CNN post-war malaise - 5 April 1991

Here's an interesting medical puzzle, mystery. The telephone rang in a house in which a young man lives with his widowed mother. The young man answered it and all he said was: "Good of you to call. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Yes, she's fine now." Had his mother been ill? Well, yes, in a way. In a way that's quite new to the experience of most of us. A new disease, an old disease with a new name which in a country where fashion is king, happens more often than you'd guess.

Quite simply, the mother, late middle-age, had finally achieved after a six week attack what one doctor calls "CNN withdrawal". CNN stands for Cable News Network. And is the station in Atlanta, Georgia which has been conspicuous in newsrooms and broadcasting offices for 9 or 10 years. It slid into the general consciousness quite modestly in 1980. But stormed into our daily viewing during the invasion of Panama. It was everybody's pipeline, day and night, during the first upheavals in Eastern Europe.

What it was, is, is the world's first 24 hour television news programme. By the time President Bush reinforced the first wave of troops to go into Saudi Arabia, by November at the latest, a survey, not flattering to the commercial networks, or indeed the networks of any nation, a survey showed that for most viewers with access to cable television, most viewers around the world – which means by now something like 110/120 countries – which have CNN on tap, most of them tuned into CNN for the news and stayed with it. And this we discovered was true, not only for the peoples but for the national leaders involved in the crisis and the war.

Once the United States Secretary of Defence confessed to news reporters one day that, "all I know is what I saw on CNN," it was no shame for the president and Mrs Thatcher and Monsieur Mitterrand, and the Iraqi ambassador here, not to mention Saddam Hussein himself, to admit the same. CNN had string correspondence with cameras everywhere. And nobody else, certainly not the politicians, did.

The result, which I'm sure many listeners in many countries can guess at was that for the first time in history, a war was converted for the on-looking world into a theatrical performance to which we had a permanent front seat. When I said "converted", I don't wish to imply anything crafty or dishonest on the part of the television crews, or the bosses who ordered their assignments. It was inevitable once you had television crews out with the bombing missions and also out in the streets and the houses of the people about to be bombed, and also in all the capitals with a direct interest in the war, it was inevitable that the war would become what the resources of television showed it to be.

I've always been suspicious of that clever, striking maxim of the late Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message." But for the first time, to me, it summed up a vivid, new truth. The war was, for everybody but the troops ceaselessly engaged, what television showed it to be. And it was exciting. Exhilarating. I feel a little shaky saying that now when we've had time to see the ruins and the victims wandering in them, and to sense what the United Nations' report called "the apocalyptic destruction of Iraq." Caused by the allies' aerial overture, what was called in polite military circles at the time "the softening-up" process.

Well, the widow. The widow whose son declared her now to be fine had finally broken her zombie's habit of chaining herself to the easy chair in front of the tube. I don't know the son and if I did, I wouldn't, I hope, be boorish enough to warn him that his mother now stands in danger of a following complaint, which is sufficiently widespread to have earned itself a name in the psychiatrists' manual. If it hasn't, it will soon be there. I heard a psychiatrist talking quite chirpily about it the other evening as he would of an illness that is very familiar, not life-threatening, bothersome. One we can handle. It's called PWM. Post War Malaise. And what do you suppose that is?

It's what happens, has happened, to some people who probably didn't realise how riveted they were to the box, until General Schwarzkopf's final triumphant news conference, the epilogue that brought the curtain down. Then you had to get up, forget the performance and get back to the realities of your own life. Well this psychiatrist said quite a lot of people couldn't do it. Couldn't slough off their enchantment with the war. One woman patient said it bluntly: "I can hardly bear to go out and shop or settle down to work. Life is so dull after Desert Storm!" The doctor pronounced those words with a smack of the lips, Desert Storm. The best movie in town for years.

I appreciate it's callous to talk like this after we've seen the vast shattering of the land of Iraq, which if we'd seen it in sequence with the bomber take-offs and the amusement arcade entertainment of patriots zinging into a black sky to pinpoint the scuds, we would have been ashamed and desolated. So, there will be those who condemn the victims of PWM, Post War Malaise, as lazy, unfeeling, couch potatoes. But there are more of them than you might think. And since I spent most of my days certainly riveted to the screen, I felt enough of the exhilaration before the guilt that has led now, in some people, to a neurotic let-down.

The doctor did say that one cure lay in a more varied routine than your normal life. Breaking up your leisure by catching up with an old friend, and why not take up a new game? The passing thought that some benighted patient might have to be paying for this prescription reminded me forcibly of Mrs. Crupp's advice to David Copperfield, when he was down, advice, by the way, given free:

"You are a young gentleman, Mr Copperfull, and my adwice to you is to cheer up... and know your own walue... If you was to take up skittles, now, which is healthy...you might find it divert your mind."

However, the psychiatrist did reveal a glimmer of humour. He thought that for many patients April 15th could serve as "shock treatment". 15th April is the last day for filing your income tax.

For the general population, the post war month has brought mostly good news, at any rate, when it's the news that can be attributed to the victory. And the stimulus is pride. And however embarrassing it may be to see it in its more jingoistic expressions, the forests of waving flags, the grins and crocodile tears of bawling politicians who weren't there, there's no getting away from the hard fact that the lift in the nation's morale seems to have weakened the recession. Of course, in parts of the country that depended for their livelihood on the army, navy, air force, the prospect of men coming home has been a violent tonic.

There's a small town in Georgia that has for two generations at least, subsisted on the nearby army camp. All but a skeleton maintenance staff were shipped off to the Gulf in August and the result was devastating. Again, seen on television, the town appeared to have been abandoned. Stores, bars, petrol stations closed. To let, to rent, for sale signs posted on a jewellery shop window, a liquor store, furniture store. The town was going into bankruptcy. It is now as jubilant as a gold rush city after the first strike. Of course, that's an extreme example, though I'm pretty sure Saddam Hussein video taped these first scenes of a bankrupt town. They would have made, to the Iraqis, appetising pictures.

The most noticeable fillip to the economy has come from the modern barometer of economic health. Forty years ago it was railroad freight loadings reported and anxiously scanned every month by bankers and shop keepers. After the Second War, it was the news from Detroit, the state of the automobile industry, which at the present, incidentally, is in shock and despair. These days, since the early 80s I'm told, the barometer is what's called "housing starts". It used to be known as "home building".

Housing construction has zoomed up from the bottomless pit of a year ago. To anyone who travels much or lives close by an airport, the most visible, almost ostentatious improvement is in the airline business. I had to fly quite a bit between the autumn and Christmas, and then, in January, and the big airports, Dallas, one of the two or three largest in the world, Dallas after January 15th was a huge catacomb.

Now without claiming any sort of valour, as I am a physical coward of mouse-like proportions, I must say I could never understand the panic which overtook more than, well, about half of the normal flying public. I had friends, intelligent, educated, not hypochondriacs, who wouldn't fly anywhere after 15th January, when the aerial war began. Why?

Terror of terrorism. I quoted a mathematical friend. The chances of getting in a plane, a restaurant, a town, that would be terrorised, if you flew madly, every day and night for six months in all directions, were about one in 10 million. The chances of being killed walking across Piccadilly or Madison Avenue are disturbingly high at the best of times.

No matter. I must say it was wonderful to be an airline passenger while the terror lasted. The care and tending of the few passengers going through or flying on was remarkable. It recalled to me the universal courtesy, the solicitude, the bowing and thanking of shop assistants throughout the Great Depression here. And the accompanying commercial slogan, "The customer is always right".

One idiom, I'm afraid, that's vanished without trace.

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