
Terrorism and the Media
When Yasir Arafat spoke at the United Nations some years ago with a gun in his belt, he was giving a performance in what has become the terrorist theater.

When Yasir Arafat spoke at the United Nations some years ago with a gun in his belt, he was giving a performance in what has become the terrorist theater.

Almost from the moment the first “contra” was issued his American, made combat boots, the Reagan Administration’s secret war against Nicaragua has been embroiled in a vociferous if somewhat bizarre public debate: Congressmen proclaim their outrage, editorialists confess their misgivings, while officials in Washington – who are running the war – blandly “decline to comment on intelligence matters.”

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Thus Walt Whitman, in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, expressed what has been the American poet’s struggle from the beginning-to wrest from the land a separate work of art.