If you want to get the unfiltered skinny on how the never-ending war with Iran is going, it’s written in the dust. Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi reported this week that U.S. service members marooned in the Persian Gulf have been expressing themselves in messages fingered onto a dusty aircraft flap. The anonymous graffiti, which calls to mind the helmet scrawls of disgruntled soldiers in Vietnam, include “Operation Epstein Fury,” “Peace deal #64 incoming … ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” and “Bibi’s cucks.” Sounds like things aren’t going so well! “I have no frame of reference, I can’t compare it to the sentiments of U.S. soldiers in previous conflicts,” Parsi wrote. “But I suspect these are new sentiments, or at least a new willingness to express them this openly and directly.”
Whether these sentiments are new is indeed unclear, but it’s not without a frame of reference. Trump has always been fairly explicit in his disrespect for the grunts who do most of the work—and all of the dying—in this racket that we call “war.”
I have some friends in the military and they have a running percentage of how many bases they’ve been to lately running Fox News in common areas, because unfortunately that reliably influences a lot of folks. I’ve heard it’s been going down since Trump came back into office. So that’s hopeful.
A little over a decade ago, I was stationed at a base in the US, working on a huge IT helpdesk that catered to bases across an entire region of the world. We had two TVs in the room, one on each side wall. They were always muted with subtitles, but one was always on Fox News and the other was always on CNN.
It was interesting seeing major news reporting from both sides of the aisle (back when CNN was very left-leaning). We shared our helpdesk with a civilian IT company and they would regularly unmute the Fox News side after-hours. So during nightshift, we unfortunately got a bit more exposure to right-wing media.
The front wall of the room had a bunch of large monitors with live network maps and status charts for all our bases. At night, I would connect to one of those large monitors and stream movies to it. It usually distracted my shift away from the news.
Bahahahahahaha
Like in another dimension? Because I still wouldn’t believe it.