The Written Word Communications Company

Last time it was "collateral damage" and "surgical strike." This time it's "embedded journalists" that show just how much control the U.S. military-industrial complex has taken of the main commercial media.

Embedding journalists means making them part of military units. They report from the point of view of service members in combat or other operations, supposedly to bring us real, live and credible coverage of the conflict.

Yes, the images are compelling. But by their very nature, they're one-sided. By themselves, they're hardly the kind of journalism we in the West demand from our major news networks.

Of course, the news outlets do try to balance the coverage with reporters in Baghdad and in-depth analysis of all the announcements and reports from various sources. But clearly, they are seen by the military as a resource, something that can be used in the campaign against the enemy. The "shock and awe" report has become the most notorious example of the military using the media in this campaign as part of their psych-ops, letting the phrase supposedly leak out in order to demoralize the enemy.

Not that any of this is new. The U.S. administration has a history of feeding the news media information, or withholding it, to achieve their goals - in fact, every government does. Vietnam, Watergate, Reagan's "disinformation campaign" in the 80s, the list goes on. Canadian governments, too, are guilty of this.

Two things are different this time around: first, the "coalition" forces are more media-savvy than ever before. Embedding journalists is just one sign. Other signs are the care they take to portray the right image: tearing down pictures of Saddam, but not hoisting (usually) the U.S. flag, so they're not seen as conquerors, but as liberators. And let's not forget the quarter-million-dollar Hollywood set built at the main press briefing centre in the field.

The other difference is the degree to which the mainstream media are willing to let themselves be used like this. All the major networks and newspapers are eager to embed their journalists. They carry every word spoken by the military leaders at the media briefings. By contrast, the Arabic network, Al Jazeera, cuts away from the briefings to breaking developments. They're not as committed to covering every word of the coalition leaders, it seems. And they aired the full video of the captured U.S. maintenance crew, while the American media, perhaps for some very good reasons, showed only parts of it. Was it too graphic? Undoubtedly, and there's no real reason to show the whole tape. We get the idea. But there's also no arguing that showing the whole tape would dismay and demoralize the Western public, indeed all those opposed to Saddam's regime, and boost psychologically Saddam's side. That's the whole point. These decisions, made for all sorts of reasons, support the "coalition" military's objectives.

Decapitation strike - that's pretty straightforward, if a little gruesome. "Striking off the head" evokes images of the guillotine, of the U.S. as carrying out the ultimate form of justice - an image that appeals to Dubya. Sorry - do we still call him that, or in the current climate, is "Mr. President" the only sufficient honorific?

Friction of war - the latest version of "collateral damage" and "casualty." It means that people die, and sometimes it's the people on our side, the good guys, and sometimes we don't want it to happen but just can't help it.

Embedded journalists - let's break that down, or in true intellectual parlance, "deconstruct" it: to embed means to place something deep and inextricably within something else. In this case, the journalists are becoming a part of the combat teams. It also sounds like "in bed," which can mean "allied with."

The question is, who is in control of this alliance? Who is the dominant ally - who's on top in bed?

Is this beautiful? Men, do you find the woman in this image irresistible? This is Julianne Moore, lauded, feted and Oscared actress from The Hours, Far From Heaven, and let's not forget Jurassic Park II. She is the current goddess of beauty as represented by the organizations that own popular culture: Hollywood and supermarket magazines, like Vogue.

Feast your eyes on this vision. Men, ache for what you can never have. Women, writhe in vain envy. Let your eyes linger on her shrunken breasts, pushed up by what must be a painful brassiere. Goggle over the sharp planes and angles of her face. Note her nearly fleshless arms. That's why she doesn't eat - she doesn?t have the strength to lift a fork!

Yes, this is what the media tell us is beautiful today, the ideal image of woman. And it is legitimate to use the term media as an all-encompassing, monolithic term, because the same ideal is pushed at us in Western society from every visual medium: television, movies, magazines, newspapers, everywhere.

Courteney Cox, Sara Jessica Parker, Lara Flynn Boyle, Brittany Murphy - it's a parade of progressing starvation. They represent beauty in every popular medium. They go on to endorse beauty products, to say "Use this stuff and diet until your're thirty pounds underweight, and you too can be beautiful."

Today, beauty has become synonymous with thinness. And not just thinness, but extreme thinness. The thinner the better, to the point of emaciation. And we have all heard the argument about how damaging this is to children, especially girls, who are harming themselves through eating disorders so that they can look like this.

But before we get too deep into that, I want to ask: do you want to look like this? Do you want your wife, your daughter, your sister to look like this? It's not healthy - which is ironic, because anthropologists who study the evolutionary aspects of beauty point out that many of the aspects of the human body that people generally find attractive - like clear skin, thick hair and bright eyes - are also indicative of health.

In this picture, Lara Flynn Boyle looks like a spoon standing on end. The problem is that her head is out of proportion to her body - she's just so thin.

Hilary Swank is described in media as a rare beauty, a powerful actor. Except for her lips, though (strange), her face appears to be skin stretched over a skull. Look closely at her arms, her neck. She's painfully underweight.

And for the ultimate in skull-faced women actors today, no one can compete with Nicole Kidman. Her poster photo for last year's The Others, a horror movie, invites the question, Is she the walking skeleton, or is the horror about famine?

I'm not saying that women should be fat. Obesity is a huge (no pun intended) problem in the West today. It's not healthy. But neither is emaciation.

I'm not the first to notice how the female beauty icons have been getting progressively thinner since the 1970s or so. But what I don't understand is just why the actresses and models keep doing this? Who wants them to look this way? I don't, and most people I talk to agree with me: models and actresses today are much thinner than is attractive.

Condom vending machines in public bathrooms are controversial for a lot of reasons. Here's one that was new to me, and I wonder if anyone else has encountered it.

On the front of the vending machine, a sign proclaims the wonders of a certain brand of latex condoms. "Exciting flavors!" it reads in bright pink lettering.

My twelve-year-old son saw it and asked: "Why do they flavor condoms??"

How do you explain that to a pre-teen without getting really uncomfortable?

A British Royal Marine fires a Milan wire-guided missile on the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq. Photo from MSNBC.

Picture from MSNBC