Yesterday’s New York Times featured four full pages of American military Afghan war casualties under the headline, The Roster of the Dead:
Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan on Oct.7, 2011, more than 2000 American service members have been killed. On this and the following pages are the names, hometowns and photographs of the second thousand of these soldiers.
The pages:
And that’s how a great newspaper does it, people.
Campaign Outsider 
Every Saturday night, in season, we watch Coach’s Corner on Hockey Night in Canada, on CBC, at the end of which Don Cherry posts pictures and tells the stories of Canadian soldiers killed in action. And every Saturday night we’re struck by the fact no one has the guts and/or the decency to do the same in the US.
It’s a weekly reminder of the very fuzzy definition of freedom we live with here. We support our troops but are not free to acknowledge or memorialize their sacrifices because someone somewhere is afraid it might cause a drop in support for what the troops are doing.
In other words, we’re free to support our troops, but not to think about it.
Meanwhile, we learn that Ronald Reagan spent his Hollywood years engaging in casual political conversations with his peers, then reporting the ones who disagreed with him to the FBI, then lying about it and denying it — even going so far as to testify in front of Congress that he “wouldn’t point a finger at anyone” after he’d already secretly done so, repeatedly. In return for these favors the FBI kept him informed of things his own son did that might have harmed him politically, and in this way he became governor of California, then President of the United States.
http://harpers.org/archive/2012/09/0084045
So…how do you describe a country in which people achieve political advancement by secretly reporting those who disagree with them to the authorities, and in which acknowledging our war dead is tantamount to treason? How do you describe that country?
Like East Germany, except we speak English?