinced that it was a militaristic game like Doom that set off the tragedy in Colorado.

Maybe our lack of concern is a symptom of postmodern politics. We expect our politicians to lie - if they don't, then there's obviously something wrong with them. We hear Clinton calling for sacrifice and commitment to justice in the Balkans and we don't believe him. He's led us through a maze of adventures - we followed him into Sudan, we followed him into Iraq, we followed him into Monica - and each time he fizzled, or foibled. Of course he has no idea what he's doing, we tell ourselves. Has he ever? For hundreds of thousands of people, the conflict has meant death, rape and forced emigration. For us, it has become background noise.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.