Seeking Symbolic Moments in the Tides of History

Television is moments.

It was such moments -- converging sights and sounds that instantly convey lasting impressions of dramatic change -- that helped make television so memorable in earlier times, from bloody combat and dashed lives in the jungles of Vietnam to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. To say nothing of a solitary dissident boldly defying the Chinese military by using his body to block a column of tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Where Wednesday’s Baghdad event ranks in this hierarchy of cosmic images remains to be seen, as does the long-range result of a U.S.-led invasion that has toppled and possibly even killed Saddam Hussein. Unknown is whether today’s euphoria will endure or become tomorrow’s frustration and sorrow.

When recalling Iraqis’ gaining freedom from Hussein’s oppressive regime, however, memories will surely go to TV pictures of his 40-foot statue being pulled down in Baghdad’s joyous Firdos Square. Here was a freeze frame for the ages, a poster in the making, a signature for a shift in history whose ultimate consequences are a blur.

Symbols don’t come more powerful, unless it’s other TV pictures of the statue’s head being dragged through the city with a noose around its neck, and Iraqis, including children, hitting it and a huge photo of Hussein with shoes, slippers and sandals -- an insult among Arabs. All the while, TV was rolling, still cameras clicking away, the world watching.

The war’s live pictures from media with sand-swept combat units are something you talk about. If Vietnam was the living-room war, after all, this is the living war, thanks to technology and the Pentagon’s decision to embed media in combat units as intimate witnesses.

But Wednesday’s pictures you remember.

As you do the jubilance of Iraqis in that square, as some vented their anger by pounding the statue’s base with sledgehammers before a Marine armored recovery vehicle helped bring it down. Why, there must have been thousands there.

Or so it seemed much of the time.

“You can see it on the screen,” a news anchor cried out from somewhere.

But see what? If the emotion spoke for itself as people let off steam, the pictures spoke half-truths. With a camera fairly tight on the square, teeming, cheering Iraqis pressed against the edges of the TV screen, as if Baghdad’s multitudes had poured from their homes and hiding places to celebrate Hussein’s demise in this city of nearly 5 million.

When the camera occasionally pulled back, however, it was apparent there were maybe 300, about the size of a healthy demonstration in front of the federal building in Westwood, once again the camera creating its own misleading universe. And when cameras occasionally widened to shots of Iraqis parading elsewhere in the streets, their visual impact also shrank.

Perhaps it meant nothing, perhaps it meant everything. Perhaps many Iraqis were still too frightened or skeptical to publicly join the early-evening celebration, or many decided not to take part for other reasons. Perhaps those multitudes would turn out in Baghdad today, just as a much larger crowd of Arab Americans took to the streets in Dearborn, Mich., on Wednesday in support of Hussein’s removal.

In any case, Wednesday’s contrast between dominant TV images and street reality provided a cautionary note about putting too much faith in TV pictures and how well the U.S. and this power transfer would be accepted in a post-Hussein scenario.

That ambiguity was something to consider.

Meanwhile, these stirring pictures were replayed repeatedly. TV chipped off sections of the story, just as chunks of Hussein’s statue were probably carried off for posterity, and human-interest pieces were worked up capturing Iraqi curiosity and happiness.

Taking a lead from the Pentagon and the White House, though, much of the early coverage was more wary than giddy, as if TV, too, feared overstating what had happened.

When it came to history’s pantheon of epic TV footage, nothing Wednesday matched seeing hundreds of thousands of citizens demonstrating in Prague in support of ending Czechoslovakia’s Communist government. Or Ceausescu and his wife after their execution, the close-up of him on his side with his eyes open, staring vacantly.

Nothing Wednesday was as exhilarating as witnessing the dismantling of the Berlin Wall via TV and seeing throngs of ecstatic Germans attacking it with pickaxes and celebrating the demise of this symbol of oppression.

As for Baghdad, it was only a statue, after all, not the real Hussein, whose fate and whereabouts are unknown. And what of TV pictures of a U.S. soldier briefly draping an American flag over the statue’s head as if the U.S. was a colonial conqueror? However fleeting, that will be a symbol, too.

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Howard Rosenberg is The Times’ television critic. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com