I've been following recent events in Yemen with great interest. And I just watched Lawrence of Arabia (for the first time ever, shame on me). And it's 9/11, of course, the 25th anniversary of that fatal wound to American empire that we're only now finally getting around to dying of.
So I'm thinking a lot about the Middle East and imperialism and historical destiny and all that. A bunch of dudes in flip-flops are stunting on the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces, with all their F-15s and Abrams tanks. The Saudi military and their Yemeni proxies and their mercenaries, are, of course, frauds, as a fighting force goes. Imposters. And of course the Yemeni government (the actual, if internationally unrecognized, Yemeni government affiliated with Ansarallah, the so-called Houthis) are a bunch of imposters too, in a sense. In more than one sense—in that they're not recognized as the legitimate government of the country (despite governing areas containing the vast majority of the population), and also in that they have little or no training in statecraft or experience running a government or anything like that. But they manage. And in that, they're not so different from the Saudis. Or the Americans.
When Lindsey Graham died a couple months ago, lots of stories about him circulated. My favorite, the one I think is most telling, is this, a recounting in his own words of his long climb up the ladder of power:
When I was first elected to the House, I looked for the they. They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they. I went to the Senate. But there was still no they. And then I started to get invited to the White House, and to closed-door briefings, and to meetings with top officials. No they. What I finally realized is that there is no they. There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.
It's imposters all the way down. Pete Hegseth is more obviously a fraud as Secretary of Defense (or War or whatever) than past officeholders, and Donald Trump is more obviously a fraud as President of the United States, and the SAAF are more obviously a poor simulacrum of a real military, and so on and so forth, but these phenomena (and our panoptic media environment) are all just pulling back the thinnest veneer of credibility from a bunch of shit that's always been this way. Was Lyndon Johnson a serious statesman? He blundered ever deeper into the Vietnam War and destroyed his legacy because he didn't want people to think his dick was small. Was the U.S. military ever a credible hegemon, or did it just coast for decades on the empty threat that if you bombed every American base in your vicinity off the map, something much worse would happen to you than a dried-out neo-Nazi alcoholic calling you names and drone-striking a few wedding parties?
This is all scary and grotesque and disorienting, but it's empowering too. Empowering politically, because the people in charge, who want you to think that they're wise and capable masters of the universe and that the pathetic little likes of you couldn't possibly handle the pressure and the responsibility and the complexity of what they deal with (and that you can't ask for, or even hope for, things to get meaningfully better), are mostly clueless dipshits, and any random American grabbed off the street could probably do a better job than they do, and don't let them tell you otherwise. But empowering personally, too. You want to write a book, start a band, create a game, but you're not a real writer, not a real musician, not a real designer? Sure you are! You're already better at all of that stuff than George W. Bush ever was at being president. I believe in you.
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