This global conflict is approved for all audiences

This chatter about PBS agonizing over whether to self-censor a documentary series on the veritable family-friendly petting zoo that was World War II to avoid FCC indecency fines for airing explicit dialogue would be patently ridiculous–if in light of contemporary coverage of the war in Iraq it weren't so tragically ironic.

Iraqi civilian casualties, now that someone's actually started counting them, are clocking in at record highs of more than 100 each day. Recent events have compelled newspapers to debate the rhetorical distinctions between "escalating sectarian violence" and "civil war" on their opinion pages. More U.S. troops are being sent by the president into Baghdad to battle the rising unrest (anecdotally, a friend of mine in the Army recently returned for her third tour).

Yet attention spans wane and ribbon magnets fade, and now the fighting between Israel and Lebanon and whomever else is in on this latest firepower free-for-all is the Middle East crisis-du-jour. And as this is America, most of us probably still have more informed and passionate opinions on Mel Gibson's DUI and alleged accompanying anti-Semitic diatribe.

Indeed, with the situation in Iraq becoming for most Americans a routine recitation of knee-jerk opinions and a perfunctory trickle of casualty counts, amorphous and removed from everyday experience yet still something we know should be important, the story becomes interchangeable with other pet abstractions from gay marriages to distant wars.

The difference, as Frank Rich wrote Sunday in the New York Times, is that those others have coherent plots and recognizable casts:

The Iraqi people, whose collateral damage was so successfully hidden for so long by the Rumsfeld war plan, remain a sentimental abstraction to most Americans. Whether they are seen in agony after another Baghdad bombing or waving their inked fingers after an election or being used as props to frame Mrs. Bush during the State of the Union address, they have little more specificity than movie extras. Chalabi, Allawi, Jaafari, Maliki come and go, all graced with the same indistinguishable praise from the American president, all blurring into an endless loop of instability and crisis. We feel badly ... and change the channel.

It's no coincidence that the most astute reviews of the current political stage come courtesy of a former theatrical critic.

For when its producers continue to insist everything in Iraq is all raves and roses and has been for years now, the professional storytellers in the news media don't get much to work with, leaving any reporting on Iraq beyond the obligatory lip service to fall by the sidelines as pessimistic, damaging, inconvenient and unproductive.

As for sources, instead of even pretending to debate possible solutions, we've got the early-bird '08 front-runners, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, bantering about how they're practically bi-partisan drinking buddies, which is fabulous news if you're hoping they'll negotiate one of the presidential debates to be a beer pong battle or a keg-standing showdown at some heartland NASCAR bar, but rather frustrating for those hoping they'll actually elevate the discourse above smoke and mirrors and get something accomplished.

It seems few elites can be bothered to care about Iraq these days unless it's useful for painting a political opponent as unpatriotic or one's self or an ally as tough on terrorism, because it's gotten to the point where that's the only intelligible storyline Iraq fits into anymore.

Often, all the audience can do is fall back on that profound yet endearing human flaw of just wanting the words and pictures before them to make sense.

According to the most recent Harris Poll, the proportion of Americans who believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11 have actually increased to their highest shares to date, with a solid half of the population now reporting belief in the former.

And unfortunately for everyone involved, if the distinction between truth and fiction gets much more meaningless, residing in the reality-based community may not make much of a difference.