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I was in New York the night Obama was elected. Harlem residents and Columbia students danced together down 125th street in a rare moment of mutual trust and celebration. We took the street, as we had taken back our country! But then the NYPD rolled up and started forcing everyone onto the sidewalks. Despite a decade of attending protests from anti-war to Occupy, that night was the first and only time I have felt a police shove in the small of my back.
Reading Jo Becker and Scott Shane’s New York Times article about President Obama’s “kill list,”—his hand-picked dartboard of terror suspects at which he aims his drone strikes—I felt shoved aside once again, both by the President’s actions and the story he and his aides felt fit to tell about them.
The article shows a president willing to sideline the citizens of his democracy, and the institutions that are supposed to represent us, in very real ways. Surgical drone strikes allow him to go after targets in Yemen and Somalia without having to wait for a Congressional declaration of war on either country; the targeted assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was justified by shrinking the 5th amendment’s promise of due process to mere executive-branch deliberation. For non-American citizens, the disregard turns deadlier still. One of the most shocking revelations of the piece was that Obama uses a metric for calculating civilian deaths that counts all males of combat age as militants. Innocent until proven guilty indeed.
But, as Tom Engelhardt points out, the article doesn’t just describe an unprecedented use of executive power. It also represents an unprecedented executive media strategy. While the American government has carried out assassinations overseas, during the Cold War and Vietnam, it has never bragged about them to the press. (And you don’t get to interview three-dozen current and former presidential advisers unless someone in the White House wants you to.) Engelhardt writes:
We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.
Indeed, the article advertises Obama as action hero. Watch him turn rage into resolve after a terrorist almost explodes a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day; watch him shoulder the moral burden of determining targets; watch him slash through red tape to make the kill. The article ends with a quote from former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Mr. Leiter: “laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.” That quote could be the tagline for a summer blockbuster. And, indeed, the first thing that comes up when you google “kill list” is the trailer for a film.
The action movie narrative is a troubling one for the leader of a democracy to use. The logic of action films is, after all, profoundly anti-democratic. They present a world in which free society can only be preserved by a secret army of trained killers fending off a secret army of madmen. In other words, a world in which democracy is saved, but ultimately irrelevant—a sort of Matrix into which we plug ourselves while the real struggle goes on offline. The heroes of these films never seem to care much for the people they’re saving—unless that hero is in need of a one night stand.
Image may be NSFW.
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Obama isn’t the first president to style himself as Terminator-in-Chief. But he is perhaps all the more dangerous in that role because he plays it so well. Just compare his calmly confident walk up to the podium to announce Bin Laden’s death with George W. Bush’s “Mission accomplished” pageantry. Whenever Bush went for badass, he ended looking goofy. His face was too pudgy; his mouth often photographed in a state of half-open confusion. Obama, on the other hand, is Hollywood handsome. You wouldn’t laugh if you saw him pose with sunglasses and a machine gun. And you could trust him not to botch the post-kill one liner. He’s already proven he can quip about drone attacks on camera.
Some people have clearly bought into the fantasy he’s selling and are willing to write themselves out of the story. “Thank you, NYT, for your reporting on this important topic. And thank you, President Obama, for being willing to make the really, really tough choices on our behalf,” says one commenter. “I for one am glad this decision doesn’t rest directly on my shoulders,” says another. And yet the story isn’t as convincing as those who leaked it to the press must have hoped: many commenters are also shocked and appalled. This story breaks, after all, little more than a year after Arab Spring proved that a large group of concerned citizens have as much power to affect global politics as one president with a trigger finger or one terrorist with a bomb. It was a moment that shook the U.S. vs. World narrative of the War on Terror. When the protestors from Tahrir Square ordered pizza for the protestors occupying the Wisconsin State capital building, it suggested that we, the ordinary people of the U.S. and Egypt and everywhere, had more in common with each other than any of us did with our leaders.
And it’s this awareness that our leaders fear. In an interview about the New York Times “Kill List” article with Real News, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern theorizes that Obama’s expansion of executive power might be as much about crushing dissent at home as striking down terrorists abroad. He mentions another one of Obama’s controversial actions—the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, which included a clause allowing U.S. citizens to be detained indefinitely if they supported terrorists. How useful would that be, he wonders, if the government declares war on Iran and suddenly finds itself surrounded by 80,000 Occupy-inspired protestors? Thankfully, that clause has since been struck down by a District judge, but it’s initial passage three months after the start of the Occupy protests lends credence to McGovern’s closing words:
There’s no real reaction to these Draconian measures save that you find in Occupy and other people who are realizing that we are the 99 percent, that we have to act like it, and I think that’s what they’re afraid of. It’s sort of a precautionary measure, but it does reflect the kind of fear that they feel.
In McGovern’s view, the government is not ignoring our rights as it wages its secret drone war; it is actually targeting them. Sooner or later, we all become the innocents disappeared into the category of combatant.
That may be true, or it may be a paranoid fantasy. In either case, the action-movie narrative pushed forward in the article is as much a part of the attack as the NDAA. Will we amass to protest a war with Iran if we believe in the noble figure of Obama taking out the evildoers? Our leaders may see us as the enemy, but they want us to see ourselves as irrelevant.
Images via IFC Films, The Nation