There is a deepening triviality in the conduct of American politics, which should be a matter of great concern to the citizens of the United States. In this process, form trumps substance and minor side issues are often the subject of long and tedious debate while fundamental matters get shunted to the sidelines. It is a kind of politics that finds congruence and context in this growing American notion of 'infotainment' and well-suited to the predilections of the purveyors of mental sloth, the media pundits.

This commitment to the contrived tedium has had great exposition for most of this week in the grand debate over statements made by John Kerry, the U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate, to college students about the war in Iraq. In a throwaway line during an address in California, Mr. Kerry told the young people if they worked hard, studied and did their homework they would get ahead. "If you don't you get stuck in Iraq," he added.

Mr. Kerry's opponents in the Republican Party, including President Bush, jumped all over the remark, saying that he had insulted American soldiers fighting in Iraq, suggesting that he had somehow so undermined morale that the Iraqi insurgency would now sweep to victory against the U.S. military. So, if the war is lost it is Mr. Kerry's fault. In the firestorm, some of the Mr. Kerry's colleagues in the Democratic Party distanced themselves, to the point that the senator has withdrawn himself from the campaign and apologised for what he says was a botched joke.

Potential Consequence

That Mr. Kerry's remark should be elevated to such high level of importance and potential consequence and command such attention would boggle the minds of most people outside of the United States. For, it is hardly offensive and is easily discerned as more of a statement of the conduct of the war in Iraq than of the quality of the people doing the brunt of the fighting in that Middle Eastern country. And the fact is they are not wholly untrue. The truth is, it is not mostly college and university-educated people who join the U.S. army or Marines to do the grunt jobs. These are mostly people of lower educational attainment, who, in some cases, hope to go onto to higher education on military entitlements.

The issue here is not so much about any insult or hurt he may have caused to the men and women in uniform, but the fact that Mr. Kerry reminded young people what may be in their future: of America being bogged down and bleeding in an unpopular and unwinnable war, with no idea of how to extricate itself. This ought to be the issue of discussion or debate in the United States ahead of next Tuesday's mid-term Congressional election, for the country to search for a consensus on this divisive issue. Instead, there is the proverbial shooting of the messenger. But worse, is the performance of the American media, which, rather then seriously attempting to find the logic of the debate, find it easier to be passive holders of the target before Mr. Kerry's chest. They fail, or are afraid, to highlight in all the ink and talk spewed in analysing Mr. Kerry's remark, the trivia for what it is. And that is a shame.

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