livestreaming defeat
The president appeared on the New York Times landing page: I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan... He squinted and paused and made it through his speech, which was defiant but muted. At some point the livestream started cutting out and warping the image, to rather startling effect:
They quickly fixed it, but the glitches stuck in my head for the rest of the speech. I started to think about how much of this conflict has existed for me as a long-running series of deranged video artifacts, how much of it lives in my brain as archival footage of unknown or conflated provenance. The small TV in the corner of a Charlotte deli where my mom and I watched Bush declare war on Iraq in 2003, when I was nine. The green-lit bombing raids in the family room at night after dinner. Suicide bombers in the news. Attorney General John Ashcroft singing “Let Eagles Soar,” a song he wrote, at a seminary event in 2002. Bush’s MISSION ACCOMPLISHED photo op. Watching Zero Dark Thirty on an airplane, a year or so after it was nominated for Best Picture. Feel-good videos of soldiers returning home to their dogs. The Afghanistan mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Guy Pearce donning a blast suit at the beginning of The Hurt Locker. Enormous displays of patriotism at Carolina Panthers games: flyovers, free tickets for troops, livestreamed fan cams from oversea military bases.
Eliot Weinberger, one of the best and most under-read American essayists, has a small and essential collection of political commentary called What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. Writing for European publications, he was a fierce critic of the Bush administration and the wars it dragged the country into. (He even called the Iraq War before 9/11; in January 2001, he wrote that among “their principal concerns will be […] a return to Iraq. In their circles, the Gulf War is seen as a failure because it did not end with the assassination of Saddam Hussein.”) In a short missive from Manhattan the day after 9/11, he wrote:
This is clearly the first event since the rise of the omnipotence of mass media that is larger than the media, that the media cannot easily absorb and tame. If the media do succeed, national life, beyond the personal tragedies, will continue in its semi-hallucinatory state of continual manufactured imagery. If they fail, something profound may indeed change.
Today, two decades on, I can’t tell if the media has succeeded in wrangling the strange into something intelligible or if something has indeed changed profoundly. Perhaps both: rather than the images being semi-hallucinatory, they are entirely hallucinatory. Or more likely, the imagery is all the same; the profound change is our tolerance for it.
Yesterday morning, I couldn’t stop watching the endless loop of that enormous airplane rolling down the tarmac as Afghan people cling and wave and shout. Watching a clear-spectacled Jake Tapper lisp scoldingly at a ghostly Antony Blinken. Watching clips of the Fall of Saigon. Watching Twitter light up with finger-pointing and scorn. Watching videos apparently of Taliban fighters at an amusement park. Watching a video on Reddit that purportedly shows three Afghans falling from a plane to their deaths.
There is a grim feeling that, as the war comes to an end, so too does some strange aspect of my own small perspective—and with that, a sharper realization that much of my life during wartime was spent in a kind of impenetrable suburban holding room, the faraway conflict constantly being sublimated into cultural production and political theatre and spin while our tax dollars went to military contractors and Halliburton and the deaths of innocent civilians.
In 2017, when President Trump authorized the dropping of the largest non-nuclear bomb on an ISIS target in Afghanistan, Fox & Friends soundtracked the black and white clip to Toby Keith’s 2002 jingoistic pop-country anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” Predictably ghoulish, it was also bizarrely personal: I remember being a child in the back of the car on the way to a football game or my grandparents’ house, my dad listening to the country music station—Charlotte’s 96.9 The Kat—and that song coming on: “And the eagle will fly / And it’s gonna be hell / When you hear Mother Freedom start ringin’ her bell / And it’ll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you.”
Fifteen years later, people were singing the same old song and crowing about America while a $16 million bomb vaporized a cave system. “That is what freedom looks like,” said co-host Ainsley Earhardt. That was five years ago. It was never about freedom and people aren’t falling for it anymore; 70 percent of Americans favor pulling out of the war. Many Americans experienced the meaninglessness and violence of the war firsthand, or know someone who did. Many more, like me, experienced its meaninglessness as a long march of images, a dissonance that echoes back through our childhoods.
President Biden’s livestream was broken for less than a minute. He continued haltingly and walked off without taking questions, one reporter shouting after him for a comment about the videos from Kabul airport. The stream ends. The page refreshes. A photo and headline appear.
The present comes at us with the two-second delay of a livestream, makes its wavering way into the record, and subsides. Historic moments buckle under the weight of coming commentary. The rhetoric is urgent and incendiary. Somehow it is always the main event. On the CNN website the screen is subdivided into eight dour faces. Tapper’s top-left, and the four men on the top row are all wearing purple ties. Of course the War in Afghanistan didn’t just happen on television. But something did.
ben tapeworm