OPINION:
George Orwell was rude enough to point out the truth about political rhetoric: “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
That warning seems especially trenchant today, although there is no telling what Orwell would do with social media or, more specifically, political memes.
I mention this because a few days ago, presumably in response to a question about the Trump administration’s social media offerings related to current combat operations in the Middle East, a “senior White House official” (so someone who is probably no less than a special assistant to the president of the United States and thus should know better) told Politico: “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude. There’s an entertainment factor to what we do. But ultimately, it boils down to the fact that no one has ever attempted to communicate with the American public this way before.”
There is probably a good reason no one has ever tried to communicate with adolescent fantasy memes what war might look like if it were a Marvel production.
Let’s be as gentle as we can be. This sort of thing trivializes and, in its own way, minimizes the importance of a decision — made by the president and Congress and executed by Americans in the military — to go to war. The reality of war is considerably uglier than “banger memes.”
The plain and terrible fact is that during a war, humans kill other humans, usually for reasons that are less than clear. This moment is no different. Numerous objectives have been offered: to change regimes, to reduce the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program or its ballistic missiles (are there other kinds?), to manage the Israelis, to give Iran the beating it has been tempting for 50 years.
There is no clue as to which one(s) might be the real objective(s). No one has shared whatever plan there might be for victory, or even what victory might look like.
To reduce the killing of other humans in real life to a set of memes is to reduce the humanity of soldiers on all sides.
In this particular conflict, you can include the few thousand unfortunate civilians, including schoolchildren. I’m betting we don’t see any clever memes about dead civilians, including dead children or wounded or dead Americans.
The veterans of this conflict, like the veterans of all conflicts, will carry its (hopefully light) burden for the rest of their lives. Let’s not even get started on the wounded or those who loved and will miss the dead.
In short, a shooting war, like the one in which we find ourselves, is very serious business in which lots of terrible things happen to people on all sides. Everyone who has ever seen a war knows that, which is why no one, and certainly no U.S. government official, has yet been guided by some sort of “entertainment factor” while informing American citizens about a war.
War is usually the last resort, and rightly so. President Trump should make clear that the effort underway requires the utmost seriousness of purpose. Communicating the gravity of that purpose and its cost in human lives requires maturity at least equal to that of the people we are sending into harm’s way, dude.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.