Killing Bin Laden: The Television Series
Every episode begins with a story told by the Retired Analyst:
Certain basic realities have escaped us. This is a good time to remember.
Contemporary war is not about human beings. It is not about ideologies or clashes of or between anything and anything else.
Contemporary war is about procurement and logistics.
Procurement: every gun and bullet for every gun comes from somewhere.
Logistics: every gun and every bullet for every gun has to be moved from one place to another.
Multiply that so it reaches a scale that includes all aspects of fighting. Multiply that again to reach a scale that includes all aspects of moving, sheltering, feeding, clothing and entertaining an armed force.
Procurement and logistics are the primary functions of the vast machine that drives the American economy.
Of course war itself is a commodity as well. It is the product of a manufacturing. And it must be moved about.
The idea of a hunt for Bin Laden was central to the definition of the war commodity. Any actual hunting was entirely incidental.
A decade ago, we sent a letter to the government of Pakistan. Dear Government of Pakistan. We know where Bin Laden is. We have always known where he is. When it suits us, we will come get him. You will, of course, protest. Thank you.From there we looked for him carefully everywhere he was not. We rarely ventured outside of where he was not because when we did the danger increased that we would accidentally find him. We expended considerable energy preventing accidental discovery.
Sometimes where he was not was quite close to where he was. Don't be next door to here, we would say. Don't make us come over there and look.
Bin Laden's importance as a focal point presupposed this absence of events.
He was a ghost from the beginning.
The actual killing of Bin Laden marks the end of a phase of accelerated procurement.
I assume it happened by mistake.
Viewers get to put together the parts.
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Author's Note
I saw a teaser for an upcoming series (show?) on the Discovery Channel called "Killing Bin Laden." It promised to be some fetishy thing with a bit of televised (reconstituted) execution thrown in the mix. So the show itself isn't fictional. This version is. What the Retired Analyst says, however, you can define for yourself.
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Well thought.
I have always agreed with war as a manufacturing and consumption process.
It's fine as long as you don't look at pictures of the marketing program.
Stephen, I come to your work with a fair degree of sympathy, having read several of your pieces. So my point here is a more general one. It's easy to miss whatever degree of doubleedgeness you're intending with this piece, since on a cursory reading one might easily overlook the importance of the opening - that it's the retired analyst speaking. No matter - that's a problem with reading out-of-context pieces. If you don't keep that opening firmly in mind, you'd have to critique the piece mainly for its political content. You might be inclined to say then that it's a series of simplicities. A shallow analysis of something far more complex. A depiction of man-in-the-street cynicism. Maybe even a satire on some other leftist satire. However, because of the opening I don't jump to enumerating these or other possibilities (nor of course to agreeing or disagreeing with any of them). All I can really say is that the piece is a good example of the dilemma facing a writer dealing with political content. Do you pin yourself honestly to the ideas/arguments in the content, or ironise it behind some fictional device? You're probably doing the latter. I can't be sure because of its out-of-contextness. I note however that most serious writers seem shit scared of dealing front-on with 'social' or 'political' content, preferring the relative safety of more imaginative fictional subject matter.
thanks very much for the reads and comments.
eamon--interesting...on the piece itself, i had in mind the speech ned beatty gave in chayevsky's "network" as the idea behind the analyst's story.
the piece is a double television narrative. the parts are clear & simple. the point of the piece as a whole really is to put the reader in the position of holding the two narratives in place at the same time. so to put you in a position of trying to co-ordinate and figure out what is going on. from there, it refers to itself as a piece and to the idiocy of the packaging of the killing, to the tv show, and to the "war on terror" circus beyond that.
judging from the comments i think the piece works...
it's a documentary narrative to an extent (the letter to pakistan was revealed this past week and says more or less what the analyst claims). the characterization of modern war comes from paull virillio, his book "pure war" in particular.
the context question is one i've been thinking about a lot. these political piece seem to me tied to a kind of information climate, which they come out of and refer back to by reprocessing. the two pieces that i've made about this whole bin laden farce feel to me quite tied to a transient context. i'm not sure how they'll work in a few months....my suspicion is that "fuck yeah america" will fare better, but i don't know. so there is a context that's broader than the television show that prompted the piece.
i've been finding it interesting to mirror back aspects of that context as a kind of mapping project. it's also kind of a challenge because to do it i have to hold my academic side back and resist developing larger, more comprehensive narratives in order to focus on the fragmentary and give it room to breathe.
making maps of a fading empire is an interesting project, i think.
larry: sometimes i can't tell where the line is between being politically opposed to the national-security state model and a sense that our intelligences are being insulted by the shabby packaging of the model, its objectives and functions.
Re yr academic urges. I understand what you mean(I think). You have to let the fiction speak its own complexities. Not be a vehicle for some agenda.
A very challenging form is fiction, if it contains challenging ideas.