If the cameraman slept in, was it news?

Week after week, Soviet emigre columnist Lev Navrozov warns a sleeping West of the rising China threat. This week he deals with the reality that no one is paying attention.

The "China threat" is an abstraction as was the German threat in 1938. The mainstream media always prefers the concrete to the abstract.

Furthermore, Lev continues, "Western thinking of today is dominated by mainstream television, which does not think, but shows." This is another way of saying there is not a whole lot of thinking going on.

Naturally, small wars in small countries — like the current war of Israel and Lebanon (Syria, Iran?) — engulf Western mainstream television — such wars present an infinite wealth of telegenic scenes of carnage (or mass murder), as compared with the "China threat," which presents none.

The template for western media coverage of Mideast wars is so predictable as to become boring, if weeping mothers and screaming children can ever be boring.

But what is new about the current Mideast war is that missiles have stopped being an abstraction (merely sinister pieces on the geostrategic chessboard). They have been raining down on Israel by the hundreds, terrorizing Israeli (yes Israeli) civilians.

As columnist John Metzler points out today in "The Summer of Missiles",

Someday in the not too distant future we may face more accurate Iranian ballistic missiles targeting Israel, an operational North Korean Taepodong II rocket which shadows the West Coast USA, and equally another East Asian situation where communist China’s missiles threaten democratic Taiwan.

At some point, someone may have to tell the camerapersons to wake up and smell the coffee.