TV AND THE GULF WAR : Will Bloodless Entertainment Inure Us to the Real Thing?

Shades of World War II.

KABC’s “A.M. Los Angeles” became a virtual USO spectacular last week, jump-starting your mornings with Hollywood stars, patriotic songs, verbal hugs and kisses for the troops in the Persian Gulf and heavy doses of red, white and blue, along with target practice on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

For a moment, you were back in “Casablanca,” with echoes of loyal Free French springing to their feet in Rick’s Cafe Americain to sing the stirring Marseillaise over the voices of their nasty Nazi rivals.

If this grandly schmaltzy movie delivers a message, it’s that Americans, epitomized by Bogie’s cynical Rick, can be counted on to ultimately do what’s good and just. So here’s looking at you , Old Glory.

Is that a chill I feel surging up my spine?

We profess to hate war. But who are we kidding? We love it, at least as it’s frequently presented on television, as a romantic abstraction.

We love war as theater.

Thus, we love war in movies. Two dozen war movies, from “The Dirty Dozen” to “The Bamboo Blonde,” sprawl across this week’s schedule on regular and cable TV. There were 30 movies last week, mainly oldies produced in an earlier age of innocence, with plastic plots about plastic people being brave and patriotic in World War II. For us, these are bloodless, feel-good wars that we can watch--really enjoying war and feeling its machismo--while keeping a distance.

We love war when it’s artsy. So we’re getting exactly what we want from those constant KNBC promos for its news series on “The Home Front,” scenes of troops and jets and flag-holding Americans poetically played in slow motion against a background of effusive music, as if war were ballet.

We love war big and splashy. So we’re getting what we want from seeing a pacing Harvey Levin unfurling himself before a panoramic American flag as he promotes his KCBS news series, promising to separate war profiteers from patriots.

We love war that’s non-specific and impersonal. We get it from TV’s charts, maps and bombardier tapes.

We get it, too, from military men, icily referring on TV to something known as “collateral damage”--as if humans were undistinguishable from buildings and war materiel--and to “killing” tanks, as if no one were inside those tanks.

Faceless casualties? You think of that while thumbing through a British newspaper spread celebrating George Rodger. He is the photographer whose black and white pictures of the German bombing blitzes of London and Coventry in 1940 were published weekly in Life magazine and helped rally the United States behind Britain.

Tens of thousands died from German bombs dropped in cities and the countryside. And, although Rodger refused to photograph mangled bodies--preferring “more subtle ways of showing suffering”--his pictures capture the incredible resilience of a people coping with human loss, fire, choking dust and mass destruction.

One photo, in particular, showing six boys, somehow still grinning while emerging from the rubble of their Coventry homes the day after the city was hit by 450 bombers, jumps out at you in a way that sweeps away the years.

If Rodger were active today and aiming his camera at Baghdad or Tel Aviv or the desert, were full-blown ground combat to occur there, would we react? Or would we stare vacantly at the page or screen?

With few exceptions, TV may have done more to inure us to war pain than to desensitize us. Not only war pain, moreover, but all violence, as night after night newscasts reel out misery after misery to the point that we may have mentally drawn the shade.

Insert into this video environment the Gulf War, now flickering dimly on the screen.

If we are, indeed, incapable of responding to real war the way we do to wars with actors and musical scores, will we regret it?

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives?

Not to worry. We’ll always have Paris.