Guest Blog: The Jessica Lynch Story Part III

by 'Gabriel Gonzalez' at June 23, 2003 2:58 PM

JK Note: Gabriel Gonzalez is a resident of Paris, France. He's got another Guest Blog spot coming, thanks to some very smart comments he left in our Comments sections. There are important parts of this article's thesis that I don't agree with, but it's worth running as a discussion-generator and the last paragraph alone justifies its inclusion.

The Jessica Lynch Story Part III – Empire Strikes Back
Gabriel Gonzalez

Sequels are rarely as good as the original movie, and sequels to sequels are of course even worse. After the often obscure director has his or her first box office hit, too many people get involved in the follow-up and what was at first refreshing and innovative tends to get repackaged for mass marketing...

Proof of this as applied to the media is the endless series of remakes of the Jessica Lynch story, starting with the Guardian's Columbinesque version of "facts" printed in mid-May. More recently, we have seen last week's fairly dry and wishy-washy Chicago Tribune article The Truth About Pvt. Lynch following closely on the heels of the Washington Post's own rehashing last Tuesday. And then there is last Friday's opinion piece by Nicholas D. Christophe, "Saving Private Ryan", in which he purports to stand up for Private Lynch and speak out against her alleged exploitation by the government:

"[I]t was unnecessary for officials to try to turn her into a Hollywood caricature. As a citizen, I deeply resent my government trying to spin me like a Ping-Pong ball."
Christophe states further:
"My guess is that 'Saving Private Lynch' was a complex tale vastly oversimplified by officials, partly because of genuine ambiguities and partly because they wanted a good story to build political support for the war — a repetition of the exaggerations over W.M.D. We weren't quite lied to, but facts were subordinated to politics, and truth was treated as an endlessly stretchable fabric."
The hypocrisy of Christophe's using Lynch as his own "Ping-Pong ball" to get in a few swipes at the Bush administration on the "exaggerations over W.M.D." is not only glaring, it borders on the obscene. Christophe is not "saving Jessica Lynch", she was saving him, together with hundreds of thousands of other U.S. troops who were fighting for all of us as well.

Frankly, none of the sequels to "Jessica Lynch I" have been nearly as compelling as the original, and what box office success they have had owes more to careful audience targeting than truly inspired reporting or analysis in the ratings war surrounding the "Bush-lied-to-us" theme.

What all of this hardcore truth-seeking lacks when compared to the original is that it overlooks an important fact about "heroes" like Jessica Lynch and her rescuers: They are supposed to have mythological status. They are symbols. Jessica Lynch is our Athena or Joan of Arc, and that symbolism is more important than the grubby little details of camera angles or the exact wording of a CentCom briefing. Even better, Private Lynch is the perfect modern heroine: She is a woman. She represents our strength and courage, as well as our vulnerability. She is our sister, our daughter, and with a couple more years, she could be a mother. She also represents our need for encouragement, a timely morale booster when it looked like the chips were down. Her rescue is our salvation. It was not the administration who needed to elevate her to semi-saintly status, we ourselves did.

I much preferred the original version, guns ablazing and all, and think it comes much closer to any notion of "truth" that has any real meaning. I hope it comes out on DVD, and I'll gladly skip the sequels.

Jessica Lynch is not some missing bit of WMD. We did not fight for Private Lynch. She fought for us.

JK UPDATE: Other good links/articles on the Lynch story can be found via Power Line and Omnibus Bill (who just shreds Tom Spencer at History New Net).

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