“Happy is the country which requires no heroes,” Bertolt Brecht commented. Today, by that standard, the United States is a very unhappy country.

These days, the public’s genuine eagerness for heroes is difficult to gauge. If media output is any measure, the hero industry is engaged in massive overproduction. Whether the “products” are entertainers, star athletes or politicians, the PR efforts are unrelenting. Some brands catch on.

In mass culture, the media consumer is constantly encouraged to swoon for personalities who seem to turn glitz into a verb. From MTV to the mall multiplex, the role models are on the market, glorious in two dimensions.

Among politicians, heroism has become a holy grail…

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The nation’s top dog of war is frisky again. Donald Rumsfeld has returned to high visibility — after a couple of months in the media doghouse following revelations about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison — now openly romancing the journalistic pack with his inimitable style of tough love as he growls and romps across TV screens.

For three years, the elan of Rumsfeld’s media stardom has been welded to fear and killing. The civilian boss at the Pentagon made little impression on the nation until 9/11 — but soon afterwards, CNN was hailing him as “a virtual rock star.” While he briefed reporters about the bombing of Afghanistan in autumn 2001, there was a rush among reporters and pundits who conflated his ability to oversee air-war carnage with new status as some kind of hunk…

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We saw butterflies turning into bombers. And we weren’t dreaming. At the time when the Woodstock festival became an instant media legend in mid-August 1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of American war machinery.

The music and other creative energies that drew 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm that weekend rejected the Vietnam War and the assumptions fueling it. Thirty-five years later, the Jimi Hendrix rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner could still serve as an apt soundtrack for U.S. foreign policy, with bombs bursting in air over urban neighborhoods across much of Iraq.

A Woodstock reunion, scheduled for Aug. 20-22 in the town of Bethel, N.Y., comes while the gap between the nation’s commander in chief and huge numbers of its citizens is enormous.

Among those on the bill for the 35th anniversary event is the Country Joe Band. Its four musicians were original members of Country Joe and the Fish. No doubt the band’s upcoming Woodstock performance will include “Cakewalk to Baghdad,” a caustic tune based on boasts — from such right-wing media darlings as Richard Perle and Ken Adelman — that the U.S. military’s quest for victory in Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”

“Now moms and dads don’t worry ’bout / Your soldier boys and girls,” the song goes. “We’re just sending them cakewalkin’ / Around the world /When the coffins come home and the flag unfurls / Cheer for Bush, Cheney,Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle.”

Of course this song has echoes from the excruciatingly grim humor of the Country Joe and the Fish classic “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die,” which resonated not only with antiwar activists but also with many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam a third of a century ago…

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Also see Country Joe Band 2004.

A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, “who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages.” Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal force behind a 26-year civil action lawsuit that won a $12 million settlement.

Smith’s life changed forever on Sept. 13, 1971 — the day when New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered 500 state troopers to attack the upstate Attica Correctional Facility, killing 29 inmates and 10 guards held as hostages. The raid wounded at least 86 other people.

The media coverage was atrocious. Outright lies were front-page news, “informing” the public that prisoners had slit the throats of hostages when the troopers’ assault began. Corrective facts came later, with much smaller headlines, after autopsies revealed that no throats had been cut. Only when their claims were exposed as deceptions did top state officials admit the truth…

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No, hope does not gallop in like Paul Revere. And it certainly doesn’t arrive breathless from a corporate party convention.

Movements for peace and social justice can bring realistic hope — not with rhetoric but with the tough daily tedious uplifting work of political organizing.

Yes, we’d be better off with John Kerry in the White House instead of the Rove-Cheney-Bush regime. And the only way that’s going to happen is if enough people in swing states (www.swing04.com) vote for Kerry on November 2.

But I’m already getting tired of the bulk email messages claiming that Kerry is the embodiment of progressive dreams… I agree with the Greens For Impact (www.greensforimpact.com)…

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The same broadcast networks that eagerly devote endless prime-time hours to vacuous sitcoms and unreal “reality shows” couldn’t spare a total of more than a few hours last week for live coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

It’s true that complaining about scant news coverage from NBC, ABC and CBS is a bit like griping about small portions of meals from restaurants that serve lousy food. But still: the conventions are worth watching, if only to keep up with the rhetorical needles that party strategists are trying to thread these days.

Gathering for the convention in Boston, several network anchors participated in a high-profile panel at Harvard University. One of the more interesting moments came when the panelists responded to a question about the scant amount of air time the commercial broadcast networks were devoting to the convention…

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With two words, the governor of California has managed to highlight the confluence of anti-gay bias and misogyny. Open contempt for “girlie men” would have raised fewer eyebrows in the past. Reactions to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s put-down of Democrats in the state legislature — “if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men” — tell us a lot about how far we’ve come. The good news is the media outcry; the bad news is that the outcry hasn’t been stronger.

As a rough gauge of media progress on gender-related issues, consider two editorials that appeared — 88 years apart — in the same newspaper.

About 10 months before the United States entered World War I, the writer Upton Sinclair aimed some barbs at flag-waving militarism…

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Tom Ridge, the federal official in charge of defending the United States against terrorism, was on message when he told a July 14 news conference: “We don’t do politics at Homeland Security.” Such high-level claims of patriotic purity have been routine since 9/11. But in this election year, they’re more ludicrous than ever.

Days earlier, alongside a photo of Ridge, a headline on USA Today’s front page had declared: “Election Terror Threat Intensifies.” There was unintended irony in the headline.

While a real threat of terrorism exists in the United States, we should also acknowledge that an intensifying “election terror threat” is coming from the Bush administration. With scarcely 100 days to go until Election Day, the White House is desperate to wring every ounce of advantage from the American Flag, patriotism, apple pie — and the subject of “terrorism.”

Newsweek reported a week after July Fourth that Ridge’s agency “asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place.” The media response was mostly negative, and the Bush administration proceeded with its intended dual message of portraying a postponement as far-fetched — yet not quite unthinkable…

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Also, see the documentary Hijacking Catastrophe.

The morning after John Kerry announced that John Edwards will be his running mate, powerful newspapers fired warning shots across the bow of the Kerry-Edwards campaign.

“It is likely that Mr. Edwards will be dispatched to critical industrial states like Ohio to talk about jobs, as he did with such force in the primary,” the liberal New York Times editorialized. “We hope that he’ll refrain from falling into protectionist rhetoric in the process.”

Over at the Washington Post, an editorial that voiced less overall enthusiasm for Edwards underscored the same basic concern: “Mr. Edwards improved as a candidate during the primaries, but he also demonstrated, especially toward the end, an unfortunate tendency to cater to popular but irresponsible positions. Mr. Edwards was powerful, even moving, when he spoke about how the country was divided into two Americas, with one tax system, one school system, one health care system for the rich, and an inferior version for everyone else. Yet his lurch toward protectionism on trade was disappointing for a candidate who we thought knew better.”

On the Times op-ed page, two columnists had their say. Conservative William Safire pooh-poohed the new V.P. candidate, calling him “the happy class warrior, the smoothest divisive force in politics today.”

Meanwhile, liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof had a lot of favorable things to say about Edwards…

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