The media's first task in reporting the Georgia conflict was to figure out on which side we were all supposed to be, writes Donald Clarke
EARLIER THIS week, Dmitry Medvedev, a major attraction in prime minister Putin's Marionette Extravaganza, shocked the world by formally recognising the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The resulting worldwide fury helped confirm that three weeks of scrappy, often confusing conflict has delivered a definitive victor.
The unexpected war between Russia and Georgia is, it is true, still in a state of tense, unresolved remission. But the battle in the media over who is the goodie and who is the baddie seems to be over. Medvedev and Putin have been handed the black hats. Mikheil Saakashvili, the reassuringly Anglophonic president of Georgia, has taken on the Roy Rogers role.
When war breaks out in some part of the world that has yet to welcome Starbucks or The Body Shop, it is not unusual for even the most well-informed western observer to pause before taking sides.
Still, one rule will usually distinguish your Darth Vader from your Obi-Wan Kenobi: the invaders are the bad guys. A hasty analysis of the early reports suggested, however, that this maxim might not be too helpful in the South Ossetia bust-up. After all, this story in the
New York Times tells me that the Georgian tanks started it all by trundling into an area largely inhabited by citizens with Russian passports.
You cannot, I suppose, invade your own country, but the Georgian advance certainly muddies the waters.
Anyway, after a degree of squinting at Wikipedia and some prodding from Aspect Consulting, Saakashvili's PR firm, a majority view was reached that the Russians were, indeed, the villains. Condoleezza Rice smiled upon Tbilisi and European leaders and unearthed dusty admonishments they had not used since the Cold War.
The facetious tone is not intended to imply that there is, necessarily, anything awry with the widely held view that Russia is the aggressor. What's worrying is that there is this irrepressible desire to break all world affairs down into a battle between good guys and bad guys. Sure enough, my own first reaction upon hearing the initial bulletins from South Ossetia was an urgent longing to learn which team I supported. War is, however, significantly more complicated than football.
This binary approach to human relations gets its way into coverage of every area of public affairs, however trivial. Consider, if you can bear it, the sad story of Jade Goody. The recidivist reality show contestant first emerged as a mouthy presence on an early incarnation of Big Brother. Each series of that show proceeds on the basis that the public and its tabloid minders will quickly divide the contestants into heroes and villains.
Within a few days of the series' opening episode, Goody, survivor of a notably troubled upbringing, had revealed a stunning ignorance of basic geography and a bewildering disregard for personal volume control. The tabloids duly fingered the poor girl for a villain and began publishing caricatures of her as a snorting pig.
Some years later, despite leaving the Big Brother house to a chorus of catcalls, Goody had been reclassified as a national treasure in the vein of Coronation Street's Vera Duckworth. The late, supposedly heroic Princess Diana featured only marginally more frequently on magazine covers than Jade.
Then, in early 2007, while appearing on Celebrity Big Brother, she made a few racist remarks to one Shilpa Shetty, a modestly famous Indian actor, and found herself back in the villain compound again. This thing she called a career was, surely, over for good.
Yet here we are in 2008 and Goody, briefly a contestant on the Indian version of Big Brother, has cast her former tormentors into a quandary by receiving a diagnosis of cervical cancer. Could the tabloids really do one more tailspin and relaunch Goody as a hero? You bet. Expect "Brave Jade" to make increasingly frequent appearances in Your Soaraway Sun.
Mention of Big Brother is sure to prompt a suspicion in reactionary brains that this desire to break nations, politicians, pop stars and criminals into goodies and baddies can be blamed on contemporary popular culture. Having grown up on Star Wars, we, perhaps, expect the real world to conform to the simplistic ethical structures of George Lucas's universe.
Well, a glance at Genesis reveals few attempts to address the morally conflicted nature of the serpent or to allow God any fatal flaws (wrath seems to be a virtue in Bible World). Behave yourself and you stay in Eden. Eat of the forbidden fruit and, without even undergoing a public vote, you will be summarily ejected from the Big Father House. Shakespeare had his villains. Even the humanistic Tolstoy had his heroes.
The belief that white hats and black hats can be imposed on living, breathing individuals stems from the same anxiety that produces the varied delusions of organised religion, conspiracy theories, astrology, fascism, reality television, feng shui and town planning. Human beings have, understandably enough, always been somewhat terrified by the nagging awareness that world affairs refuse to proceed in an orderly fashion and that good people do bad things (and vice versa).
Reality would be so much easier to bear if we could take it to bits and reassemble it in the image of High Noon or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Such efforts are, of course, merely adventures in self-delusion. Mind you, that Vladimir Putin does look a little like the Child Catcher.
John Waters is on leave