The art of trailers has become its own genre of filmmaking. Video games, political ads, even commercials for food and insurance borrow techniques from the form of the trailer. While coming attractions are as old as moving pictures the modern trailer eschews story and outline for an assemblage of affectively charged and relatively disconnected sights and sounds. The work of the trailer, the excitement that it generates often far exceeds the films, or even politicians, it hopes to promote. The affective intensity of this form of promotion so commonly causes the complaint “the trailer was better than the movie” that an active attempt is made to produce films at the same amplified pitch resulting in summer movies like Men in Black III, Transformers, etc for which narrative is no longer even an afterthought, it is entirely absent.
Although all movies have trailers the pinnacle and likely driving force of such innovations in compressed sight and sound is the action film. Explosions, fleeting love interests, more explosions, executions, tense torture ticking bomb scenes all held together by a rogues gallery of heroes and villains. A facial line-up superimposed on a series of disconnected but thrilling events all set to some soaring score; either coming pop hit or operatic aria. One cannot help but feel the concerns of those that saw in aestheticization a fascistic impulse. The great filmmaker Francois Truffaut once remarked that there was no such thing as an anti-war film because the medium was too powerful it glorified everything on its screen. Despite the fact that most trailers are now viewed on cell phones or ipads there is still something about the metonymic mix of image and sound that lends itself to glorification. The body is mobilized for enjoyment. In what follows John Protevi and Jairus Grove with a guest appearance by Davide Panagia explore the composition of a recent trailer for the movie “Gangster Squad” in an effort to diagram the affective economy at work in a mere 2 minutes and 30 seconds of video.
The opening sequence is the Sean Penn monologue with him punching the heavy bag, and some stock shots of the Hollywood sign. I don't think there's much to note here, a little Realpolitik ending with the hubristic "Out here I'm god" (0:01-0:37). But as with all this reading, I'd be happy to get suggestions in the comments. Things pick up when we get Nick Nolte's grizzled cop veteran talking to Josh Brolin's determined leader of men: "Los Angeles is a damsel in distress, and I need you to save her" (0:38 – 0:41). So here we have society as soft, female, and endangered, with the male cops called upon to swoop in to save her. Then we cut to beat-up suspects being led into the police station. Ryan Gosling: "what happened to them?" Brolin: "they resisted." (0:41 – 0:45) Besides the glorification of violence, we have the action hero one-liner trope, which increases the sympathetic identification with Brolin. Then back to Nolte, who redefines the problem from law-enforcement to warfare: "it's not a crime wave, it's enemy occupation" (0:46 – 0:49). There's a War on Terror forecast here, but we don't have to dwell on that. It's enough that civil society is declared just a mask for warfare. So the heroes have to answer the fascist demand: the homeland is occupied by enemies, the liberal response to treat the gangsters like criminals rather than war enemies is ineffective, what are you going to do about it? The response is a black-ops / plausible deniability / "off-the-books" group of cops. At 0:50 Brolin says "I'll need men." What kind of men? Men who walk forward, always forward toward the camera, steely-eyed, no words, just shooting. Men of action. Fascism is always about forward movement, isn't it?
Then after the recruitment scene, Nick Nolte's voice-over at 0:55 – 0:57 says "you are to make no arrests, this is off the books" with the camera panning down the City Hall phallus. Then the boys walking toward the camera in front of the building. That's the kind of government we need, a cover for off-the-books operations. Gosling mocks socialist ethos at 1:00-1:04 ("doesn't seem right that he should have so much while others have so little") – with a two-shot of Emma Stone and Gosling. She's part of the "so much" that Penn "has." She's a possession.
Then the Penn character shows the depths of societal corruption that will be redeemed by the extra-legal violence of the heroes: "we're standing in the middle of a money-making machine." Images, gambling, then stacked Tommy guns on desk 1:05-1:08. Then,"we got all the whores and dope sown up" – with shots of each (1:10). Then move terror: gangsters shooting at family home with Christmas lights (1:12). Then Brolin is addressed at 1:19 as an officer: "you call it Sarge." Paramilitary violence. Brolin rallies the troops -- "we're going to war" -- but again, we're talking about making heroes out of cops who go off-the-books and wage war at home. Brolin continues "there's no glory in this assignment." But the movie is glorifying the selfless heroics of the black-ops crew, who aren't in it for the money – they light piles of it on fire – they are in it to be the redemptive fire cleansing society (1:20 – 1:27). Brolin: "You do this, there's no going back" Gosling, with insouciance, "well, you gotta die of something," extinguishing cigarette (daring, devil-may-care, my life isn't worth that much if we can get some action and clean up the corruption). (1:27-1:31) Intercutting of "no badges, no names, no mercy," with various violence / brutality / torture (beating a guy tied to a chair). 1:32-1:35. Then the boys march ahead (forward motion for the fascists) with explosions in the background. 1:36-1:38. Then we get a car careening on edge and Gosling shooting out the window. A suggestion that things are poised on the edge (1:38). Then we get one of the biggest affective punches of the trailer, the Emma Stone / Ryan Gosling sex and violence link. First we get the repartee (1:39-1:46), then some gunshots (1:47-1:49), then a very quick shot of Gosling and Stone in bed, a bit of flesh, with him starting to roll over on top of her (1:50), then Brolin with his shotgun at waist level pointing up and out (1:50-1:51). Now there's a lot to talk about here. The appeal to teen boys of all ages: go off-the-books and you too can fuck Emma Stone! The embarrassing Hollywood Freudianism of shooting = ejaculation; that real men do it from on top (I'd be interested to know if they have an earlier scene of Stone on top of Penn); and that Gosling's conquest of Stone gives Brolin an erection. Of course fascism isn't the only affective style that links male-bonding and male-dominant sex and violence, but the glamorization of that linkage seems to me to resonate strongly with the fascist affective style.
Then at 1:52 – 1:59 we get interspersed credits with character shots. Penn's character says 2:00 – 2:10 "a cop that's not for sale is like a dog with rabies; you just got to put them down." We cut to Brolin walking down a movie theater aisle, then gangsters shooting up a movie theater, bursting through screen. Other than the reckless shooting up of a public space, showing the gangsters' depravity, I have to say the coming through the screen stumped me, and I'd be glad to get help in comments as to what is going on here. Now for the ending one-liner, 2:10 – 2:17. We see a gangster on the ground, smirking about the weakness of liberalism, that cops have to respect the rights of gangsters. "You're a cop, you can't shoot me." Gosling does that one-handed load-the-shotgun maneuvers, looks down the barrel of the gun, and says "not anymore." Cold-blooded elimination. Gun flash illuminates his face, then black. Then title. What to make of the one-liner? (1) Gosling is "not anymore" a (regular) cop -- he's off-the-books. Or (2) the special type of cop that Gosling represents is "not anymore" bound to obey a fundamental code of liberal society, that cops use only the amount of force necessary to detain a subject and that they not mete out justice on the spot. Or (3) he's "not anymore" even an off-the-books cop, but a lone wolf. There are two plausible motivations here: (a) Penn has killed Stone, the gun moll, after having discovered her infidelity or (b) Penn has killed Brolin. Either way, Gosling has then broken free of even the black-ops squad to go rogue for personal revenge. I'm not sure if reading 3 of the one-liner resonates with fascist affect, but readings 1 and 2 certainly do.
* * *
Jairus Victor Grove University of Hawaii The 'above the law' hero-cop is an extremely popular figure. It plays into almost all superhero films and certainly all mafia films. The story is always the same. A frustrated man unable to cope with the violence around him is driven to leave behind the law and follow a higher law. The causal factor is always the extremity of the villain. This is the formula for The Dark Knight as much as the infinite supply of buddy cop movies. It is in fact hard to remember a summer without a revenge flick following this formula. These films also follow a trailer formula. Generally we come to absolve the hero of his illegal acts because he bares some personal cost or loss that redeems the spectacular destruction as an act of sacrifice for the greater good. For a movie to work that is to say for people to want go see it all of this must be felt in the 3 minutes of trailer that will introduce the film. One has to anticipate the enjoyment of the heroes desire to kill. To give a sense of how this is accomplished bellow there is a brief sketch of the trailers for the Untouchables and L.A. Confidential as they are undoubtedly predecessors of Gangster Squad.
The Untouchables Starting at 1:51: Canadian: I do not approve of your methods. Costner/Ness: Yeah, you’re not from Chicago.
In The Untouchables Brian DiPalma stages virtually the same story as Gangster Squad. After all, as the film goes, Al Capone could not be taken down without exceeding the law (the tax evasion part of the story is underplayed compared to the shotgun justice thematic). Sean Connery’s line, ‘he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he puts of one of your men in the hospital, you put one of his down” is front and center in the trailer for the film. In no uncertain terms it is cold war escalation dominance with period accents and Tommy guns. The trailer in particular is interesting in that the aural sensible is partitioned almost entirely by voice overs until the end in which an aria, Vesti la giubba from Pagliacci, reaches its fever pitch as the violence escalates and our appetites for full spectrum hero vs. mob violence is truly wetted. Obviously arias are common to film climaxes as the opera’s crescendo cant help but make you want the crisis resolved. It pushes you further into the zone of tension fearful the voice will break until it does in the realm of DiPalma and Coppola with a gunshot. One could also say something about the choice of music so inescapably Italian. Although what is interesting is that the aria is supposed to carry us along with the heroes (Anglos, Irishmen, accountants) not the Italian Al Capone. The trailer is held together then by a traditional musicless introduction of key characters, the setting of the stage of heroes and villain, the foreboding presentation of Costner’s wife and kids as the potential sacrifice, and to seal the deal a contextless violent climax set to opera.
Leading the charge of the Neo-noir aesthetic that owned the late 90’s (and made the new Batman series possible as Memento caries through both the aesthetic of noir and the violence beyond good and evil motif as well) James Ellroy’s LA Confidential is basically the same movie as Gangster Squad although reversed as the two hero cops are originally part of an under the table ‘gangster squad’ that turns out to be a front for running drugs and killing the competition. However of course in LA Confidential the ‘bad’ gangster squad is merely the pretext for Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe to disavow the immoral extra-legal violence of ‘bad cops’ for their own moral justice/revenge killing spree. In this case the damsel in distress is not L.A. as Nick Nolte says in the Gangster Squad trailer but Kim Bassinger. Again though in the trailer and in the film the music is period appropriate or at least is engineered to sound like what we think this ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood would sound like. As the tension builds in the trailer you begin to hear the faint violin section growing louder, short staccato attack gives way to a big lush string section typical of many scores of the period all of which sound like Thomas Newman’s score to The Road to Perdition. Beautiful, big, lush, string sections, oversaturated production, lots of music only, slow action sequences, and kill shots. Generally the scores are, I think, to capture the tragedy and the beauty of someone's act of sacrifice. This sets the affective mood to feel good about the enjoyment of killing as it was something that had to be done. I suspect however the real fuel for the enjoyment comes from a baser desire to witness payback or revenge. In this way Russell Crowe’s excessive violence in LA Confidential is already cleansed and ready for enjoyment in the trailer before seeing the film through its juxtaposition with the tragic score and brief sad glances of Kim Bassinger. Although we come to find out Crowe isn't dead, so it's not really sacrifice despite the fact that he got the music for it. Cheating I think. You should have to die to get the whole orchestra.
These trailers and the movies that follow them proceed by the revenge/extreme justice playbook. Justice can exceed the law but at least the secondary heroes have to pay for it with their lives. Kevin Spacey gets it when he becomes noble in L.A. Confidential; in The Untouchables Sean Connery gets gunned down as does the hapless accountant. And we have all of the slow-building sad violin solos to carry us through.
Gangster Squad is more like Fight Club than its predecessor revenge flicks. I think it was Houston Baker that pointed out that the entire Dust Brothers' soundtrack to Fight Club was hip-hop with the black voices removed. The tracks are sampled and rendered entirely instrumental to create the ‘OG (original gangster) sensibility’ but with the voices of Pitt and Norton. This is of course the fantasy of the movie. Pitt and Norton play at the lives that hip-hop reports on. They start a kind of crime club not because they are poor, marginalized, or stolen from Africa, but because they are bored and tired of cornflake blue ties and Ikea furniture.
While Gangster Squad has a strong visual investment in the same Noir period of L.A. as L.A. Confidential no one cues the swing music or tragic string section. As the renegade cops go fully BADASS the striking anachronism of Jay-Z begins to play. There is much that can be said about violence in hip-hop. The best of hip-hop does more to re-present violence than represent violence, to steal a line from Spivak, however in this case neither make sense. The violence of kick-ass, Jay-Z “I am Che Guevara with Bling On” swagger is put to use by the faces of Gosling, Broelin, and Nolte. I think this is what makes this film truly fascistic. It is the full enjoyment of being beyond the law without any cost or necessity to disavow the guilt inducing enjoyment of violence. There is at least in the other movies a cost or a sacrifice to leaving behind the law in favor of divine violence. People get killed, families are drawn in, etc. Things GET REAL.
In the trailer for Gangster Squad we have one of Jay-Z’s most over the top songs, samples of screams over industrial clanging synthesized to sound like the crash of cymbals and a driving beat, then visually and aurally punctuated by explosions on screen. The Jay-Z song “Oh My God” comes from Kingdom Come, his most triumphant album (in the sense of Triumph of the Will). The production on the whole thing sounds like it was made by the archangels of a self-proclaimed God. Wagner for a new generation. As a result it has none of the texture and ambivalence of earlier albums which is to say it is a crass celebration of speed boats and Lambos in an intermittently brilliant career. The over-the-top production for "Oh My God" is meant to provide the back drop to Jay-Z’s rags to riches, will-to-power, Horatio Alger story with a black, urban twist. Growing up poor with a single Mom and then through the streets to become the godfather of hip-hop intolerant of young upstarts who questioned his authority during his retirement. Kingdom Come is after all the first album Jay-Z made after he called off his retirement. What is clear in both the production of the original song and its strangely out of history placement in Gangster Squad is that at the top, in control is what strong men prove when questioned.
I have always thought the production of Kingdom Come sounded like something Mussolini would have commissioned. Its is a series of hollow anthems and Jay-Z is their nation. This further compounds the horrifying mishmash of references to the war on terrorism, the decline of the city, the public as damsel in distress, such that we have something quite different from The Untouchables and LA Confidential. We have a music video for enjoying violence as violence with a little sexualization on the side. I am not sure if it is worse than the other two movies as they invest authoritarianism with a sense of nobility but it's not better. Just different but a difference that lends itself even more to the affective form of the trailer as the justificatory backstory is barely needed. What is at play in the Gangster Squad trailer is also part of an aural racial aesthetic that uses hip-hop as the go-to for the enjoyment of senseless violence. Interesting that the sound of young urban black male identity is now the reservoir for the reclamation of white male machismo that is if the content of the lyrics are sufficiently removed. As vapid as this particular Jay-Z song is Jay's story is a compelling one and all that remains for the trailer are grunts and background vocals. There is also something about the aural racialization of crime and decay at work here that is made more explicit by the use of hip hop but is present in all three films. I think particularly in the case of LA Confidential these movies are nostalgia trips. In these new modern times of urban decay and rampant crime where are OUR heroes willing to sacrifice their honor and reputation for the greater good? Hip-hop in this context is particularly creepy. Every fascist needs an emergency and urban decay has been enough to make the prison industry a bottomless bipartisan pork barrel.
Although again I think the aural aesthetic of Kingdom Come's 'Oh My God' is one of swagger it is after all a comeback album where the king reminds everyone what the penalty for disrespect is. However these other resonance ought not be ignored. As the inclusion of torture by heroes in films is now de rigueur we ought not be surprised by Gangster Squad. And I am not saying all of this to join the chorus of moral panic over senseless violence. What I think is worth taking seriously is the sense that is being made of violence. As a technique of mobilization not unlike singing in battle or national anthems the trailer as a form is something more than merely an advertisement. And as the trailer form seems to work best as a collage of violence and pulse-accelerating music all held together by close ups of a few unforgettable faces it should not surprise us that it is increasingly the format for politics. It should however concern us.
So here is what I have learned so far. Judson has carefully explained that all Muslims are dangerous because the Qu’ran approves of killing infidels (apparently Judson did not read the part of the Bible that says people should be stoned for mixing crops or taking the Lord’s name in vain and most of all for worshiping other gods). O’Reilly made the same defense of his comments on The View, arguing that it was a violent religion and that his statement was an ‘indisputable fact.’ O’Reilly demanded of a flustered Joy and Whoopie “what religion were the 9/11 attackers then?” suggesting that if 9/11 attackers were Muslims ergo all Muslims attacked us on 9/11. Barbara Walters promptly admonished her colleagues and calmly told O’Reilly he needed to refer to them as extremist Muslims. In the entire discussion that followed no one thought to ask why such tempers were flying over a moderate Muslim community center (not a mosque) when the United States was negotiating a massive and unprecedented arms transfer to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is Osama Bin Ladin’s country of origin and a state that champions intolerant and violent interpretations of Islam. But we have heard this all before. The Right’s racism is unfounded and irrational. No one reading this post will change their minds about Islam simply because I point out that the Jewish and Christian Bible has just as many demands for violent punishment and killing. So is this just the rehearsed Left response? The Right does something offensive, those of us on the Left notice and bemoan it? I don’t think so. Something has changed. The Right and the particularly loud figureheads of the Tea Baggers are not just being ‘politically incorrect.’ They represent a new racism.
For those of you that like to kick it old school, don’t worry. The old racism has not gone anywhere. It will continue to find its expression in the arbitrary enforcement of drug and gun laws, the increasingly privatized prison-industrial-complex, and neoliberal bootstrapping narratives that blame the underclass for their near permanent state of despair. What is different and worth thinking about more is why these same modes of structural violence are not sufficient or to put it another way, are not satisfying for the Tea Bagger’s demographic. Fear, anger, insecurity, are not new to various classes of white voters that have felt for decades that they have been left behind by the promise of American prosperity and ignored by mainstream politics. So is the fever pitch of violence and vocal expression of heretofore unspeakable racism simply the result of the recent economic decline? Is the recent economic decline the tipping point for the downward trend of wages for the last twenty-five years or is there something else adding affective fuel to the fire?
I would suggest that what is going on here is exacerbated or enabled by the ‘near enemy’ of the 2008 derivatives debacle. However there are other major operators in the mix of the ascendent and increasingly normative racism expressed by Judson Phillips and Bill O’Reilly. The evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine that seemed so badly beaten in the 2008 election was merely bruised not bowed. In fact the hostility against non-white immigrants, Muslims, gays, liberals, scientists, academics etc is all too familiar to those of us who closely watched the Palin rallies during the last Presidential election. Is history simply repeating itself? Is it back from the dead like some kind of seasonally appropriate zombie?
No. Something has changed. What was publicly retracted, muffled, cut out of broadcasts, expressed only in ‘misspoken’ words (think George Allen’s Macaca comment) has found a public legitimacy that has crossed the thin line between word and deed. The assault of Lauren Valle is not likely to be an aberration. In Bill O’Reilly’s words, “Muslims attacked us on 9/11.” As cynical as I was of Bush’s plea to Americans to distinguish between terrorism and Islam, I have come to miss those days. It is no longer necessary to apologize for that conflation. In Judson’s case it can be your campaign platform. The return of the evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine has left behind its compassionate conservative voice and found a new militancy. To borrow one of neoliberalism’s favorite words, there is a fresh crop of violent entrepreneurs that make O’Reilly seem ‘mainstream.’ Therefore the possibility of a Tea Bagger caucus in the House of Representatives is not just irritating, it is dangerous. It means an audience of like-minded Congresspeople that believe in war. The cultural wars of the 80s and 90s were at best a low intensity conflict in comparison. Newt Gingrich and William Bennett may have been a preview of part of this resonance machine’s agenda but that tactics are being taken to a whole new level.
There was an initial first response in me that chalked up the comments of Tea Baggers as gaffs and enjoyable gaffs. There was a satisfaction in seeing people say what I knew they were thinking. Growing up in Texas there was always a difference in what could be said in the locker room, in protected social engagements, at church or at home, and what could be said in public. It was unmannered or unrefined to be too open about your superiority. Racist jokes, slurs, violent depictions of difference were shared openly amongst ‘friends’ and shared again in glances and unspoken behavior elsewhere.
So isn’t this better? Once in the free market place of ideas won’t these ignorant rednecks simply be humiliated by the voices of democratic reason? I don’t think so. While ‘covert’ racism and hostility are certainly not good, the expanding comfort zone where these ideas can find expression is cause for worry - not an opportunity for more debate. When issues like the significance of gay suicide or the legitimacy of racism become ‘debatable’ we have already ceded too much ground.
These ideas are toxic to even the deepest pluralism because they begin from the premise and emotional commitment that pluralism is the enemy. These discussion are not brought to forums such as CNN or The View for reasoned debate or invitational discussion. They are a provocation of war to sort friends and enemies.
The Tea Baggers are not interlocutors. I have coached competitive college and high school debate for over a decade and just about the only thing that cannot be debated is whether your opponent has the right to speak or participate. Once argument becomes a prelude, bait, for the recording of black lists and the identification of ‘high value targets,’ the cynicism has become terminal. Politics has given way to war.
Does this mean the electoral process is dead? That all that is left is to take to the streets? Absolutely not, but if violent racism and homophobia become acceptable topics of reasoned debate then public reason is little more than a thin veneer of manners soon to give way to something much darker. Every opportunity must be seized to prevent electoral success, but even that, while necessary, will not be sufficient. The Left needs to engender a new militancy of its own. It cannot merely mimic the exclusionary tactics of the Right, we cannot simply grab out apiece of the hate pie. More militant pluralists must intervene at every level of practice from faculty meetings, media outlets, and bar discussions to set the terms of what is sayable and what is not.
There is also the ‘near enemy’ to attend to. People have reason to feel insecure and afraid. Economic justice cannot be the democratic agenda only when it is convenient. The market will not save us and while I am the first to insist on pluralizing connections with those who would struggle with us, those committed to the neoliberal order of growth and the cruel austerity measures that are imposed on the most vulnerable when that system fails are not part of that coalition. In fact rather than looking to the ‘generous’ wings of the democratic party we are more likely to find opportunities for coalitions amongst those religious folk who are alienated by the new fury of the resonance machine then amongst those who would rather tolerate fascism than give up on market based solutions. These are fragile times and we cannot wait for a market miracle to turn down the heat on the pressure cooker.
I stumbled upon a little book a few weeks ago. It was, in fact, its shape and color that attracted me to it. I was in a used book store and it was a tiny, hardback, Everyman edition from the late 1940's, no more than half an inch thick. The title was small and faded and too hard to read against its navy blue binding so I picked it up and examined it more closely. It was Hiroshima by John Hersey. It sounded familiar. I think I may have read it as part of a class on the Cold War I took as an undergraduate but I cannot be sure. It was, if only as an object, interesting enough to buy and take home.
I had no recollection of what it was. I assumed it was an account of the first atom bomb. It was. But the first few pages were something different. The book begins with an account of the morning proceeding the bomb. I study and teach about war so I have read the papers and documents surrounding the Manhattan Project. I know the details of the blast, the kilotonage, the side bets between the scientists regarding the risk of igniting the earth's atmosphere. I didn't know that for weeks every conventional B-29 attack on Japan had flown by Hiroshima on the way to its target elsewhere. That night after night the inhabitants of Hiroshima had listened to air raid sirens wondering if the B-29 was just passing through or if this time it was their turn to be fire bombed. According to the author, the anxiety was unbearable. Hiroshima was as of yet untouched and people assumed with each siren their time must have come or worse yet that the Americans were saving something special for them. Of course we were. The bomb was dropped, 140,000 people were killed, and the world changed forever. Although what struck me about these few introductory pages was that the dropping of the bomb was not in no way the first act of violence, it was for some a perverse sense of finality. As many people disagree about the reason the bomb was dropped as whether it needed to be dropped, but for the next few paragraphs that is not what concerns me. It is the interminable panic, the slow, seemingly endless terror, a sick feeling in the gut, that at any moment the sky could fall and there is nothing you, as a singular person could do about it, that makes me sad for our world. To paraphrase Norman Mailer, nothing you do, nothing that you are, will change the fact that in an instant you can be reduced to little more than a few teeth or other grizzly remain to be cataloged or counted in some post-mortem ledger.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the atom bomb per se. Airpower, cruise missiles, the "Prompt Global Strike" initiative, can all accomplish this task without a nuclear warhead. What keeps me up at night is not the magnitude of the weapons but the event without warning that strikes like a lightening bolt. More to the point it is the inequality and the regularity of the inequality with which these weapons strike such that only a few populations in the world truly live with the daily dread that they or their loved ones could be next.
I don't believe for one second that this is the tragic inevitability of war. Nor do I believe that this is just some flaw in the mortal condition. Death from above is different than someone kicking in your door or invading your city. There is no countermeasure, no response, no resistance, no possibility for combat. If the bomb arrives there is only what I imagine is a few seconds of shock, sadness and then maybe even relief that you do not have to bear another day of waiting to be visited by the bomb. This is all a long of way of saying that, for me, the debate over continuing the war in Afghanistan elides a question much more troubling that is not even being asked on the major news networks, much less openly by the Obama administration: Will we continue to send drones to shoot 'Hellfire' missiles into villages between Afghanistan and Pakistan and beyond? Will more or less troops even have any bearing on the decision to increasingly automate the war? So far there seems to have only been a steady increase in drone attacks since the so called Afghanistan surge. Is it possible that future troop reductions in Afghanistan and Iraq will lead to an increasing reliance on this prosthetic means of warfare?
For all of the changes in strategy, diplomatic posture, and real commitments to a better world in both word and deed by the Obama administration, the first drone attack took place January 23rd 2009, just a few days after Obama was inaugurated. I remember because I had just returned from the Obama Campaign's Staff Party when I read the news update on my computer. Even then in the haze of one of the best nights of my life the news made me sad. So much had changed and yet this continued unabated, seemingly without pause. Since then the attacks have become more regular. In fact the Obama administration has already authorized and ordered more Predator attacks than the Bush administration did the previous year. I have no idea what a drone sounds like. I imagine it to be like a remote control airplane. Something high-pitched, like an airplane but shriller. What I do know is that every child in the territory of Waziristan must talk about it constantly. In an area of the world in which indoor plumbing and consistent electricity would be 'the future' the boogeyman is not a vampire or some disfigured monster as it was for me growing up in the Texas suburbs. It is a polished, faceless, white UFO armed to kill and operated by remote or automated control. I am sure, in fact I know, that the statistical success of these weapons is unimpeachable. If the question is do they work than the answer is yes. If by work you mean they, in the words of the Revolution in Military Affairs, 'hit to kill'. I can't argue with the numbers.
However I can't help wondering what the world will be like in ten or twenty years, not just in Waziristan, but in every country we deploy these weapons, if the United States of America becomes synonymous with this faceless, bringer of death. It will not be those maimed or killed that all Americans will have to answer to but the millions that couldn't sleep, that woke up drenched in sweat, or simply wanted to die because they could not stand the waiting. What must it be like to start every day wondering if you are next. If the plane you hear in the distance, the buzz you thought you heard, the unholy dread of a sudden stillness, the oppressive weight of silence, is the arrival of precision American engineering. War is hell. This is slow sadistic torture. Every flash in the sky, the low hum of an engine, the constant sense of unease, all of it is a waiting game that would make me wish for hell's certainty and finality. This cannot be the best we can do.
