The Emotional Well Is Dry

Daniel Henniger looks at the reason behind the "Numbing Down of America" at OpinionJournal (free for all):

There is no more powerful reason for this downward pressure on public sensibilities than the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is the most persistently violent event of our time. More precisely, the suicide bombers are. The suicide bomber is the most emotionally corrosive phenomenon since World War II.

The bombings around Baghdad began about April 2003. At first the bombings were mainly directed at Iraqi military and police installations. Then in August, with the Canal Hotel bombing, they killed 22, including the popular U.N. human rights commissioner, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Ten days later, on Aug. 29, the suicide bombers arrived in the neighborhoods of the Shia to murder noncombatants, killing perhaps 125 people. It was just the beginning.

Attacks of this design against defenseless civilians are hardly new. Israelis live with them. Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers have committed similar barbarities for more than 30 years. But if you have followed the war in Iraq, you have had a remarkable encounter with the blood-drenched world of suicide bombers. The way the American people have absorbed these bombings in faraway Iraq is unique in the annals of war and in journalism.

A very great number of the suicide bombings--there have been more than 700 since 2003, occurring weekly and often several times a week--have been reported in detail to the American people. The stories routinely include body counts and vivid details and color photography of shattered bodies and street scenes. These suicide bombings are often the first news story one sees on such Web sites as Yahoo and MSN, and they have been displayed prominently in newspaper coverage. If one were at all interested in the U.S. role in Iraq, this has been one's primary experience of the war for three years.

As an extension of its determination to be even-handed, contemporary journalism has attempted to impart not only the politics of war but also its human cost. It will be interesting, years hence, when histories of this war's journalism are written, as with Vietnam, to discover the basis of the news judgment that placed the suicide bombers' work at the top of the news pyramid. Almost any normal reader who consumed these accounts as often as the suicide bombers staged them would eventually pull back emotionally from the bombings, and from the war itself.

This has had the expectable result of producing what one might call the numbing down of America. Setting aside support for or opposition to the war, the muting of the emotional pathways of the American people is a neutral event, a normal defense against the killings of the suicide bombers, or the crude murders of Cho Seung-Hui.