Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper
| I. (I dreamt you up in third grade.) Ultra-cool & promo slick, a predatory dart zip-lining threads of nimbi, unmanned, over darkling continents, your bot-brain is a paragon of focus & yet mechanizedly desireless, as self-aware as silverware, & thus incapable of cruelty when delivering laser-guided missiles calibrated to fountain a small bus full of explosives into a contained puff above a crowded marketplace, or slip eel-like through a cave's oculate within the Hindu Kush. Your blurry, thermal aerial view beset with squared crosshairs a rookie war director's owlet dream: oblivious vermin swept up with gestural efficiency from heights that confer the necessary filmic distance of omniscience, as if each strike were a warrant fulfilled by reason abiding divine instruction: Michelangelo's God fist-bumping Adam. Edited & packaged, a select few videoed assaults ship to media outlets as evidence, an impressive staging intent to show a public what humdrum work war's become—locate, track, eviscerate. Replicate. From these spare scenes of bombed & reconfigured wreckages of cars & buildings ghosting though a dusty plume arrives a satisfying vengeance for the loss of Sgt. Elias from Platoon, those spry young Wolverines in Red Dawn, & my uncle's waking battle dreams (of the Vietnam variety) that go unmentioned in advertisements peddling the mastery of thumb-numbing single-shooter POV games for Xbox & PlayStation as a skill set, with once implausible credits transferable to active military duty. O to be gamers & destroyers, with each ethereal tick a countdown aria to roadside decimation or the anticipated readiness of microwaved pizza— I'm on YouTube again watching a task force seize a desert outpost, the offal opulence of awful ordinance as witnessed by a documentarian's hand-held, an eye unsteady in its capturing, but never insecure. By firefight an anecdotal oral history begins developing its authors, these servicemen & -women who user-posted comments identify as members of Generation Kill. Soldiers passing soccer balls to poor kids an errant attempt to dupe a viewer into moral alliance & engage the heart's surrender, but as the camera goes downrange, still settings shiver with heat & the sudden dubstep beat drops its discharge of epinephrine, pumps us for the possibility of a shootout & invasive human plumage: gut-shots, headshots, Hajji hematomas (& never a dead American), the BBC-style coverage devolving into Bang-Bang Club badassery, moments spliced for detachment via destabilizing rapidity. The first tank shot a Globe theatric to begin the operatic picaresque: Pafghaniraq: the Musical. Ubi sunt & heretofore? Let the bodies hit the floor. Dulce et decorum est? You wanted in and now you're here. / Driven by hate, consumed by fear. The tanks roll in, the tanks roll out. But Reaper, where they cannot go, you can—& suddenly we're Superman! Eye in the sky, womb with a view. You whizz to the rescue, my childhood A.I. dream's apotheosis as M.Q. Joe, as a voice narrating the hunt regurgitates post-Towers ideologies— the kind of stuff we get from news sources instead of news—& a superstructure emerges, with themes equating learnedness with subversive otherness & might with right, which Heaven atones, advocating our patriotic, righteous will-to-power. & I get why we heart the hype. Your sleek iBomb design is haute Apple adorable: the extended wingspan, the ball turret cam. Viewed full-frontal, Hellfire missiles hang loosely clamped to the horizon of your asterisk body, itself a fusion of X-Wing Fighter & Lambda-class Imperial Shuttle from Star Wars, a sexy sort of curvilinear Geek Goddess whose forehead slope recalls the stately dolphin fish, rear propeller the whirr of a rubber-banded planophore. Behold our Indian Springs Sphinx, riddled with weapons. But your work is deadly serious: to split atmospheres & genealogies alike, & do to human beings what bunker busters do to basements. In my child's mind you were precise, able to de-install a dictator as effortlessly as any computer virus, a typed command & poof, *democracy*. But the reality is always trickier: while pursuing the enemy you also catch civilians, & often, a fact that crass reporters reduce to food metaphor (in order to make an omelet) & zealots to allegory (God makes his omelets with American cheese), but a truth remains: when targeting al-Qaeda, jihadists, & the Taliban, you snatch the heads off schoolchildren. Actual little kids, with families smothered in radii of blast circles & a bloody sampling of bystanders. The Brookings Institution puts your civilian-to-militant kill ratio in Pakistan at 10:1. Possibly. New America Foundation says 1:6. Maybe. Actual numbers unavailable. I click from collateral damage to Google Maps, satellite zoom to downtown, & comb rooftops for the faintest fraction of your form hovering Ground Zero because I've read you minnow those twin blue columns of memorial light as New York's newest National Guard. I can't help but imagine what future recon missions Cuomo might commission. Will you one day sweep & clear meth labs? Will you whistle just above our neighborhoods, a goodly beat cop who when alerted turns bag snatchers into smatterings of gore a blogged cartoon Giuliani might welcome as graffiti? Or would you just zap terrorists? & could we as Americans stomach accidents? A collapsed school gym, a Park Slope bar, the IFC, NYU, or BAM? In my dream you spiral slowly overhead in a droning corona of mechanized security, attentive as any parent. Are you the border patrol or the border? In your harmonious hum I hear George Carlin proselytizing on flamethrowers, a confluence of human ingenuity (How do I throw fire from here—) & what our culture embraces as a necessary wickedness (—on people over there?), as if the bargain struck with sentience was having to fulfill its darker innovations. Will the ramifications of your exploits serve as a parable, or dictate foreign policy? Do robot assassins outstrip the honor of our enemy, or us? This is not, I think, an academic question, unless we really wish to own the role of a global hobgoblin, dining expansively at the expense of others, crematoriums stirring in our cocktails. |
