Some fictional horrors of war
Mark Steyn's syndicated weekly column addresses last week's big Sunday New York Times page-one story (part 1!) on the fictitious crime wave perpetrated by American troops returning from combat. John took the Times story apart in "Crazed veterans spark nationwide crime wave." Mark notes John's post after introducing the theme of the Times story:
"Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak."Echoes of Vietnam (or something) banging around in the heads of a phalanx of New York Times reporters and editors have resulted in serious derangement. Steyn concludes the column with a reasonable query that has a self-evident answer: "Who's really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?" This is an important column and I urge you to read the whole thing."Patchwork picture," "quiet phenomenon."… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture? The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either "committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one." The "committed a killing" formulation includes car accidents.
Thus, with declining deaths in the war zones, the media narrative evolves. Old story: "America's soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand." New story: "Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand." In the quagmire of these veterans' minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin' Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
It was the work of minutes for the Powerline Web site's John Hinderaker to discover that the "quiet phenomenon" is entirely unphenomenal: It didn't seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It's not.
