Pyrotechnics

In the 1980s, the budgets of mainstream Hollywood cinema exploded, due in part to producers' growing fondness for explosions. And cocaine. When in doubt, the answer was usually one of four options: A.) make something big go boom...  B.) throw in a montage sequence set to terrible music featuring lots of action verbs... C.) include some gratuitous nudity, often accompanied by an equally unnecessary saxophone solo... or D.) do another line of coke, then decide.

Throughout this period, action heroes such as those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone made destruction look cool. Their movies were visceral celebrations of spectacle that invariably presented vengeance as a just and noble motivation for violence. All the while, producers were fueled by an apparently endless supply of terrible ideas that no doubt seemed brilliant at the time. It probably had something to do with all that coke.

"Two words: exploding arrows. The screenplay practically writes itself."

Meanwhile, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union would intermittently reach a boiling point, threatening to thaw out the Cold War like a TV dinner that nobody wanted to eat. On some level, many Americans probably slept a little more soundly at night knowing that their nation has all this badass weaponry capable of such massive and indiscriminate annihilation.

...including Chuck Norris.

Audiences were reminded of this whenever they watched these movies in which the tough guy heroes would commit unauthorized acts of war while spewing vague platitudes about justice and freedom. In every choreographed scene that features one of these over-the-top caricatures of American masculinity blowing shit up with extreme prejudice, it reinforces the fabricated notion that we are the moral arbiters of the world... and any disagreements to this effect will only be met with more explosions. The underlying message here is: Just be thankful that these guys are on our side.

...except Steven Seagal, who officially became a Russian citizen last year.

So Americans like things that go boom. No big surprises there. I hate to say it, but firepower is kind of our thing. Well, that and type two diabetes. We even celebrate our nation's independence every year with explosions. Meanwhile, American action films, particularly those of the era that I am discussing, tend to feature communicatively impaired alpha males operating outside of the law in order to solve complex problems through improvised acts of violence -- you know, kind of like terrorists, only patriotic.

These guys get answers with karate chops and rocket launchers, not diplomacy. This, in turn, has the effect of justifying an interventionist and militaristic foreign policy based upon the exact same premise. That is, just like how the characters embodied by these action stars may "righteously" murder dozens of bad guys and extras in non-speaking roles through excessive displays of force that are often motivated by revenge, the United States does the same thing in the service of neoliberalism under the false flag of democracy.

"They said I could pick out one of them codenames,
too, like in Top Gun. So from now on, call me Doofus."

Take the first Iraq war, for example... except it wasn't called that. It was officially known as Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, which certainly had the effect of making the whole thing seem more like an action movie. It has even since had its own sequel: Operation Iraqi Freedom, and it seems that there may be talk of turning it into a franchise. I'll get to that in a moment.

Back in 1990 and 1991, for the first time, audiences of the televised news had front row seats from which to witness these awe-inspiring explosions from multiple angles, just like in a movie, including night vision POV shots from the bombs themselves. Despite any "collateral damage" (the inhumane euphemism for innocent lives lost -- as if referring to the scores of uncredited extras that get killed in every action movie), it was all justified under the ambiguous banner of freedom. Audiences ate it up.

Action movies, generally speaking, started being less jingoistic, focusing instead on matters of interpersonal violence while increasingly making audiences privy to the scenes that take place between the stuff that they were used to seeing. For more information, see Pulp Fiction... or practically anything else directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Just don't watch it with your grandma.

Today, of course, we have military drones, the operation of which bears an unsettling similarity to video games. Psychologically, they change the idea of combat on both sides of the equation. On the ground, people live in constant fear of drone attacks, and many of them join militias in order to fight back -- because it's kind of all they've got. Meanwhile, from a safe distance behind a command console, drone operators can witness the awesome destructive force of these state-of-the-art weapons while maintaining an emotional detachment from the actual damage caused, both in terms of lives lost and enemies created. From this perspective, a human being is reduced to little more than a pixel on a screen... much like those POV shots from the news coverage of the first Gulf War.

If you stop and think about it, though, the use of drones also marks a clear shift in the stakes of combat. We are essentially fighting humans with dollars. If a drone gets shot down, it can be replaced. No American lives are put at risk. I suspect that's why Obama favored their use so much. Meanwhile, the casualties on the ground, both innocent and otherwise, become martyrs for the oppositional cause, only motivating recruitment in its support. Consider too that to them, our use of drones is a form of terrorism because it operates on exactly the same principle, which is to deny people any sense of security. Drone strikes, much like terrorist attacks, can happen anywhere at any time, and they are just as likely to kill civilians and allies as they are to take out their intended targets.

This brings us to Drumpf. Since I did begin this article with a brief discussion of the 1980s, cocaine and bad ideas, you probably knew that I would get here eventually. Last week, he authorized the use of the "Mother-of-All-Bombs," a 21,000 pound bomb that was so big that it had to be pushed out of a cargo plane and then dropped with a fucking parachute. That sounds like something straight out of a Road Runner cartoon. At the bargain price of only $16 million (presumably purchased from Acme, Inc.), it is said to have taken out 36 ISIS militants. So according to neoliberalism's own tendency to reduce everything to a dollar value, that works out to about $450,000 per bad guy. Meanwhile, of course, most Americans have to take out loans to go to college.

Some heads of state bomb with reluctance, others with glee. Trump has certainly shown his cards in this regard. Yes, it seems that he has set out to grab the whole world by the pussy. Only fueling the fire, so to speak, is all the positive press that he receives for using military force like a locker room bully. Narcissists like him live on shit like that, and this is a man who has already demonstrated a profound disconnect from reality, as well as a psychotic willingness to authorize acts of extreme violence without the approval of Congress or the American people. At this point, we should all be concerned.

In Syria, you may also know that Trump ordered that 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles be fired upon an airbase controlled by the government because of their suspected use of chemical weapons. However, since it has still not been proven that Assad's regime was directly responsible for these attacks, according to international protocol, no action should have been taken before an independent investigation was conducted. Unilateral strikes on a sovereign nation with whom we have not declared war is not ok, no matter who the fuck you think you are.

Despite the ill-informed contentions of America's negotiator-in-chief, the United Nations actually does serve a purpose, which is essentially to resolve issues such as this without resorting to acts of aggression. The UN doesn't just hoard the fees that it collects and then offer as little as possible in return. He must be thinking of private insurance companies.

In all this patriotic posturing, Trump promotes his bullshit image as a tough guy. And while the United States flexes its muscles on the world stage, not only are we provoking our enemies into further conflict, but we are also creating more enemies in the process. What exactly is the endgame here? Or is it naive to think that anyone has actually thought that far ahead?

Consider too that it is entirely possible that ISIS militants (or even some other entity) used chemical weapons and blamed it on the Syrian government for the sake of provocation. It's not that far-fetched. ISIS in particular would love to start a war between the United States and Russia. For a lot of them, bringing about the end of days is kind of what it's all about, and from that fucked-up perspective, what better way to achieve this than by igniting a world war?

And this brings us full circle.

Immediately after the missile strikes on the Syrian airfield, there was an article on NPR that listed the official reactions of different countries. I truly hope that I am wrong on this, but it looks an awful lot like sides are being taken for the next world war. And why is it that Albania always gets picked last?

In closing, here is an awesomely bad clip from the 1989 movie Action USA, which includes some truly unnecessary explosions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koM5VIyipR0*


...but not nearly as unnecessarily as dropping a sixteen-million dollar, ten-and-a-half ton bomb just to show the rest of the world what a tough guy you are.


*Skip ahead to about 1:53 if you want to cut to the chase. I mean that literally. Then prepare to be blown away (not literally).