The Unreal War
The Trump team sees their own mass murder through the lens of TV and video games
Trump’s illegal war in Iran is now a week old. In that time, it has already caused the deaths of at least a thousand human beings—perhaps many more who have not yet been numbered.
More than a hundred of these casualties were children at a girl’s school—now believed to have been hit by a U.S. strike.
The war has already metastasized to twelve countries and counting, dragging the entire Middle East into a whirlwind of bloodshed and destruction.
What is most astonishing about this is not only the atrocity and murder unfolding before our eyes—but the Trump administration’s completely lackadaisical attitude to the results of their own choices.
Trump seems to regard the hell he has unleashed on tens of millions of people with a kind of bemused curiosity. His guess seems as good as anyone’s as to what he is doing here and why.
When asked earlier in the week whom he expected to take over Iran, after he decapitated their previous leadership, he said: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”
Does that mean someone even worse could take over in the Ayatollah’s place? Sure, said Trump; maybe—with the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
If Trump’s attitude to his own atrocities is that of a bored and jaded despot for whom even the wailing of his own prisoners no longer suffices to furnish him much amusement—Hegseth’s is that of a delighted schoolyard bully putting his boot into the supine carcass of a helpless victim.
“Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps,” he said in a Pentagon press briefing earlier this week.
“They are toast and they know it, or at least soon enough they will know it. And we have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities,” he said.
He made only one oblique reference in that briefing to the six American service members who have already lost their lives in this unconstitutional, undeclared war. The press just wants to pick on every tragedy in order to make Trump look bad, he said.
He would much rather talk football.
“I liken Iran’s predicament,” he said, “to a football team who scripted the first 20 plays of a game. The team knew what plays to run because their first few drives were scripted. But now that the game has started and the blitz is on, they don’t know what plays to call, let alone how to get in the huddle and call those plays.”
What an idiot.
The thing that strikes one most about these remarks is the pervasive sense of unreality with which Trump and his top officials seem to approach a war that they caused for no discernible reason or lawful purpose—and which is right now ending hundreds if not thousands of human lives, including those of children, civilians, and American troops.
The postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard spoke controversially of the first Gulf War as a war that “did not take place”—because it was presented to the public as a TV war, a CNN war, a war of televised entertainment that managed to neutralize and obscure its own terrible human cost from the eyes of those not directly affected.
All I can say is that Baudrillard hadn’t seen anything yet.
Likewise, Harold Pinter once gave his poem condemning the first Gulf War the ironic title: “American Football.”
His point was that American leaders crowed about their overwhelming battlefield advantage like a bunch of dumb jocks in the locker room celebrating a cheap victory—rather than as military and government leaders who had just caused the wartime deaths of thousands of human beings.
Pinter’s poem exaggerated and parodied the triumphalist rhetoric of such leaders for the purposes of satirical effect.
But no exaggeration or satire is required, when Hegseth is supplying the locker-room “football” analogies himself.
No satirical hyperbole needed when it comes to the Trump White House’s crude sadism, insecure masculine bravado, or eerily postmodern, Baudrillardian approach to this war.
The other day, the official White House “X” account posted a video montage showing clips from Hollywood movies interspersed with actual scenes of bombing and killing from the ongoing U.S. campaign.
In a bizarre way, this viciously sadistic and juvenile meme was yet another way of the administration telling on itself.
At one point, the montage features a clip of Kylo Ren, from the movie The Last Jedi, shrieking “More!!”—before cutting to actual footage of the U.S. torpedo strike that sank an Iranian warship (a strike that killed roughly a hundred Iranian sailors in international waters, as they were returning from joint exercises as the invited guests of the Indian government).
“JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” the X post crows, over this footage of a strike that—in real life, not a movie or video game—actually murdered one hundred sailors in an undeclared, illegal, unjustifiable war.
What is most striking about this clip is not only its jingoism and its fascistic reveling in the spectacle of violence and brutality for its own sake—but its open and avowed self-identification with the forces of evil and villainy.
For Christ’s sake—they just cast themselves in the role of Kylo Ren!
To quote Judge Lance Ito—after Johnnie Cochran tried to pull out a quote from the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men during the O.J. trial:
“Isn’t he the bad guy?”
Those who have forgotten the Disney Star Wars movies can easily be forgiven for doing so. To recap quickly: Kylo Ren is an aspiring Sith Lord who serves a genocidal fascistic movement called “The First Order.” He deliberately blows up entire planets, including all of their civilian inhabitants, and even kills his own father.
The scene in which he shouts “More!!” comes when he is ordering a bunch of imperial walkers to open fire on Luke Skywalker—not realizing that Luke in that moment is just a Force-projected hologram, and therefore beyond the reach of his lasers.
What the scene is actually conveying, then, is not the awesomeness of Ren’s power—but the opposite.
It is about the impotence and futility of sadistic violence—the ultimate patheticness and smallness of wounded narcissistic men who think that by blasting their victims with enough explosives and firepower they will somehow fill the void in their own ego and make them feel powerful again.
You cannot change the fact that I know
How small and insignificant you are,
Now matter how important you try to make yourself,
With all your death and thundering (as Heine wrote in “Adam the First”).
At least the administration understands themselves to this extent, then. They know they are the Kylo Ren in this scene, not the Luke Skywalker.
They are telling us who they are, in short—and we should believe them.