re: #40 The Ghost of a Flea

The press cares about spectacle.

They show Trump because he’s all spectacle. That he makes things scary, and worse, means more people watching their shows: some because they’re into that vibe, the rest because the only way to feel safe is to stay informed on what the maniac is doing.

They’re doing this thing with Biden because it’s spectacle—the long answer that every preceding president made this moment, that the blame is systemic and suggestive of deep problems all through the body politic, isn’t as satisfying as the current no-drama, popular president failing in ways that require commentary and opining.

They’ve never cared about Afghanistan because it hasn’t produced any dramatic images or “this will make you feel something” moments…it’s just be a grim, long grind of uncertainties. Lots of stuff has happened in Afghanistan that been bad signs, but it’s all boring detail work where you’d have to explain the regional politics and the culture and such: even the Taliban themselves became boring because their shit wasn’t as ultraviolent as ISIS or as Cold War-redux as China and Russia stories.

Indeed, part of the don’t-care-about-Afghanistan is that Afghanistan and the Taliban have been assigned a label as incorrugible brown tribals who can’t be better: they’re either decadent useless Kharzais or draconian ascetic Mullah Omars. There’s no hook, no good dudes or bads dudes to react to, no recognition that the Taliban are awful people but are competent at what they’re doing, because those things don’t put asses in seats.

And to get spectacle, the press relies on access, which means that what they show aligns with what their points of access want shown. And DoD and defense “experts” having been pushing a very flat “it’s fine, six months” thing for quite awhile. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve had unconventional news sources dig into stuff like…concealing the civilian casualty rate, the role of bribing warlords and whether that produced strategic gains. At no point have anyone talked about stuff like casualty rates in the new army and how morale is doing…the nitty gritty, the stuff that says we’re losing the war, has no zazz. What does have zazz is stuff like videos of bombs being dropped

The other thing going on is that the useless pundits in the press that pretend to be reporters but actually read transcripts basically do mutual aid with the useless pundits who get sinecures in thinktanks and lobbying groups: none of them actually have a solid basis for what they say, but by coordinating they can create the aesthetic of all being wise, well-informed people who are thinking seriously. It’s the David-Brooks-industrial complex: the words themselves are absolute horse puckey, but there’s just enough shallow erudition that it can be presented as “smart” such that other people as performing shallow erudition will applaud.

Also, most fundamentally…war is a racket, and part of that racket is getting paid to sell war as not a racket.

You are completely correct. And the point of this withdrawal at this time is to take advantage of the short attention span of Americans.

We really are fucking idiots, like dogs who lose the thread anytime anyone yells “Squirrel!”

But we *are* predictable. A year from now, no-one is going to give a fuck about Afghanistan or any other fucking stan. But we’ll still be arguing about vaccines and why we still have thousands of people dying every week from a disease we should have killed dead bang in July, 2021.