Like other Mainers, I dragged myself out of bed before daybreak Thursday to tune in to the inevitable wall-to-wall coverage of the war in Iraq, sitting there like some slothful teenage couch potato dummy staring at the television until my head threatened to explode.

Amidst the non-stop talk of Scud missiles and potential gas attacks and desert storms and speculation about the success of the mission to take out Saddam Hussein and his coterie of mustachioed yes-men early in the dustup, one thing became obvious: There has to be a better way to make a living than as a network news talking head when there is major breaking news, the main qualification for which appears to be an ability to repeat one’s self over and over again, like a stuck whistle, while trying to make it appear that such is not the case.

Since television came of age it has been ever thus when it comes to covering The Big Story, be it national tragedy – a presidential assassination, a space program disaster, a terrorist attack on the homeland- or national titillation the likes of the O.J. Simpson and Clinton-Lewinsky soap operas.

To sit there mesmerized like a bump on a log and watch extended segments of the unfolding drama is to risk slow death via verbal assault by pundit and gasbag, would-be expert and confirmed know-it-all. At times, it’s Mighty Mouth meets Chatty Kathy in search of prime-time face time, and more power to the one who can get a word in edgewise. A train wreck in progress would seem more organized; a Three Stooges comedy more uplifting.

And yet, I have to hand it to my television brethern. And sistern. It is on these occasions that the networks, particularly the all-news cable outlets, have us news junkies right where they want us, which is to say glued to the television set, remote control in hand for quick flipping to a competitor on the slim chance that he is repeating new stuff that we haven’t already heard repeated elsewhere. Other matters, including make a living, or, in lieu of that, getting a life, are put on hold until the crisis du jour has passed and the networks’ wall-to-wall attention can be focused on the next national cause celebre.

Alas. As I write this, my cable linkup has gone on the fritz, and seems unlikely to be back on line in time to catch a scheduled White House briefing as to the state of things in Saddam’s Iraq at high noon of Day One. The blank screen is a privilege for which barely a half-hour ago I mailed a $39.35 check to the local cable outfit. The timing of the outage seems overtly suspicious, and I’m thinking that some sort of Code Orange domestic terrorism may be in play. Given the speed of today’s current events, by the time the lashup is restored I may have missed an entire war.

No matter. The circuit breaker in my medulla oblongata was about to trip from information overload, anyway. It’s probably just as well that I digest the stuff I took in earlier this morning before moving on to another helping. Lord knows, there is enough material to ponder.

There are the inconsequential things, such as the unwritten rule among war correspondents that, if you have a collar on your field jacket it must be turned upward on camera as some sort of badge separating you from the riffraff and pretenders to the throne. And the equally mandatory requirement that television reporters everywhere begin each sentence with the word, “now.” When combined with those other verbal crutches of the under-40 crowd – “ya know” and “I mean” – this abomination produces an especially lethal linguistic trifecta.

There are things of medium import to consider. Is shoot-from-the-lip Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld more insulting and condescending to the news media than the conspicuously insufferable Sen. Tom Daschle is to the Bush administration, or is it just about a dead heat? Is the French national memory shorter than the German memory, or vice-versa? That sort of thing.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to contemplate, though, is the current lovey-dovey marriage of convenience between the news media and the military. A television camera in every tank and a war correspondent “embedded” in every unit racing toward Baghdad makes for exciting coverage and high ratings – for the military, as well as the networks – while things are going smoothly. But should the campaign turn sour it’s not difficult to predict which marriage partner is going to summarily get kicked out of bed and shown the door.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.