over and over

a missile vanishes in the reservoir and the soldiers do not say anything. two men abandon their car. the sky is paroxystic now and the fire wails. if it is day then it is dark and if it is night then it is dark and either way it is almost black but even then the sky is browner. a man wanders on the shoulder. this very typical walk away from things, slower and with little intention and there is no sound and so no one screams. the missile is gone now and what did not get burnt up has gone flying at whatever was around it at the time. the men do not look troubled or hurt by any of it. the fire won’t stop and the bridge still stands. hell has opened in tehran, and the united states is reportedly dismayed.

firm lines of gold and orange and red sit behind three black missiles descending on two round figures sitting in a field of brown squiggles and just beneath the blacked-out remains of buildings. a speech bubble appears between the figures. the phrase robert reich chooses to fill the bubble is written by a reader named susan robbins. it reads “just another attempt to distract from the epstein files.” sitting in his brooklyn apartment, a man laughs and says it is the way to cope. a few weeks later, in a video impossibly glossy and well-produced but with reich sitting in a chair in what appears to be his home, reich tells us to protest and in his two-and-a-half minute plea uses the word peacefully five times.

because the bombs fell from israeli planes and the bombs are likely american in origin; because for all intents and purposes the bombs are american. and an american bomb must fall a certain way. the relevant authorities must be consulted, the cause brought to the public, the papers stamped, the troops mustered, the media notified, and the rules of engagement followed. and were a bomb to fall anyway, we were generally told that the bomb was not our own and if it was our own it needed to fall right there and if it maybe did not need to fall right there then certainly we could not have been expected to sit on our hands while tyrants ran free and if we were wrong altogether then it was the fault of rogues and the men in charge could not be expected to know precisely what it is they agreed to order.

it is thought that somewhere between three to five million americans took to the streets in protest of the war, for all reasons and to whatever end. these millions were but a handful of the 150-200 million opposed to the war. they were everywhere and walked everywhere and used enough posterboard to keep staples solvent for decades. speeches were made in the shadows of skyscrapers and beneath century-old oak trees, some 3,200 of them in the span of a few weeks on saturdays and sundays and whenever people could get off work. the same smiling and dancing, the usual refrains rattled windows and a helicopter hovers above and to the pilot it must all sound like noise and the crowds must not seem to move. the american politic confined to an exclusive catalog of expected response; thus to a kind of inertia.

32 countries are set to release oil reserves in the coming days; it is reported that corporations are preparing for the price for a barrel of crude to eclipse $200. iran has in effect closed down the strait of hormuz, and it is reported that just short of two weeks ago the final barrel of crude routed through hormuz has been unloaded in california. but the leftist understands it is not about the oil. it might be about the oil because oil is the first and second and third order of all things, is all of the things and it needs to pass without interruption; the problem of iran as it is generally understood. but it is not about the oil. a flailing regime will seek in violence a kind of unity of purpose impractical any other way; the capture of a resource-rich entrepôt as a logical response to systemic crisis.

the smoke trembling in the sky now, gushing all over itself and convulsing, and it does not seem like it will stop. the fire nips at the ankles and it is burping loudly and all the time. the people scream and the stone begins to melt. from a distance an iranian records the explosion and when you get to the top not even the fire gets through and the smoke does not move; from a distance it is almost calm, this doric towering over persia.

a trans women-led marxist-leninist group in bed-stuy hosts a vigil for khameini, and “all victims of amerikan imperialism.” a man in new orleans buys a bike, reasoning that gas is getting too expensive and this fucking war isn’t gonna end anytime soon. a consultant in sacramento tells her client that now is the time to pounce on trump. a scottish woman in malibu smiles and tells us the islamists must be brought to their knees. the failure of the liberal order to supply means of redress beyond the simple expression of discontent; or perhaps its crowning achievement.

there is a story about cambodia you will hear sometimes. the figure of sihanouk, a king out of time, later on deposed by his own people and desperate for power. and of pol pot, the revolutionary son of a wealthy family, educated by the catholics and sick to death of the big men who ran cambodia, this very typical character. the story goes that king sihanouk did not want war in cambodia. he wanted the throne and its trappings, the power and he did not believe america would win in vietnam; the vietminh asked to travel through and he obliged. and the americans never asked sihanouk if they could mine the jungle and he did not say anything when they did; it is thought that today there remain between four to six million landmines across cambodia.

but the story goes that sihanouk was never much interested in the act of governance and pol pot was never much fit for the role. sihanouk was deposed in 197(?) and the story goes that pol pot needed sihanouk to rally the peasantry and sihanouk could not have reclaimed his throne without the masses, and the story goes that together these men took power. in the interest of liberation, pol pot would say, in the soil and in the relentless pursuit of socialism. the killing fields came later, and within months of pol pot’s reign the cities were emptied and citizens made to wear the same black uniforms. under his rule, some 1.3 million cambodians would die; the mass graves in which they were buried are some of the largest ever discovered. *the fact of liberation rendered subordinate to its pretension, creating a state that can exist only in appearance. *

and it was a quagmire in vietnam. there was nothing exceptional about it. young men were drafted to fight there because not enough people volunteered and the young men were not supposed to be there all that long. schlesinger says the war was a big train comin’ and for a while there it didn’t seem to be moving at all, but in 1969, americans saw villages burned all the way down and children running scared in the streets in an issue of life, and within days 250,000 gathered in washington, d.c. to tell their leaders in no uncertain terms that it must be brought to a stop, and of course it didn’t end for another seven years, but even still nixon understood that so long as his great silent majority did not speak, he could not move about as he pleased. all conventional means of resistance within a liberal democracy require a government responsive to its citizenry and compliant with its constitution.

and yet this great cloud still hangs over tehran. the fullest kind of cloud, impossibly dark and it looks so heavy and if you saw it floating towards you, you would not leave your house. it is made of sulfur dioxide and benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other poisons oil creates when it explodes. acid comes falling down when it rains, and apparently the acid hurts no more than lemon juice. and in 20 years low-res, mildly transparent images of documents and dollar bills that do not really look like anything and a bold blue bar and there is no music but the words read “if you or a loved one were in such and such part of the city on such and such date, and have suffered from such and such cancers and/or diseases as a result, you might be entitled to financial compensation,” and a judge looks solemnly to the room of people who do not have very long to live and says that this can never happen again. the means of redress the bombing will supposedly deliver to the backwards and the oppressed; that is, the structure which produces a particular admission of particular wrongdoing, decoupled from its cause, and thus

the other story is of two tracks, running in parallel. on one side is an israel that came to be not so long ago on land filled with people who had lived there centuries. holy and perfect and ancient this dirt and when netanyahu sticks his hand in the soil, he knows it was always his. but a missile hits tel aviv and in seconds netanyahu says all those centuries of pogroms and genocide writhe in his belly. it is an old hurt and he says that at this point if he sits down he knows it will eat him alive; almost out of his control, the bombs and hellfire and the shocking hunger of the children who’ve never known a world that cared at all if they lived or died. the settler-colony, premised on the denial of its true and basic shape, cannot feel shame.

on the other side is the united states. it is the troops of sheridan and the massacre of big sandy creek, it is black kettle waking up in the dead of night and it is the train tracks cutting clear across the arapaho’s ancestral hunting grounds and deputies in georgia in the 1870s drawing up all the right papers with all the right charges that make possible once again that supposedly dead kind of slavery. it is the big hollywood sign and the trucks carrying water once a week to the navajo reservation and the children who are thirsty and a couple hundred miles away a woman showers in los angeles. more specifically it is reagan and more specifically it is the two decades before him and the dream he left to rot and men left without good work and rent too damn high. it is this man standing on our screens and he tells us that we will no longer rely on the goodwill of barbarians to sell us our oil and drive up our prices, and it is these men and women listening because they are hungry and so desperately do they want the good times to return and when those bombs fall they feel free for a moment and to them this is what america was always supposed to be and centuries undoubtedly hang in that cloud over tehran.

the war is happening very clearly now, not a million steps but with real purpose and with the right name attached from the beginning. there will be no pat tillman this time around, no man shocked enough to give up everything and rush across the atlantic to defend his country and no soldier shocked enough by the terror to abandon his post and when the children drop dead no great wrong will be righted. it is a war, a war, a war, fought because it is a war and will end because again it is a war, and none of it for any other reason than that it is a war. a society terribly rid of itself, the peculiar fact of its age and the boldness of its action.

the men and women who fight this war joined the military for the promise of a better, more stable life. often from those places we have left to starve and people who did not quite know what else to do. the common narrative is that the army paid and fed and housed them, and with a little luck, the army will educate them. some will fight and some will learn to operate a drone and others will simply work in the mess. in time they all hope to assume a common role in civilian life neither privileged nor troubled, in that dim little home on the edge of downtown columbus. *the citizens begin not to stir but to while away, It’s * they will likely not desert in record numbers and when they come back home the people will probably not muster the energy to spit at their feet.

https://x.com/whitehouse/status/2030051395294941427?s=61 because it is also this, this official white house video with black-and-white drone footage of airstrikes in tehran with ray lewis laying out pierre garcon right when all the debris flies into the air like they know that is what we want. that it is very much this new world,

rid of the framers who did not want to defile the constitution with the term “slaves” and the contrivance of the little vial colin powell holds up to coax us to action and the long shadow of the tyrants who wanted us dead that peculiar object of paranoia, syncretic and perpetual and all-encompassing, to which even the most committed liberal must defer and all these things we really wanted to believe we would and more importantly would not do, at least without a good reason, and only if absolutely necessary and even then we would bow our heads and avert our eyes when we pushed the big red button the virtue of the liberal democracy, that is, the pretension of contrition and the reluctant, though unabated, pursuit of its supposed defense and now the empire is lost at sea, hungry and destitute and very clearly the tumors have taken it, and now it is thrashing violently and we are overcome with this profound nothingness, an endlessly abstract feeling that this is not how things should be and and the roots of this tree stretch clear to the center of the earth but the disorder as a means of reassurance, as terror, as this great crucible upon which the liberal state must temporarily assert itself through illiberal means, knocking thus back into joint at this very moment the state’s ephemeral moral promise but alone on these grounds did the empire come alive and it had to be just on paper, had to seem and appear legitimate, all those deputies filing papers they knew no one would care to read and treaties brokered with the indigenous that they could not understandfor no other reason than that to her, sitting high above on a golden throne with her eyes covered in rags and her chin held proud, we had to plead our case, an that democratic virtue of justification, of the elaboration of the cause of state action, undermined by and, at the same time, undermining–this presumed archon of democratic virtue, the outsourcing to the Other these sense-making means but we can just do away with the giant tower of paper and do precisely what it is we want to do because we know now, we have to know now that we’d just sit here and watch it anyway, this trained abdication of civic order, that the citizens within it learn not to speak up, this almost-cosmic tragedy of the unspeakable will lurching through still all these structures of state power, trained, and yet training all these bombs and we don’t even march up that very short street and bust through the windows demand to know why and this body lying on the floor but it doesn’t even have a gunshot wound no stippling in its chest just this pile of drool and the simple fact of the matter is that we must actually like it.