As we learn more and more details of the extension and knowledge of the cover-up in the Pat Tillman story, an important subtext is not only emerging, but is failing to be commented on by most covering the story.
The subtext of how the Bush Cult requires and supports what I like to call Movie News as part of the emotional trigger codes that feed the hysteria and drive the machine of cult-driven worship.
Movie News can't be looked at on a case by case basis. They must be seen in their entirety. Think of them as chapters in a book that is still being written. When the real world intrudes, as it so often does, the Bush Cult followers need to be read another chapter of reassurance before drifting back to sleep.
Yet so few seem to want to mention the motive behind the Pat Tillman fiction. A motive that had nothing to do with Pat Tillman and everything to do with a Fox News and Drudge driven hype machine that relies on these sorts of prop-driven fictions as the very bread and butter that sustains their survival.
By now we all know the story.
Pat Tillman gave up a multimillion dollar football contract with the Arizona Cardinals after 9/11 because he felt a higher calling to serve his country. He did so quietly, hoping to slip out of training camp and enlist, but the press made a big deal of it against his wishes. Tillman served in the Army Rangers and was killed in Afghanistan a year or so later.
Immediately afterwards, a story emerged of his heroism on the battlefield. As Frank Rich explained it in 2005:
Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he "personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun."
We all know Pat Tillman is a hero. That is without doubt. Unassailable. He was an intelligent, dedicated iconoclast. He disagreed with the Iraq War but served so that a poor kid wouldn't have to serve in his place.
Now it's true that many bloggers have made this obvious connection between propaganda and myth in the Bush Cult movement. But news media continues to refer to this story in isolation.
Much of the criticisms led by such brilliant mavericks as Glenn Greenwald, is the corporate media's refusal to state obvious conclusions if those conclusions might make them look, God forbid, "partisan."
This is exactly the case with the Pat Tillman story. Rather than connect the Bush administration attempt to rewrite overt facts and truths surrounding Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, Abu Ghraib, the insurgency and pretty much every Hollywood-inspired fictional story line to fit their narrative, we hear about each story only on a case by case reporting basis.
This lack of context exists because to place any of these stories into their context leads to one inescapable conclusion:
The Bush Administration is running a fictional war.
I know, you've heard this said before. But lets think about what this really means. What is a "fictional war"? It is a war that exists as a storyline construct in the minds of those "watching" it happen. It is literally a movie, existing on multiple screens and over many years, playing in the minds of those cultists participating in this thought experiment.
Oh sure, there's a real war happening, too. But that's not the war republicans and frauds like Joe Lieberman are participating in.
Although I must give credit to MikeP on John Edwards's blog, one of the few directly associated with a major political candidate to state the obvious underlying root causes of the Tillman myth:
I entered this in my blog today..but wanted to share this with the community...
Today was another sad day. The hypocrisy and the lies once again exposed how the Bush Administration has misled us for so long. From what I was able to gather, Pat Tillman was killed by Friendly Fire and at least Four Generals knew about it. When I heard Pat Tillman's Mother earlier, I wondered how far this cover-up went. I did not doubt for a minute that the Administration was anxious to move the spotlight away from Abu Gharib. It needed a Hero...just like it built up Jessica Lynch.
You got it MikeP
But last night, as I watched Bill Maher's "Real Time," the panel including the brilliant D.L. Hughley, failed to make the connection. So did Bill Maher. And whatever right wing propagandist talk radio loon was on last night (I forget his name), he went through great pains to make it, once again, about a few generals acting on their own.
And this is how the Bush Cult is able to compartmentalize its own operation. By studying the detail they can wilfully ignore how the entire operation exists precisely to lie to them about people like Pat Tillman.
Instead they describe the lie as simply those of a few generals. The reason for the lie? To make Pat Tillman look like a hero.
And to a reasonable person, that would seem motivation enough for a few generals to rewrite a death log and make Tillman look "more heroic" even if in retrospect there was nothing unheroic about the truth in the first place.
But that's not what the Pat Tillman lie was about.
A few generals in this one case?
Uh, no.
How about an entire movement based on creating a fictional narrative?
And this is the key point in understanding the Bush Cult mindset. It is not that Bush Cultists are motivated by the desire to simply make Pat Tillman, or Jessica Lynch or any of the dozens of other stories they doctor, "look better."
It is that they simply can't tell the difference between fact and screenplay.
The Republican Movement of the past thirty years has not been driven by ideology, much as it might seem that way. It's been driven by Hollywood Myth. This also explains that frothing obsession with the actual real world Hollywood that produced the very myths that define their reality. They hate Hollywood with such rabid and intense anger because Hollywood created them.
They have turned on their maker because to acknowledge the "maker" is to acknowledge that the myth was artificially created on sound stages and back-lots. With swelling orchestral music and Jimmy Stewart. With Auntie May cooking apple pie.
This is the myth the Republican Cult lives within. A myth built out of 1950s movies and T.V. that literally produced Ronald Reagan and continues to drive the entire mythos of their self-contained reality.
In other words, they didn't "lie" about Pat Tillman at all. They simply hired a screenwriter to rewrite the story.
Because the Republican Cult has fully demoored from critical thinking, objectivity, rational thought and cause and effect. They are a political party sitting in a darkened theater waiting for the next Reagan movie to play, complete with sweeping American inspired orchestral music and heroic shots of American flags.
Fox News, Drudge and the talk radio empire serve as the "movie critics" of this world. Telling them which movies to see and which not to see. Telling them who the movie stars they should love are, and who they should hate are.
Everything works on the hero/villian binary. The "white hat" vs. "black hat" Western. The requisite Act-2 plot twist to be overcome in the Act-3 twist(Bush's early personal problems to finding Jesus, etc.)
So when they rewrite Pat Tillman's life or concoct a Jessica Lynch rescue narrative that finds a lithe little blonde girl fighting with a machine gun for the country she loves, we must understand that in their minds they aren't even lying at all.
Is a movie "lying"?
Of course not.
They are simply active players in a collective myth making grand filmic experiment. The Murdoch media machines are there, but not only are the grand myths being written in real-time, each and every participant in the Bush Cult not only gets to watch the movie, but gets to participate!
It's like getting to act as an extra with Gary Cooper. Getting to participate, even obliquely, with Cary Grant.
This is why they cheered with frothing fervor when a high school drop-out, steroid abusing, sexually promiscuous body builder walked out during their convention in 2004. Not because of anything Arnold Schwarzenegger ever did in office. But because their mythic American cinematic experience had suddenly received a mid-story jolt with an unexpected movie star entrance.
It is why they lust for Fred Thompson for president, without a clue why they love him so much.
Because for thirty years the Republican Movie hasn't been about facts, issues or politics. It has been about casting, myth and narrative entertainment.
They hate the actual Hollywood because they have become their own studio, producing and participating in an epic movie bigger than any David Lean or Stanley Kubrick production.
This is their grand movie. They are, each and every one of them, editors, writers, producers and actors within the epic cinema landscape. Actual stars like Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson, help them to reposition their own supporting roles.
Facts?
The word itself is as meaningless as an audience member asking how Keanu Reeves can dodge a bullet in the Matrix. Once you buy into the narrative, once you are a participant in that narrative, the word "facts" is as meaningless as what really happened to Pat Tillman.
What happened to Pat Tillman was he got a rewrite. And to the Bush Cultists, that's the greatest honor they can bestow on a secondary cast member.