[Daniel Martin Varisco is professor of anthropology at Hofstra University.]

In biblical times when an individual mourned, it involved tearing up everyday clothes and putting on coarse sackcloth and ashes. This is what the patriarch Jacob did when told his young son Joseph had been killed. When Job lost his family he sat on a dung pile. Both acts were motivated by humility rather than thoughts of revenge. As fitting as Job’s location might be for some of the memorial scenes yesterday, several of those making the news headlines represented the Empire (it is hard not to think of the United States superpower as anything else but an empire) in what they thought were patriotic “red, white, and blue” cloth, but which even a little child could see were politically naked to the core. The New York Times reports a woman at the 9/11 site holding up a sign that read ““Today is ONLY about my sister and the other innocents killed nine years ago.” Would that were true.

The loss of life nine years ago in a terrorist act deserves reflection for many reasons. For those of us who live in the New York area, there but for the grace of timing go we. Those who died had pulled no triggers, pushed no buttons to drop bombs, made no political decisions to invade another country, burned no Qur’ans. They died because politically motivated extremists so hated the policies of the United States in the Middle East that they were willing to commit an atrocious suicidal act to make a symbolic statement. It did not matter that among those killed were Americans who strongly disagreed with America’s foreign policy or were in fact Muslims. Such is the ethical nothingness that hate sets as a trap, no matter which God is being called upon to condone an evil act.

Yes, there were people yesterday who paused to reflect, who prayed to the God of their particular belief. But there were also the hatemongers on parade. Among those with naked ambition was the infamous Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose speech near Ground Zero only tarnishes the memory of those who died. It is bad enough that he spews hate against fellow Dutch citizens who happen to be Muslim, but now he sets himself up as a citizen spokesman of the world. To Wilders the world has no color, only his white vs the other’s black. He did not even play the nuance game of only attacking “terrorist” Muslims.

For Wilders, America pre-9/11 was a peaceful Garden of Eden, like his “tolerant” Dutch homeland (somehow the Dutch control of Indonesia is written off as another result of imperial tolerance). “The West never ‘harmed’ Islam before it harmed us,” he claimed. Just about everything that is wrong with Islamophobic discourse oozes out of this terse Himmleresque screed. For the simple minded the world is bipolar: the unbounded “West” standing for a particular secular, white bastion of political power vs “Islam” which has no border. It is no longer Christianity vs. Islam, as propagandized during the crusades, nor West vs East, nor even North vs South nor Cold War Free World vs. Communism. Dear Geert, the harm is there in full color and has been a two-way blood-soaked street throughout the history of this geographic space known as the “West” and “Orient.” The Crusades were surely harmful, as was the expulsion of Jews and Moors from 15th century Spain. The Ottoman intrusion into eastern Europe to the gates of Vienna was just as harmful. As was the mentality that fueled wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe. As was the lust for power that drove the Mongols to utterly destroy the Abbasid caliphate in 1258 CE. The history of the world is all about harm, and there is plenty of blame to go around. As a historian I dredge up the murky past only to silence the nonsense that anyone today is pure. As a concerned citizen of the United States I love my country but not because I hate someone else’s nation or faith.

Wilders was not the only morally nude performer on display yesterday for the media to cover with fig-leaf reporting. In Alaska Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck took to the stage to a packed, paying crowd, to flaunt their own commercial and political ambitions at the expense of the memory of those who died. Palin noted that when she heard about the attack on September 11, 2001, she went to her church to pray. So why did she not do the same yesterday? Prayer in a church strikes me as a fitting memorial; using such an event for self promotion (as quite a few desperate politicians have done over the years) is hardly any different from exposing yourself in a Playboy centerfold. Beck only noted that at the time he was getting ready for work and suggested we are somehow “forgetting” so many years later. For a day that the media relished and covered all across the country, Mr. Beck seems strangely out of touch. Was the Mormon Tabernacle, where he might have offered a prayer, sold out?

Then there is Terry Jones, who continued to make news by not making news. Here is a fringe lunatic (yes, lunatic by any rational measure in the 21st century) who now has the wrath of Gainesville upon him, who had no permit to build a bonfire and who had his ten seconds of fame. How newsworthy is the fact that he so reluctantly decided not to burn Qur’ans, managing to put his calculated act on a par with the building of an Islamic community center several blocks away from the Ground Zero site.

Here’s news for Wilders, Palin, Beck and Jones: there is a Bible verse written just for you, way back in Genesis, although I suspect the irony will be lost on the lot of you: “They were both naked, and were not ashamed.”

[Shaun Jacob Halper is currently a PhD student of History at the University of California at Berkeley where he studies modern European History with a focus on subaltern histories including Jewish and gay history. Shaun graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia in '05 where he studied Art History and American and European History.]

Any professional historian worth his academic chair knows that no two historical periods are ever truly the same. No matter how widely the cliché is used, history does not repeat itself.

Many Americans, however, see things a bit differently.

Enter discussion of the Iranian nuclear threat and you will likely be transported back to 1938. The most significant player determining American foreign policy is not American, Israeli, or Iranian, but German--and he has been dead for sixty five years. The Iran debate is so haunted by the ghost of Hitler, one might think it possessed the bodies of Khameini and Ahmadenijad. Concessions to Teheran are framed as appeasement at Munich; the nuclear sites at Bushehr and Qom are the launching pads for the next Chelmno and Sobibor.

The use of Nazi analogies in the current debate over Iran is ubiquitous. Talk of Iran and Nazi Germany is not merely limited to fringe political elements or loud-mouth demagogues on conservative talk radio. It is repeated by cable-news talking heads; in the blogosphere; by politicians , academics and investigative journalists. Not merely the language of neoconservatives (R. James Woolsey, Tony Blankley, Ted Nugent are just the most recent examples), the weight of Nazi history burdens the hawkish Left too.

Of course there are quite a few American pundits and scholars who reject the analogy--and the Obama administration has generally relied on this camp. But in terms of shaping public opinion, these less-hawkish voices are drowned out. Like so much else that has characterized the Obama administration thus far, its policy initiatives and achievements, however beneficial to the health (quite literally) of the nation, have not translated into public understanding or public support for those policies. The White House and its allies on the Left have been remarkably bad at political instruction. While the White House pursues diplomatic solutions vis-à-vis Iran, the"1938-ers," to borrow Tony Blankley's term--those who build analogies between Iran and Nazi Germany--dominate the airwaves; the analogy is repeated as mantra, ultimately shaping public opinion.

Certainly the Nazis have been--and will always be--a powerful political symbol of evil for Americans and non-Americans. Politicians and pundits (both Left and Right) will continue to appropriate Nazi history and imagery, usually to the detriment of its true historical significance, no matter how ugly, tasteless, and inappropriate the comparison. This phenomenon does not begin or end with the debate over Iran currently raging in the US; but its use in the current debate is so widespread that it requires attention, especially if we want to understand American public discourse as the West moves ever closer to military engagement.

By contrast, Hitler seems to rarely make an appearance in German discussions of Iran. In Germany, where reference to a"Jewish gene" by a single public figure sparks public outrage, where Holocaust denial is a crime, and where teaching the Holocaust is mandatory--none of which is true for the US--discussion of Iran is not saturated in historical analogies to Nazism. Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule: Chancellor Angela Merkel has made the comparison as has the president of Germany's Central Council of Jews. And as Jeffrey Herf (who is quite warm to the analogy himself) recently pointed out, there are a number of German pundits and scholars who perceive the Iranian threat through the prism of fascism: Richard Herzinger of Die Welt, the political scientist Matthias Küntzel, Klaus Faber, and the leaders of the"Stop the Bomb" campaign for example. But these are minority voices, as these advocates themselves admit.

The difference between American and German public discourse is striking and available for any German with access to American media outlets to see. But why is this so? Why is the American debate over the Iranian nuclear threat so obsessed with Nazi History? And why is the analogy largely dismissed in Germany?

Certainly the most logical reason--and one I have heard from several Iran experts in researching this piece--is that the analogy is simply inaccurate. It is true that states are facing a very real and complicated problem that historians of the German 30s know well: should the international community give precedence to Iran's rhetoric or its actions and is the regime too ideological to be appeased? But beyond this parallel, the analogy falls apart. Suffice to point out that Iran today has none of the economic, military, or political might that characterized Nazi Germany by the late 1930s. Iran does not even rank among the top twenty economies in the world. The Pentagon's budget is more than double Iran's total gross domestic product; America's annual defense outlay is more than 100 times Iran's. In short, unlike Nazi Germany, Iran is not an equal player or a true threat (not even by a long shot). It could never win or even hope to win a true military encounter with the US (nuclear or not). That is not to say, however, that Iran is not a significant threat to the security of Israel and its Arab neighbors or that its apparent drive toward nuclear weapons should not be stopped or that it does not believe in the frighteningly anti-Semitic things it says or that it could not generate a tremendous amount of violence and pain in its drive to reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. Still: the analogy to Nazi Germany cannot withstand analysis. Simply put: Iran is its own beast.

But factual accuracy can only explain so much. If we follow this line of reasoning--that Germans, unlike Americans, largely reject the analogy to Hitler on factual grounds--then the"1938-ers" either do not know what they are talking about (possibly true for some, but not probable for most); or, more likely, the"1938-ers," are content to use the analogy's superficial parallels to scare their audience into awareness of just how evil the Iranian regime is, which the"1938-ers" sincerely believe. What then of their American audience who should know better?

Well, many readers are saying to themselves, Americans are not the brightest bears in the forest, now are they? This is, after all, the nation that re-elected George W. Bush in 2004. And to be sure, Susan Jacoby,Rink Shenkman, and many other American scholars have documented just how poor American historical and geopolitical knowledge is (it's abysmal). But again, lack of historical and geopolitical literacy is still not a sufficient explanation. Americans (of whatever political persuasion) are hardly the only nation on earth to believe in historically inaccurate narratives that buttress their political interests. Myths--the perception of Iran as a reincarnation of Nazi Germany is certainly a type of myth--buttress every political ideology and national identity and they rarely if ever correlate to truth. This is not a particularly American sin. The question is why this particular historical narrative finds so many ready ears in the US.

Israel, AIPAC (the American Israel lobby), and American Jews are other obvious, but incorrect targets. Most Israelis (though certainly not all), including its current leadership, perceive the Iranian regime as an existential threat. After all, the regime's international face, Ahmadenijad, called for Israel's extermination and has been a state-sponsor of terrorism (including Hamas and Hezballah) for years. Shall we trace the source of American Nazi rhetoric then to the influence of the pro-Zionist community?
Again, this theory only skims the surface of explanation. The source of American support for Israel does not, as many incorrectly believe, stem from the influence of the American Jewish community, much of which has a tortured and critical relationship to Zionism. American support for Israel is grounded in the tremendous power and influence of American Christian Evangelism, who regard the Jewish presence in the Holy Land as part of God's plan for the second coming of Jesus. True, many neoconservatives are Jewish and AIPAC is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, but neither keeps a stranglehold on American public opinion. Jews make up less than 2.5 percent of America's population; without the wide support of the broader Evangelical population, American foreign policy and its relationship to Israel would look very different.

Those who charge 1938-ers as propagandists for Israel, of course, are easy targets themselves. 1938-ers often condemn their (usually European) detractors with a litany of vices: anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, Holocaust and general war fatigue; and, in the case of Germany: the desire to unburden the weight of its historical guilt or compromise its extensive trade.

Again, while some of these motives are true for some individuals, they fall short: for one, it ignores widespread German outrage over Iranian Holocaust denial, not least the Weimar city council's cancelation of the Iranian delegation refusing to visit Buchenwald. Germany is still Israel's closest European ally, even if at times critical of Israeli policy, and Germany has been the most vocal of European states in its condemnation of Iranian rhetoric. And while Germany could certainly do more to use its economic leverage to pressure Iran, it is clear that American pressure has helped place Iran's nuclear aspirations at the forefront of relations between Germany and Iran. Germany has been a crucial player in supporting the latest round of sanctions and, despite the most recent numbers, German businesses are increasingly wary of expanding trade with the increasingly unpradictable regime.

No, contrary to its surface appearance, the American obsession with Hitler is not actually about the danger posed by Iran. The obsession with Hitler is about returning to the lost glory days of World War II--to what Americans call"the Greatest Generation," who, as 1938-ers (among many others) romanticize as proudly fighting against a clearly identifiable evil. It is about returning to a world where Americans could unify around a common purpose and a common enemy. Nazi rhetoric is about restoring honor and glory to America. When commentators compare Ahmadinejad or Khameini to Hitler, they are doing rather little to explain the true threats Iran poses. Instead, they emphasize how righteous any future conflict with Iran would be.

One should not neglect, of course, how different the American profit-driven media establishment is from its German counterpart. American media encourages and enables the spread of such analogies, regardless of factual inaccuracy, because as everyone knows, Nazi sells. But this narrative sells because Americans opine to return to an imagined world of national purpose and moral meaning. The desire to return to American glory sits easy with the Christian Evangelical drive toward hastening the end days, a narrative that situates a beleaguered Jewish people at the heart of the battle between good and evil. These narratives of lost glory and religious exuberance are alien to today's Germany, a nation that understands how nostalgia for war and a failure to emotionally demilitarize--well-known characteristics of the interwar period-- can lead to a path of destruction. Many Americans have yet to learn this lesson, even after ten years of the Bush White House.

Perhaps then a comparison to Nazi Germany is truly warranted after all, but for a very different reason.

[Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.]

The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness. 

Don’t think we haven’t been here before.  In the late 1990s, the American mass media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda.  In 2002, it slavishly parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way for a senseless war.  No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability the Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here pays much attention, it will already be too late.

Few Americans were shown -- by the media conglomerates of their choice -- the heartbreaking scenes of eight million Pakistanis displaced into tent cities, of the submerging of a string of mid-sized cities (each nearly the size of New Orleans), of vast areas of crops ruined, of infrastructure swept away, damaged, or devastated at an almost unimaginable level, of futures destroyed, and opportunistic Taliban bombings continuing.  The boiling disgust of the Pakistani public with the incompetence, insouciance, and cupidity of their corrupt ruling class is little appreciated.  

The likely tie-in of these floods (of a sort no one in Pakistan had ever experienced) with global warming was seldom mentioned.  Unlike, say, BBC Radio, corporate television did not tell the small stories -- of, for instance, the female sharecropper who typically has no rights to the now-flooded land on which she grew now-ruined crops thanks to a loan from an estate-owner, and who is now penniless, deeply in debt, and perhaps permanently excluded from the land.  That one of the biggest stories of the past decade could have been mostly blown off by television news and studiously ignored by the American public is a further demonstration that there is something profoundly wrong with corporate news-for-profit.  (The print press was better at covering with the crisis, as was publically-supported radio, including the BBC and National Public Radio.)

In his speech on the withdrawal of designated combat units from Iraq last week, Barack Obama put Pakistan front and center in American security doctrine, “But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al-Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”  Even if Pakistan were not a major non-NATO ally of the United States, it is the world’s sixth most populous country and the 44th largest economy, according to the World Bank.  The flooding witnessed in the Indus Valley is unprecedented in the country’s modern history and was caused by a combination of increasingly warm ocean water and a mysterious blockage of the jet stream, which drew warm, water-laden air north to Pakistan, over which it burst in sheets of raging liquid.  If the floods that followed prove a harbinger of things to come, then they are a milestone in our experience of global warming, a big story in its own right.

ews junkies who watch a lot of television broadcasts could not help but notice with puzzlement that as the cosmic catastrophe unfolded in Pakistan, it was nearly invisible on American networks.  I did a LexisNexis search for the terms “Pakistan” and “flood” in broadcast transcripts (covering mostly American networks) from July 31st to September 4th, and it returned only about 1,100 hits.  A search for the name of troubled actress Lindsay Lohan returned 653 search results in the same period and one for “Iraq,” more than 3,000 hits (the most the search engine will count).  A search for “mosque" and"New York” yielded 1,300 hits.  Put another way, the American media, whipped into an artificial frenzy by anti-Muslim bigots like New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and GOP hatemonger Newt Gingrich, were far more interested in the possible construction of a Muslim-owned interfaith community center two long blocks from the old World Trade Center site than in the sight of millions of hapless Pakistani flood victims.  

Of course, some television correspondents did good work trying to cover the calamity, including CNN’s Reza Sayah and Sanjay Gupta, but they generally got limited air time and poor time slots. (Gupta’s special report on the Pakistan floods aired the evening of September 5th, the Sunday before Labor Day, not exactly a time when most viewers might be expected to watch hard news.)  As for the global warming angle, it was not completely ignored.  On August 13th, reporter Dan Harris interviewed NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show at 7:45 am.  The subject was whether global warming could be the likely cause for the Pakistan floods and other extreme weather events of the summer, with Schmidt pointing out that such weather-driven cataclysms are going to become more common later in the twenty-first century.   Becky Anderson at CNN did a similar segment at 4 pm on August 16th.  My own search of news transcripts suggests that that was about it for commercial television.

The “Worst Disaster” TV Didn’t Cover

It’s worth reviewing the events that most Americans hardly know happened:

The deluge began on July 31st, when heavier than usual monsoon rains caused mudslides in the northwest of Pakistan. Within two days, the rapidly rising waters had already killed 800 people. On August 2nd, the United Nations announced that about a million people had been driven from their homes. Among the affected areas was the Swat Valley, already suffering from large numbers of refugees and significant damage from an army offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the spring-summer of 2009. In the district of Dera Ismail Khan alone, hundreds of villages were destroyed by the floods, forcing shelterless villagers to sleep on nearby raised highways.

The suddenly homeless waited in vain for the government to begin to deliver aid, as public criticism of President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani surged. President Zardari’s opulent trip to France and Britain (during which he visited his chateau in Normandy) at this moment of national crisis was pilloried. On August 8th in Birmingham, England, a furious Pakistani-British man threw both his shoes at him, repeating a famously humiliating incident in which an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush. Fearing the response in Pakistan, the president’s Pakistan People’s Party attempted to censor the video of the incident, and media offices in that country were closed down or sometimes violently attacked if they insisted on covering it. Few or no American broadcast outlets appear to have so much as mentioned the incident, though it pointed to the increasing dissatisfaction of Pakistanis with their elected government. (The army has gotten better marks for its efficient aid work, raising fears that some ambitious officers could try to parlay a newfound popularity into yet another in the country’s history of military coups.)

By August 5th, the floods had taken an estimated 1,600 lives, though some aid officials complained (and would continue to do so) that the death toll was far larger than reported. Unlike the Haitian earthquake or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this still building and far more expansive disaster was initially greeted by the world community with a yawn. The following day, the government evacuated another half-million people as the waters headed toward southern Punjab. At that point, some 12 million Pakistanis had been adversely affected in some way. On August 7th, as the waters advanced on the southernmost province, Sindh, through some of the country’s richest farmlands just before harvest time, another million people were evacuated. Prime Minister Gilani finally paid his first visit to some of the flood-stricken regions.

By August 9th, nearly 14 million people had been affected by the deluge, the likes of which had never been experienced in the region in modern history, and at least 20% of the country was under water. At that point, in terms of its human impact, the catastrophe had already outstripped both the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. On August 10th, the United Nations announced that six million Pakistanis needed immediate humanitarian aid just to stay alive.

On August 14th, another half-million people were evacuated from the Sindhi city of Jacobabad. By now, conspiracy theories were swirling inside Pakistan about landlords who had deliberately cut levees to force the waters away from their estates and into peasant villages, or about the possibility that the U.S. military had diverted the waters from its base at Jacobabad. It was announced that 18 million Pakistanis had now been adversely affected by the floods, having been displaced, cut off from help by the waters, or having lost crops, farms, and other property. The next day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, surveying the damage, pronounced it was “the worst disaster” he had ever seen.

The following week a second crest of river water hit Sindh Province. On August 30th, it submerged the city of Sujawal (population 250,000). The next day, however, there were a mere 16 mentions of Pakistan on all American television news broadcasts, mostly on CNN. On Labor Day weekend, another major dam began to fail in Sindh and, by September 6th, several hundred thousand more people had to flee from Dadu district, with all but four districts in that rich agricultural province having seen at least some flooding.

Today, almost six million Pakistanis are still homeless, and many have not so much as received tents for shelter. In large swaths of the country, roads, bridges, crops, power plants -- everything that matters to the economy -- were inundated and damaged or simply swept away. Even if the money proves to be available for repairs (and that remains an open question), it will take years to rebuild what was lost and, for many among those millions, the future will mean nothing but immiseration, illness, and death.

Why the Floods Weren’t News

In the United States, the contrast with the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Haitian earthquake in January and the consequent outpouring of public donations was palpable. Not only has the United Nations’ plea for $460 million in aid to cover the first three months of flood response still not been met, but in the past week donations seem to have dried up. The U.S. government pledged $200 million (some diverted from an already planned aid program for Pakistan) and provided helicopter gunships to rescue cut-off refugees or ferry aid to them.

What of American civil society? No rock concerts were organized to help Pakistani children sleeping on highways or in open fields infested with vermin. No sports events offered receipts to aid victims at risk from cholera and other diseases. It was as if the great Pakistani deluge were happening in another dimension, beyond the ken of Americans.

A number of explanations have been offered for the lack of empathy, or even interest, not to speak of a visible American unwillingness to help millions of Pakistanis. As a start, there were perfectly reasonable fears, even among Pakistani-Americans, that such aid money might simply be pocketed by corrupt government officials. But was the Haitian government really so much more transparent and less corrupt than the Pakistani one?

It has also been suggested that Americans suffer from donor fatigue, given the string of world disasters in recent years and the bad domestic economy. On August 16th, for instance, Glenn Beck fulminated: “We can't keep spending. We are broke! Game over… no one is going to ride in to save you… You see the scene in Pakistan? People were waiting in line for aids [sic] from floods. And they were complaining, how come the aid is not here? Look, when America is gone, who's going to save the people in Pakistan? See, we got to change this one, because we're the ones that always ride in to save people.”

Still, the submerging of a fifth of a country the size of Pakistan is -- or at least should be -- a dramatic global event and even small sums, if aggregated, would matter. (A dollar and a half from each American would have met the U.N. appeal.) Some have suggested that the Islamophobia visible in the debate about the Park 51 Muslim-owned community center in lower Manhattan left Americans far less willing to donate to Muslim disaster victims.

And what of those national security arguments that nuclear-armed Pakistan is crucial not just to the American war in Afghanistan, but to the American way of life? Ironically, the collapse of the neoconservative narrative about what it takes to make the planet’s “sole superpower” secure appears to have fallen on President Obama’s head. One of the few themes he adopted wholeheartedly from the Bush administration has been the idea that a poor Asian country of 170 million halfway around the world, facing a challenge from a few thousand rural fundamentalists, is the key to the security of the United States.

If the Pakistani floods reveal one thing, it’s that Americans now look on such explanations through increasingly jaundiced eyes. At the moment, no matter whether it’s the Afghan War or those millions of desperate peasants and city dwellers in Pakistan, the public has largely decided to ignore the AfPak theater of operations. It’s not so surprising. Having seen the collapse of our financial system at the hands of corrupt financiers produce mass unemployment and mass mortgage foreclosures, they have evidently decided, as even Glenn Beck admits, it’s “game over” for imperial adventures abroad.

Another explanation may also bear some weight here, though you won’t normally hear much about it. Was the decision of the corporate media not to cover the Pakistan disaster intensively a major factor in the public apathy that followed, especially since so many Americans get their news from television?

The lack of coverage needs to be explained, since corporate media usually love apolitical, weather-induced disasters. But covering a flood in a distant Asian country is, for television, expensive and logistically challenging, which in these tough economic times may have influenced programming decisions. Obviously, there is as well a tendency in capitalist news to cover what will attract advertising dollars. Add to this the fact that, unlike the Iraq “withdrawal” story or the “mosque at Ground Zero” controversy, the disaster in Pakistan was not a political football between the GOP and the Democratic Party. What if, in fact, Americans missed this calamity mostly because a bad news story set in a little-known South Asian country filled with Muslim peasants is not exactly “Desperate Housewives” and couldn’t hope to sell tampons, deodorant, or Cialis, or because it did not play into domestic partisan politics?

The great Pakistani deluge did not exist, it seems, because it was not on television, would not have delivered audiences to products, and was not all about us. As we saw on September 11, 2001, and again in March 2003, however, the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.