The social media video with which the White House has promoted its attack on Iran is, even by the standards we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration, grotesque on a level that still manages to be flabbergasting. Prefaced in the usual block capitals “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, with a flag and flame emoji of the sort favored by pubescent boys rather than, usually, government agencies, it’s three quarters of a minute of pure brainrot.
It isn’t a sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome to consider this video obscene
It begins with Tony Stark in front of a bank of computers saying “Wake up. Daddy’s home.”, before launching into a rapid-cut assemblage of fragments from action movies and video games, intercut with real footage of explosions in Iran, set to a pounding dance beat. We see Maverick from Top Gun, John Wick, Iron Man, Kylo Ren, Deadpool, Walter White from Breaking Bad, Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Mel Gibson in Braveheart, Master Chief from the Halo games.
“FA,” says Pete Hegseth, the “Secretary of War”, in the middle of it, before Optimus Prime from Michael Bay’s Transformers is spliced in to growl: “Time to find out.” (Thus completing the memeified saying “F*** around and find out.”) Catchphrase follows catchphrase. Meme follows meme. As it comes to an end we hear the phrase “Flawless victory” from the old Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets. (Remember when we thought George W Bush posing with a banner that read “Mission Accomplished” was crass?) And finally, of course, comes the branding: “The White House…President Donald J Trump.”
It isn’t a sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome to consider this video obscene. It is obscene by any standard a thinking human of adult years can apply. Its obscenity is of a piece with the actions and attitudes of the administration. It’s aligned. It’s of a piece with Hegseth brushing off the deaths of six US servicemen as an inconvenience to his narrative; and it’s of a piece with his boss, head unbowed, wearing a goonish white baseball cap as the bodies of those men were returned to American soil.
But it’s also a near-perfect encapsulation of where we are now, right down to the disregard for intellectual property rights (which at this stage is, admittedly, the very least of it) and its embarrassingly retro references – in all but a couple of cases the pop culture that a man of Pete Hegseth’s age would have thought was cool when he was 14 years old.
Here is a war of choice fronted by a second-tier cable news personality, inaugurated by the cashiered star of a reality TV show, and presented as an entertainment, and nothing more than an entertainment – halfway between a blockbuster movie and a video game. It’s pure spectacle: a pornographic fantasy of violence, dank with testosterone.
There has always, no question, been a gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to any aspect of public life in general, and war in particular. That space – the tissue between the two – is where power operates. All those film clips function in that video as what scholars of rhetoric would call “commonplaces” – shortcuts everyone in the tribe can be held to recognize; culturally embedded shorthand for a widely accepted feeling or idea. Tin-thumping isn’t new. Machismo isn’t new. The naked worship of power isn’t new.
But the rhetoric around war and politics is usually about telling stories, and stories about values. That cursed video collage isn’t interested in telling a story and it certainly isn’t interested in values. What does it matter that Walter White is a monster, Maverick a hero, Deadpool an antihero, Kylo Ren a villain, John Wick a mercenary, Tony Stark a conflicted scion of the military-industrial complex, or Optimus Prime a giant antifascist robot whose party-trick is turning, bizarrely, into the cab of a truck? Their stories, simple though most of them already are, get flattened and compacted into a montage whose only message is “blowing stuff up is cool”.
And never has the connective tissue between rhetoric and reality been drawn so thin. In those 45 seconds, you can see the surface of American public life peeling away from reality itself. Postmodernism, with its supposed flight from material reality and concrete values, has long been a bugbear of the Right, but what we’re now seeing – with the extreme right in power – is postmodernism in a form so pure that it would make Baudrillard’s head spin. It’s weightless, value-free, disposable, trivial, plagiarized, sniggering. Burned bodies and broken buildings, drowned sailors and terrified civilians: they don’t enter the calculus even enough to warrant a cursory solemnity, or a formulaic gesture of respect. They’re NPCs: non-player characters. They make for lame memes.
The other, harder, less human realities underpinning the war are likewise invisible. Niggling little things like the closure of the Ras Laffan energy complex, the stalling of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the normative effects of ignoring international law, the likely medium-term outcome of decapitating an autocracy with no plan for what follows – and the effects on the global hard-power calculus of using the Pentagon’s limited stocks of multi-million-dollar precision weapons to mount a fireworks display for the socials.
FAFO may be a tough-sounding slogan to accompany a fist-pump if you’re a self-styled Secretary of War preening in front of the cameras. But it also embodies a truth. Reality will tend to get its own back. Dr Johnson had this taped way back when Bishop Berkeley (what passed back then for a trendy postmodernist) offered the conjecture that material reality only came into being when it was perceived. How would the great man refute this conjecture? Dr Johnson kicked a rock: “I refute it thus!” I see sore toes in Pete Hegseth’s future, and by God he will deserve them.
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