So it happened, something that I knew was inevitable -- the shot of a Chinook helicopter leaving the US Embassy in Kabul (pricetag $800 million) with the eerie resemblance to the famed Hubert Van Es shot of the people lining up to get on the Air America chopper waiting on the roof of the CIA building on Gia Long Street in Central Saigon in 1975.
The cynic in me assumes that some photographer scoped out that very angle over the past week, as the fall of Kabul became inevitable.
Of course there will be many, many dumb takes in the coming days -- hell, they're already starting to pile up.
There will be the unreconstructed Bush-era neocons who openly advocate a forever war (David Frum, Max Boot, and Co.) have migrated over to the Democrats, and they will be pushing every image of suffering in an attempt to tug your heartstrings and try to convince you that this is somehow your responsibility (while of course remaining silent about American complicity in Syria, Libya, Yemen...). There will be the poor deluded Afghans who worked hand in hand with the American puppet state and still somehow think the US had even half a chance to turn Afghanistan into a functioning democracy -- I mean, after all, there are still former VNA officers waving the red-and-yellow striped flag of South Vietnam around the Asian enclaves of South Seattle. Of course America's ruddy-jowled Trumpy uncles will loudly declaim that this would never have happened in an America made great again, before they keel over from Cheesy Gordita Crunch-related complications.
Secretary of State Blinken of course had to respond that America won in Afghanistan (winner of this year's Robert McNamara Memorial Prize for Military-Industrial Doublespeak). Meanwhile, part-time Cthulhu worshipper Mitch McConnell said nah, fuck it, send more troops in, and talked about the "embarrassment of a superpower laid low," as if this superpower wasn't laid low by our nation's failures in Iraq, and as if a quasi-functioning Afghanistan wasn't just a house of cards that could be taken out by the Taliban in a week's time.
I was 14 when 9/11 happened. The general mood in the classroom in Mrs. Woodman's 10th grade French class was basically "whoaaaa, dude." There was a lot of talk on the media about coming together as a nation. What I basically felt, though, even as a 14 year old, was just an innate sense of the fuckedness of things to come.
You all know what happened next. How Afghanistan was invaded with a bare minimum of a rationale. How many years of idiotic flag-waving, how many lives lost and ruined as a result. How many smiling executives at Halliburton and Lockheed Martin. How many smug New York Times editorials about "responsible global leadership" or some similarly dumb non-concept. How many empty promises by Obama and Trump about ending the conflict. How many strands of the social safety net in America -- or what's left of it -- shredded in the name of fiscal responsibility even as the Pentagon budget grew ever more bloated.
Over the years of course, the war itself simply became background noise, an occasional disaster from the far side of the planet, mediated largely through Predator strikes. There were so many of them, and America was tangentially involved in most of them. They became one more horror which barely registered in 2015 or so, a few inches of scanned text on a news site between the latest dish on Kim and Kanye and an ad for dick pills.
Possibly my favorite joke of all time:
Q: What's the difference between a Jihadi training camp and a Pakistani primary school?
A: Don't ask me, I'm just a drone pilot.
In memoriams to American veterans over the past several years, the various military imbroglios of the early 21st Century have all become lumped together, and veterans of all conflicts great and small are classified as having participated in the "war on terror." The nebulous verbiage of the Bush administration has become accepted as standard terminology, because the whole thing is so clumsy that to actually name the geographies and conflicts would almost be a tacit acceptance of their failures and ineptitudes.
Well now it took 20 years, 3 trillion dollars, and countless Afghans vaporized through drone and conventional warfare, and this is what we get as a final thought: the predictable image of a helicopter on a roof -- little more than a meme.
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