Anon03/11/26, 16:38No.1496318
There is also a none-too-subtle signal in the characters the White House has chosen for the videos. For one thing, they are almost all male, in keeping with the administration’s use of social-media memes to reach out to young men and its rhetoric of restoring masculinity, especially to the military. In the words of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man, who opens one video, the subtext is “Daddy’s home.”But also, look at the kind of men the videos enlist. Christopher Reeve’s Superman pledging to fight for “truth, justice and the American Way” segues straight into Walter White of “Breaking Bad” snarling, “I am the danger.” Maximus from “Gladiator” and the dark warrior Kylo Ren from “Star Wars” share equal billing.What do they have in common? Mainly, a reputation for kicking ass. Otherwise, heroes, antiheroes and villains are interchangeable here. There is no good and evil, only strength and weakness, winning and losing.This is not necessarily the philosophy of the works from which the memes are snipped and clipped. The “Star Wars” franchise, for all its laser blasts, is full of cautions against punitive warfare and giving in to hate. “Gladiator” was an indictment of a society that turned blood sport into theater. (“Are you not entertained?”)But the White House’s Iran videos espouse no ideals beyond domination and power. There is little sense in them of the war’s purpose, besides to be won. The message can be summed up in the refrain of Miami XO’s much-memed song “Bazooka,” used in one video: “Ka-blow/Ka-boom.”This is not the first administration to be accused of taking a desensitizing approach to military imagery. In 1991 the Pentagon briefings in Operation Desert Storm, with their emphasis on bloodless footage of high-tech weaponry, were accused of ushering in an era of “Nintendo War.”