thenation--2020-05-13--If You Want to Honor US Soldiers, Start by Questioning Our Military

“ Every day is a copy of a copy of a copy.
” That meme , from the moment when Edward Norton ’ s character in Fight Club offers a 1,000-yard stare at an office copy machine , captures this moment perfectly—at least for those of us removed from the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis .
Isolated inside a Boston apartment , I typically sought new ways to shake the snow globe , to see the same bubble—the same stuff—differently .
Quarantine has entered a new season .
The month of May has brought daffodils and barbecue grills .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And every Friday at 7 pm , residents in my neighborhood hang out of their windows to bang pots and cheer until they get tired ( usually , about two minutes later ) .
It ’ s a nice gesture to healthcare workers , a contemporary doff of the cap , but does it change anything ?
Perhaps it ’ s just another permutation of that old American truism : If you ’ re getting thanked for your service , you ’ re in a job where you ’ re getting shafted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s “ invisible enemy ” spasms on and we ’ re regularly reminded that health care workers , dangerously ill-equipped , must beg for personal protective equipment .
But this Memorial Day , the 18th during America ’ s War on Terror , our national focus is likely to shift , even if only momentarily , to the soldiers who are still fighting and dying in a self-perpetuating war , now under pandemic conditions .
Reflecting on my own time as a soldier deployed to combat in Afghanistan , I hope that Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and “ national security ” really should mean .
My suggestion : If you want to honor soldiers this Memorial Day , start by questioning the US military .
With this on my mind , and all alone in that apartment , I knew exactly where to look for inspiration .
Just before deploying to Kandahar , Afghanistan , in May 2009 , I bought a journal .
It was brown , faux-leather , and fit in the hip pocket of Army combat trousers .
It wasn ’ t particularly nice—just something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nonetheless , my soldiers ribbed me for it .
“ Dear diary , ” they snickered .
“ No , no , this is a war journal , ” I would reply , imagining such a distinction as sufficiently manly to overcome whatever stigma they had when it came to this self-appointed diarist .
At first , journaling was a distraction .
I captured images of my platoon , a lovable assemblage of misfits and Marlboro men .
But soon , that journal acquired a more macabre tone , its lines filling with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ amputated limbs , and funerals playing out in a page-by-page street fight of scribbles and scratch-outs .
On a humdrum route-clearance patrol on our fourth day in-country , before the unit of soldiers we were replacing even had a chance to depart , my squad leader ’ s vehicle was catastrophically destroyed by a roadside bomb .
We loaded four broken , bloody , ketamine ’ d soldiers onto an Air MEDEVAC helicopter en route to urgent care at Kandahar Airfield .
( At this rate , I realized , my platoon of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ month . )
I reassured the soldier who was most coherent that he was “ going to be okay.
” Truth was : I didn ’ t know .
And what did “ okay ” in battlefield injury-speak even mean ?
A quadruple amputee with a pulse ?
Years of horrific facial reconstruction surgeries ?
Or maybe , with luck , merely a traumatic brain injury or a single leg amputation below the knee , which my wounded friends from Walter Reed Hospital called “ a paper cut.
” For this soldier , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ broken bones and lacerations bad enough to send him home , but not bad enough to keep him there .
He was stitched-up and sent back to war five months later .
When he finally returned to America , in Oregon , he murdered and dismembered someone he didn ’ t even know in a bathtub .
Then he stole the dead man ’ s car to rob a bank .
He ’ s currently serving life in prison .
But such stories , however raw and urgent they felt , were small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just one platoon in a big , ugly mess of a war , committing acts of political violence against people we didn ’ t know for reasons we didn ’ t fully understand .
Although I was told that I ’ d be “ fighting terrorism ” in Afghanistan , most of the people our unit was killing turned out to be teenagers or angry farmers with legitimate grievances , people tired of America ’ s never-ending occupation of their land , tired of our country ’ s contemptuous devaluation of Afghan lives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my own soul , I couldn ’ t blame them for fighting back .
Had I been in their shoes , I would have done the same .
You probably won ’ t be surprised to learn that the US military did not encourage me to think too much or too deeply about the morality of the war I was fighting .
A popular military aphorism was : “ stay in your lane.
” And so I jotted down my real thoughts in private and continued with the “ mission , ” whatever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be no coherent plan or strategy , something fully substantiated when , late last year , The Washington Post released “ the Afghanistan Papers , ” secret and frank interviews by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan with top US commanders and officials .
That brown journal of mine lived through a lot and , at the end of my deployment , it earned a just retirement at the bottom of a cardboard box—until recently , when , in the midst of self-isolation in the Covid-19 moment , I excavated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it into the light of day as if it were so many dinosaur bones .
The cover was a wreck , the pages , earth-stained and dog-eared .
Nonetheless , my chicken-scratched entries were enough to reconstruct old , long-buried memories .
Those pages cast into relief how far I ’ ve come .
Physically , I ’ m 6,632 miles away .
Temporally , I ’ m a decade older .
But morally , I ’ m a completely different person .
The first two—distance and time—don ’ t add up to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I ’ ve gotten older .
But what about the third ?
Why do I look back on my role in that still never-ending war not as a hero or as a well-intentioned participant , but as a perpetrator ?
And why , now , do I feel like I was a genuine sucker ?
In a sense , I already knew the answers to those questions , but I wanted to revisit the journey I ’ d taken by flipping those pages past coffee-ring stains and even dried blood .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I crossed my moral threshold on a dusty road , a glum bit of terrain I watched over for 15 hours straight .
The mission ’ s apt nickname , scrawled in that journal , was “ Operation Highway Babysitter.
” It worked like this : we , the infantry , secured a road in Kandahar Province , allowing logistics convoys to resupply the infantry , so that we could secure the road , so that the logistics convoys could resupply us , ad nauseam and in perpetuity .
Such a system was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ self-licking ice cream cone.
” Despite the effort we put into stopping IED—that is , roadside bomb—emplacement , we neither stopped them , nor created anything that might have passed for “ progress.
” The problem with IEDs was simple enough : we could watch some of the roads all of the time or all of the roads some of the time , but never all of the roads all of the time .
Wherever we couldn ’ t patrol was precisely where the next one would be emplaced .
Quickly enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all , yet what alternative did we have ?
We belonged to the Army and so were destined to spend our Afghan tour of duty playing human minesweepers .
Ox , my platoon sergeant , internalized his frustration .
During Operation Highway Babysitter , he cut a striking image of Oscar the Grouch , with a fat dip of chewing tobacco puckering his cheek .
Just above that egg-sized wad was a small scar from a bullet fragment that had skipped off an Iraqi pavement during the 2003 invasion of that country .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ war with him in the most literal sense .
And if we weren ’ t getting blown up by insurgents , we were getting shot by the Afghan National Police .
No kidding .
One hot afternoon , an Afghan policeman , visibly high , shot my team leader , Brody , from six feet away with a machine gun .
The 7.62 mm bullet hit him in the torso , a spot not covered by body armor .
It was a negligent discharge and Brody lived , but my whole platoon wanted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t , which seemed rather commendable .
Even as we became increasingly disillusioned , we remained soldiers , trained to execute , however ludicrous the task .
If we had to stay in our lane , though , at least we wanted the satisfaction of fighting our enemy face-to-face .
It ’ s hard to explain if you haven ’ t been there , but the desire to fight hadn ’ t left us and , as it turned out , we got our chance on Halloween 2009—a day caught vividly in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couple of hours into highway babysitting that day , our stakeout was interrupted by the sound of gunfire .
We buttoned up the trucks and set out for danger .
When we arrived , the shooting had stopped .
All we saw were a few men—maybe farmers , maybe insurgents—in a large grape field .
It was hard to make out what they were doing , but there were no weapons to be seen .
Armed only with speculation , there were no grounds ( under the rules of engagement we lived by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ G.I .
Joe energy began to melt away and we were distinctly disappointed .
I concede that it ’ s a strange emotion to actually want to kill someone , knowing there will be no repercussions for doing so—except possibly praise and maybe even medals if you ’ re successful .
What ’ s first degree attempted murder in the United States is just another day at the office for an infantryman in combat .
In five months , however , my platoon had yet to run into a real firefight and we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ responsible for the plague of roadside bombs that had decimated our battalion .
We were amped , hungry for payback .
About 10 of us dismounted from the trucks .
We moved into the field , using a V-shaped , wedge formation , hoping the Afghans there knew something about the resistance fighters .
Fifteen seconds later our world erupted in gunfire .
Machine-gun rounds cut through the grape vines , trimming the hedges around us .
Immediately , I was mainlining adrenaline .
We pressed inward , shooting as we went , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gain fire superiority .
Some of my soldiers hunkered down behind the remnants of a crumbly mud wall , others found what cover they could : a little ditch , a mound of earth , anything amid the grapevines .
I turned to my forward observer , Brock .
“ Can we get rotary-wing assets on station ?
” Finally , real kinetic combat !
I paused to look around .
My soldiers were sweating profusely and sucking wind , but miraculously there were no casualties .
The sound of the approaching OH-58 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” confirmed our survival .
Jaws unclenched , lips loosened , eyes relaxed .
My sweat-slick soldiers chortled with relief .
Today , we live .
We talked the birds on station , marking our position in the grape field with fluorescent VS-17 panels , visible from the air .
The pilots acknowledged .
Then the two Kiowas race-tracked around the grape fields , evidently spotting their targets because they released a salvo of rockets on a nearby village .
They followed by strafing the area with their .50-caliber machine guns until @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My soldiers erupted in cheers and I felt smug .
It was evening when we returned to Forward Operating Base Wilson after that 15-hour patrol .
I was haggard , worn , bleary-eyed .
Ox walked over to me .
I had given him the day off because the patrol schedule was killing us .
“ Ox , how was the rest ?
” “ I didn ’ t do shit yesterday .
Slept all day .
It was great.
” “ Oh , yeah ?
You heard about the big firefight we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you guys were in contact , so I went to battalion headquarters to watch the live video feed from Scan Eagle [ an unarmed drone ] .
They had a TV screen so we could watch you guys in the fight.
” “ You see how many guys were shooting at us , where were they located ?
” “ Nope .
I showed up a bit late , but neither Scan Eagle nor the Kiowas could actually see the enemy.
” My heart sped up .
“ Well , what the fuck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no idea where the insurgents fled to—only a general direction.
” Ox offered a version of his nervous , graveyard-humor laugh .
“ Yeah , the helicopters didn ’ t have PID [ positive identification ] on anything .
Scan Eagle was zooming in on some dead lady in a blue burka and the battalion XO [ executive officer ] said to Shamus , ‘ What the hell are you shooting at ?
’ Shamus said , ‘ Uhhhhh… we had reports of small-arms coming from this direction.
’ The XO gets back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pilots , ‘ Did you see weapons or have PID on anything at all ?
’ Shamus obviously didn ’ t , so the response was , ‘ Uhmmmm… negative.
’ The XO was pissed .
He said , ‘ Well , I ’ m looking at three dead civilians right now .
Do you want to explain that ?
’ Shamus said , ‘ Uhhhhh… I guess they ’ re enemy KIA [ killed in action ] .
’ ” Anxiety turned to dread .
How could they have made a mistake @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as “ enemy KIA ” ?
I dropped my equipment in a heap inside my tent and walked to the company headquarters to fill out the debrief paperwork .
First , I looked at the SIGACT ( significant activity ) whiteboard to see what the Army chose to report and it was vague indeed : small-arms fire , grid location , calling for helicopter air support .
But the final column—the punch line—left me fuming .
Its header was “ BDA , ” or “ Battle Damage Assessment.
” And there , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ No mention of civilian casualties .
The Army had covered it up .
I felt urgently sick .
Where was the honesty ?
Where was our morality ?
Where was the “ integrity ” —an Army value I was taught at West Point ?
I wanted to give the military the benefit of the doubt .
Perhaps logging the civilian deaths as “ unknown ” had been a clerical error , even if made at the exact moment when it would cover up homicide .
But I had already given so many other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that I ’ d let slide and tucked away suddenly shifted in their hiding places .
Standing before that whiteboard , I felt a crisis of conscience .
Repressing , forgetting , or deluding myself was no longer an option .
And that was my awakening , faithfully recorded in that brown journal still in my hands .
The Army never would investigate that incident either .
It didn ’ t matter that I personally raised it with my battalion commander .
I felt betrayed and ashamed of my once-boyish excitement for war @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Afghanistan , it was now clear to me that the prevailing truth was whatever the US military wanted it to be .
When I returned home seven months later , I felt grateful but empty .
Just about everything in America looked the same , which felt rude , given how much we had changed .
For those first six months after my return from war , thudding back slaps and free beers from well-meaning civilians numbed my sense of betrayal .
But over time , I realized that all of this “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was just a culturally ingrained reflex , like saying “ bless you ” to someone who sneezes .
When it comes to our military , the mantra of the public is : thank , don ’ t think .
To most of them , war—the war my friends died for—is elevator music .
Perhaps Americans have generally forgotten that , almost 19 years after the Afghan War began , numbers , names , and percentages don ’ t go in the graveyard , people do .
While serving in the US Army Honor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , one of my best friends from West Point , in Arlington National Cemetery .
Like so many other fallen American soldiers , he was a good and gentle man—not a violent man—and yet he died a violent death on a mountain escarpment in Afghanistan , according to an officer from his company .
I presented the folded flag to Tyler ’ s crying mother .
After the family left , I looked around and noticed all the freshly dug graves that did not yet contain their occupants .
And with more time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become just like all the other headstones .
And here ’ s the thing with Memorial Day : my memories don ’ t resemble the tidy sacrifices that this country memorializes on that day each year .
Soldiers know the slaughterhouse ; America knows chicken nuggets—lifeless things processed and commoditized , marketed and sold on the cheap , and always worth whatever they cost .
Twenty-first-century American patriotism is crass , slippery , and gross .
It isn ’ t about moral courage or speaking out ; it ’ s about protecting and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American patriotism is sad-button Facebook emoticons and 20 percent-off Memorial Day mattress sales .
But blithely tolerating a yearly moment of silence to think abstractly about dead soldiers—and assume that their deaths are part of an unfortunate but necessary exchange to preserve American-style “ freedom ” —is not enough .
It never has been .
Soldiers and veterans don ’ t need priority boarding , 10 percent discounts at gimmicky chain restaurants , or a few crinkled bills stuffed into a charity ’ s coffee can .
What they need is a nation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to stop misusing their service .
For 18 Memorial Days , the American public has been complicit in allowing our troops to be sent into a series of wars that everyone knows to be costly and self-defeating , while simultaneously maintaining the audacious idea that , in doing so , they “ support the troops.
” Believe me , that ’ s not patriotism .
The most intimate betrayal is to be sent to kill or die for nothing by your countrymen .
Maybe 2020 is the year when we finally look ourselves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are really a nation of 330 million bumper-sticker patriots willing to sell-out future generations to pay for endless war , no matter who gets killed , as long as someone in the Pentagon believes they deserve it .
Maybe this year the American public will finally realize that the war on terror drags on because the United States is perfectly arranged to give us that outcome , because Americans are not allowed to question the military or military spending .
The act of doing so is taboo or , as I titled my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t like this reality , it should be our civic responsibility to change the forces that guide this nation .
We must redefine what patriotism and national security truly stand for .
To confront real threats to humanity—like climate change—we must grow in our capacity for cooperation , not conflict .
Maybe 2020 will finally be the year .
After 18 Memorial Days , When Will We Ever Learn ?
After an hour , I realized that I was still sitting on the carpet hunched over my journal .
Yes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
No , I did not feel better .
I thumbed through it one last time and a quote suddenly caught my eye : “ These stupid people , ” I had recorded one sergeant first class saying , “ all they understand is violence and force.
” That did it .
The journal went back in the box and I closed the lid .
I got up , flicked off the light , and shut the door .
As that door clicked tight , my mind returned to that quote : “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and force.
” I wondered : Was he referring to the people of Afghanistan or to us ?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
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“Every day is a copy of a copy of a copy.” That meme, from the moment when Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club offers a 1,000-yard stare at an office copy machine, captures this moment perfectly—at least for those of us removed from the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis. Isolated inside a Boston apartment, I typically sought new ways to shake the snow globe, to see the same bubble—the same stuff—differently.
Quarantine has entered a new season. The month of May has brought daffodils and barbecue grills. Memorial Day is just around the corner. And every Friday at 7 pm, residents in my neighborhood hang out of their windows to bang pots and cheer until they get tired (usually, about two minutes later). It’s a nice gesture to healthcare workers, a contemporary doff of the cap, but does it change anything? Perhaps it’s just another permutation of that old American truism: If you’re getting thanked for your service, you’re in a job where you’re getting shafted.
The war against President Trump’s “invisible enemy” spasms on and we’re regularly reminded that health care workers, dangerously ill-equipped, must beg for personal protective equipment. But this Memorial Day, the 18th during America’s War on Terror, our national focus is likely to shift, even if only momentarily, to the soldiers who are still fighting and dying in a self-perpetuating war, now under pandemic conditions.
Reflecting on my own time as a soldier deployed to combat in Afghanistan, I hope that Covid-19 causes us to redefine what “patriotism” and “national security” really should mean. My suggestion: If you want to honor soldiers this Memorial Day, start by questioning the US military.
With this on my mind, and all alone in that apartment, I knew exactly where to look for inspiration.
The Journal
Just before deploying to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in May 2009, I bought a journal. It was brown, faux-leather, and fit in the hip pocket of Army combat trousers. It wasn’t particularly nice—just something you might pick up at OfficeMax.
Nonetheless, my soldiers ribbed me for it. “Dear diary,” they snickered. Current Issue View our current issue
“No, no, this is a war journal,” I would reply, imagining such a distinction as sufficiently manly to overcome whatever stigma they had when it came to this self-appointed diarist.
At first, journaling was a distraction. I captured images of my platoon, a lovable assemblage of misfits and Marlboro men. But soon, that journal acquired a more macabre tone, its lines filling with stories of roadside bombs, shootouts, amputated limbs, and funerals playing out in a page-by-page street fight of scribbles and scratch-outs. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
On a humdrum route-clearance patrol on our fourth day in-country, before the unit of soldiers we were replacing even had a chance to depart, my squad leader’s vehicle was catastrophically destroyed by a roadside bomb. We loaded four broken, bloody, ketamine’d soldiers onto an Air MEDEVAC helicopter en route to urgent care at Kandahar Airfield. (At this rate, I realized, my platoon of 28 would be wiped out within a month.)
I reassured the soldier who was most coherent that he was “going to be okay.” Truth was: I didn’t know. And what did “okay” in battlefield injury-speak even mean? A quadruple amputee with a pulse? Years of horrific facial reconstruction surgeries? Or maybe, with luck, merely a traumatic brain injury or a single leg amputation below the knee, which my wounded friends from Walter Reed Hospital called “a paper cut.”
For this soldier, “okay” turned out to mean broken bones and lacerations bad enough to send him home, but not bad enough to keep him there. He was stitched-up and sent back to war five months later. When he finally returned to America, in Oregon, he murdered and dismembered someone he didn’t even know in a bathtub. Then he stole the dead man’s car to rob a bank. He’s currently serving life in prison.
But such stories, however raw and urgent they felt, were small. We were, after all, just one platoon in a big, ugly mess of a war, committing acts of political violence against people we didn’t know for reasons we didn’t fully understand.
Although I was told that I’d be “fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan, most of the people our unit was killing turned out to be teenagers or angry farmers with legitimate grievances, people tired of America’s never-ending occupation of their land, tired of our country’s contemptuous devaluation of Afghan lives. And frankly, when I searched my own soul, I couldn’t blame them for fighting back. Had I been in their shoes, I would have done the same.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the US military did not encourage me to think too much or too deeply about the morality of the war I was fighting. A popular military aphorism was: “stay in your lane.” And so I jotted down my real thoughts in private and continued with the “mission,” whatever that was, since there appeared to be no coherent plan or strategy, something fully substantiated when, late last year, The Washington Post released “the Afghanistan Papers,” secret and frank interviews by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan with top US commanders and officials.
“Operation Highway Babysitter”
That brown journal of mine lived through a lot and, at the end of my deployment, it earned a just retirement at the bottom of a cardboard box—until recently, when, in the midst of self-isolation in the Covid-19 moment, I excavated it from its resting place and brought it into the light of day as if it were so many dinosaur bones.
The cover was a wreck, the pages, earth-stained and dog-eared. Nonetheless, my chicken-scratched entries were enough to reconstruct old, long-buried memories. Those pages cast into relief how far I’ve come. Physically, I’m 6,632 miles away. Temporally, I’m a decade older. But morally, I’m a completely different person.
The first two—distance and time—don’t add up to much. I’ve returned home. I’ve gotten older. But what about the third? Why do I look back on my role in that still never-ending war not as a hero or as a well-intentioned participant, but as a perpetrator? And why, now, do I feel like I was a genuine sucker?
In a sense, I already knew the answers to those questions, but I wanted to revisit the journey I’d taken by flipping those pages past coffee-ring stains and even dried blood. And here’s what I found: I crossed my moral threshold on a dusty road, a glum bit of terrain I watched over for 15 hours straight. The mission’s apt nickname, scrawled in that journal, was “Operation Highway Babysitter.”
It worked like this: we, the infantry, secured a road in Kandahar Province, allowing logistics convoys to resupply the infantry, so that we could secure the road, so that the logistics convoys could resupply us, ad nauseam and in perpetuity. Such a system was mockingly derided by my troops as a “self-licking ice cream cone.”
Despite the effort we put into stopping IED—that is, roadside bomb—emplacement, we neither stopped them, nor created anything that might have passed for “progress.” The problem with IEDs was simple enough: we could watch some of the roads all of the time or all of the roads some of the time, but never all of the roads all of the time. Wherever we couldn’t patrol was precisely where the next one would be emplaced.
Quickly enough, we saw the futility of it all, yet what alternative did we have? We belonged to the Army and so were destined to spend our Afghan tour of duty playing human minesweepers.
Ox, my platoon sergeant, internalized his frustration. During Operation Highway Babysitter, he cut a striking image of Oscar the Grouch, with a fat dip of chewing tobacco puckering his cheek. Just above that egg-sized wad was a small scar from a bullet fragment that had skipped off an Iraqi pavement during the 2003 invasion of that country. One could say that Ox carried the war with him in the most literal sense.
And if we weren’t getting blown up by insurgents, we were getting shot by the Afghan National Police. No kidding. One hot afternoon, an Afghan policeman, visibly high, shot my team leader, Brody, from six feet away with a machine gun. The 7.62 mm bullet hit him in the torso, a spot not covered by body armor. It was a negligent discharge and Brody lived, but my whole platoon wanted to murder that policeman. We didn’t, which seemed rather commendable.
Even as we became increasingly disillusioned, we remained soldiers, trained to execute, however ludicrous the task. If we had to stay in our lane, though, at least we wanted the satisfaction of fighting our enemy face-to-face. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been there, but the desire to fight hadn’t left us and, as it turned out, we got our chance on Halloween 2009—a day caught vividly in that brown journal of mine.
The Sound of Revenge
A couple of hours into highway babysitting that day, our stakeout was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. We buttoned up the trucks and set out for danger. When we arrived, the shooting had stopped. All we saw were a few men—maybe farmers, maybe insurgents—in a large grape field. It was hard to make out what they were doing, but there were no weapons to be seen.
Armed only with speculation, there were no grounds (under the rules of engagement we lived by) to shoot them, so our G.I. Joe energy began to melt away and we were distinctly disappointed.
I concede that it’s a strange emotion to actually want to kill someone, knowing there will be no repercussions for doing so—except possibly praise and maybe even medals if you’re successful. What’s first degree attempted murder in the United States is just another day at the office for an infantryman in combat. In five months, however, my platoon had yet to run into a real firefight and we were aching to kill some of those responsible for the plague of roadside bombs that had decimated our battalion. We were amped, hungry for payback.
About 10 of us dismounted from the trucks. We moved into the field, using a V-shaped, wedge formation, hoping the Afghans there knew something about the resistance fighters. Fifteen seconds later our world erupted in gunfire. Machine-gun rounds cut through the grape vines, trimming the hedges around us. Immediately, I was mainlining adrenaline.
We pressed inward, shooting as we went, hoping to suppress the resistance fighters and gain fire superiority. Some of my soldiers hunkered down behind the remnants of a crumbly mud wall, others found what cover they could: a little ditch, a mound of earth, anything amid the grapevines.
I turned to my forward observer, Brock. “Can we get rotary-wing assets on station?”
“Roger. Two Kiowas. Ten minutes.”
Finally, real kinetic combat! I paused to look around. My soldiers were sweating profusely and sucking wind, but miraculously there were no casualties. The sound of the approaching OH-58 Kiowa attack helicopters, codenamed “Shamus,” confirmed our survival.
Jaws unclenched, lips loosened, eyes relaxed. My sweat-slick soldiers chortled with relief. Today, we live. We talked the birds on station, marking our position in the grape field with fluorescent VS-17 panels, visible from the air. The pilots acknowledged. Then the two Kiowas race-tracked around the grape fields, evidently spotting their targets because they released a salvo of rockets on a nearby village. They followed by strafing the area with their .50-caliber machine guns until they had expended all their ammunition.
My soldiers erupted in cheers and I felt smug.
The Awakening
It was evening when we returned to Forward Operating Base Wilson after that 15-hour patrol. I was haggard, worn, bleary-eyed. Ox walked over to me. I had given him the day off because the patrol schedule was killing us.
“Ox, how was the rest?”
“I didn’t do shit yesterday. Slept all day. It was great.”
“Oh, yeah? You heard about the big firefight we got into?”
“I heard you guys were in contact, so I went to battalion headquarters to watch the live video feed from Scan Eagle [an unarmed drone]. They had a TV screen so we could watch you guys in the fight.”
“You see how many guys were shooting at us, where were they located?”
“Nope. I showed up a bit late, but neither Scan Eagle nor the Kiowas could actually see the enemy.”
My heart sped up. “Well, what the fuck were they shooting at? We had no idea where the insurgents fled to—only a general direction.”
Ox offered a version of his nervous, graveyard-humor laugh. “Yeah, the helicopters didn’t have PID [positive identification] on anything. Scan Eagle was zooming in on some dead lady in a blue burka and the battalion XO [executive officer] said to Shamus, ‘What the hell are you shooting at?’ Shamus said, ‘Uhhhhh… we had reports of small-arms coming from this direction.’ The XO gets back on the radio to yell at the pilots, ‘Did you see weapons or have PID on anything at all?’ Shamus obviously didn’t, so the response was, ‘Uhmmmm… negative.’ The XO was pissed. He said, ‘Well, I’m looking at three dead civilians right now. Do you want to explain that?’ Shamus said, ‘Uhhhhh… I guess they’re enemy KIA [killed in action].’”
Anxiety turned to dread. How could they have made a mistake like that and then justified the dead as “enemy KIA”? I dropped my equipment in a heap inside my tent and walked to the company headquarters to fill out the debrief paperwork. First, I looked at the SIGACT (significant activity) whiteboard to see what the Army chose to report and it was vague indeed: small-arms fire, grid location, calling for helicopter air support. But the final column—the punch line—left me fuming. Its header was “BDA,” or “Battle Damage Assessment.” And there, in bold capital letters, was unknown.
No mention of civilian casualties. The Army had covered it up. I felt urgently sick. Where was the honesty? Where was our morality? Where was the “integrity”—an Army value I was taught at West Point?
I wanted to give the military the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps logging the civilian deaths as “unknown” had been a clerical error, even if made at the exact moment when it would cover up homicide. But I had already given so many other incidents a pass. All the things that I’d let slide and tucked away suddenly shifted in their hiding places. Standing before that whiteboard, I felt a crisis of conscience. Repressing, forgetting, or deluding myself was no longer an option.
And that was my awakening, faithfully recorded in that brown journal still in my hands.
The Army never would investigate that incident either. It didn’t matter that I personally raised it with my battalion commander. I felt betrayed and ashamed of my once-boyish excitement for war. In places like Zhari District in Afghanistan, it was now clear to me that the prevailing truth was whatever the US military wanted it to be.
The Price of Blind Patriotism
When I returned home seven months later, I felt grateful but empty. Just about everything in America looked the same, which felt rude, given how much we had changed.
For those first six months after my return from war, thudding back slaps and free beers from well-meaning civilians numbed my sense of betrayal. But over time, I realized that all of this “thank you for your service” stuff was just a culturally ingrained reflex, like saying “bless you” to someone who sneezes. When it comes to our military, the mantra of the public is: thank, don’t think. To most of them, war—the war my friends died for—is elevator music. Perhaps Americans have generally forgotten that, almost 19 years after the Afghan War began, numbers, names, and percentages don’t go in the graveyard, people do.
I don’t forget.
While serving in the US Army Honor Guard, I helped bury Tyler Parten, one of my best friends from West Point, in Arlington National Cemetery. Like so many other fallen American soldiers, he was a good and gentle man—not a violent man—and yet he died a violent death on a mountain escarpment in Afghanistan, according to an officer from his company.
I presented the folded flag to Tyler’s crying mother. After the family left, I looked around and noticed all the freshly dug graves that did not yet contain their occupants. And with more time and more wars, those headstones will become just like all the other headstones.
And here’s the thing with Memorial Day: my memories don’t resemble the tidy sacrifices that this country memorializes on that day each year. Soldiers know the slaughterhouse; America knows chicken nuggets—lifeless things processed and commoditized, marketed and sold on the cheap, and always worth whatever they cost.
Twenty-first-century American patriotism is crass, slippery, and gross. It isn’t about moral courage or speaking out; it’s about protecting and preserving corporate image and individual reputations. American patriotism is sad-button Facebook emoticons and 20 percent-off Memorial Day mattress sales.
But blithely tolerating a yearly moment of silence to think abstractly about dead soldiers—and assume that their deaths are part of an unfortunate but necessary exchange to preserve American-style “freedom”—is not enough. It never has been.
Soldiers and veterans don’t need priority boarding, 10 percent discounts at gimmicky chain restaurants, or a few crinkled bills stuffed into a charity’s coffee can. What they need is a nation that can find the courage and conviction to stop misusing their service. For 18 Memorial Days, the American public has been complicit in allowing our troops to be sent into a series of wars that everyone knows to be costly and self-defeating, while simultaneously maintaining the audacious idea that, in doing so, they “support the troops.”
Believe me, that’s not patriotism. The most intimate betrayal is to be sent to kill or die for nothing by your countrymen.
Maybe 2020 is the year when we finally look ourselves in the mirror and admit it—that we are really a nation of 330 million bumper-sticker patriots willing to sell-out future generations to pay for endless war, no matter who gets killed, as long as someone in the Pentagon believes they deserve it. Maybe this year the American public will finally realize that the war on terror drags on because the United States is perfectly arranged to give us that outcome, because Americans are not allowed to question the military or military spending. The act of doing so is taboo or, as I titled my new book, Un-American.
If we don’t like this reality, it should be our civic responsibility to change the forces that guide this nation. We must redefine what patriotism and national security truly stand for. To confront real threats to humanity—like climate change—we must grow in our capacity for cooperation, not conflict. Maybe 2020 will finally be the year.
After 18 Memorial Days, When Will We Ever Learn?
After an hour, I realized that I was still sitting on the carpet hunched over my journal. Yes, I had shaken the metaphorical snow globe. No, I did not feel better.
I thumbed through it one last time and a quote suddenly caught my eye: “These stupid people,” I had recorded one sergeant first class saying, “all they understand is violence and force.”
That did it. The journal went back in the box and I closed the lid. I got up, flicked off the light, and shut the door. As that door clicked tight, my mind returned to that quote: “These stupid people—all they understand is violence and force.”
I wondered: Was he referring to the people of Afghanistan or to us?


thenation--2020-05-14--‘God Friended Me’ Was the Strangest Show on TV

In his commentary on Paul ’ s Epistle to the Romans , Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote that “ man can not know God , for he is ever the unknown God.
” God Friended Me would disagree .
Watch a handful of episodes of the CBS comedy-drama , and you can sketch God ’ s personality in broad strokes : God likes Fibonacci , the song “ That ’ s Amore , ” AI-generated art , mixed martial arts , cops , causing drama at family gatherings , and The Maltese Falcon .
If you have a secret child @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do ) , God thinks that you absolutely should seek him or her out for a reconciliation , no matter the circumstances .
God is all right with monarchy ( as long as rulers advocate for incremental , progressive change ) and thinks it ’ s an acceptable payoff to hack into personal medical records if the aim is to prevent a divorce .
God is not quite ready to support legalizing recreational marijuana and thinks you shouldn ’ t run from a bench warrant .
God hates it when teens run scams @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the path of podcaster Miles Finer ( Brandon Micheal Hall ) .
He ’ s the millennial atheist son of a family of Episcopalians , and his podcast is devoted to his religious skepticism .
But one day he receives a mysterious friend request from a Facebook account calling itself God .
Miles begins receiving strangers ’ profiles from the account as friend suggestions , which he disregards as a hoax until he encounters the people in public , usually finding them in some state of extreme distress .
Over the course of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his role as the God account ’ s prophet .
He enlists the help of his friends Cara ( Violett Beane ) and Rakesh ( Suraj Sharma ) to follow its social media bread crumbs and intervene in the lives of people who need help .
Soon , Miles scraps the God-is-dead discussion on his podcast and instead tells inspirational stories about the account ’ s good deeds .
The God account ’ s interventions during the recent second and final season include getting a veteran back together with his girlfriend , raising @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s kidney transplant not covered by health insurance , persuading a precocious teen not to hack into classified Department of Defense files , and ensuring that the vaguely feminist princess of a made-up Central African nation named Longo will ascend to the throne instead of her scheming , conservative brother .
( The God account also , controversially , nabs Cara ’ s stepfather for insider trading . )
Each episode functions as a brief morality play for a peculiar moral worldview .
It ’ s not quite Christian , although most of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Christians .
The God of God Friended Me is not recognizable from any of the world ’ s major religions but appears instead to be profane in origin .
God Friended Me operates by something we can call the network TV moral universe , in which characters face common , difficult decisions—how to heal broken trust in a family , how to recover from serious material loss—in circumstances written to make those decisions much easier .
This worldview also fixates on individuals : The account is run by an entity with vastly more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ characters on the show , which the entity uses not for mankind ’ s salvation or cosmic justice but to improve the lives of a handful of people without making drastic changes to the structures that caused them strife in the first place .
Miles and his friends search high and low for the entity behind the God account , but they ’ ll never find them , because the God of God Friended Me is the CBS Entertainment Group and the network comedy-drama format in general .
God Friended Me is executive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ television producer who recently signed a $ 300 million deal with Warner Bros. Television Group , a division of WarnerMedia .
He currently holds the record for producing the most live-action scripted TV shows airing in the same year : 14 , including the CW series Riverdale , Supergirl , and Arrow .
The show ’ s other executive producers include cocreators Bryan Wynbrandt and Steven Lilien , longtime friends who frequently debate religious questions .
( Both were raised in Jewish households .
Lilien is still religious , and Wynbrandt is an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ show sprang fully formed from Wynbrandt ’ s mind in 2011 , when he saw a Facebook notification on his phone while driving to meet Lilien .
“ I just thought to myself , ‘ What if God or something calling themselves God started sending you friend suggestions ?
’ ” he recalled in an interview on the CBS website .
As the idea developed , Lilien and Wynbrandt began to see social media and religion as analogues .
Wynbrandt said they were fascinated by “ the idea that , like religion… [ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a positive [ place ] .
It ’ s something hopeful , something that ’ s supposed to bring people together , but it ’ s perverted by humanity in a lot of ways .
You see it being used to divide us.
” Are the problems with social media similar to the problems with religion , as Wynbrandt suggests ?
Depending on your beliefs , religion was created either by a higher power or by generations of people searching for answers to existential questions .
Social media was invented in the last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a to-be-determined revenue source that turned out to be surveilling users and selling their data .
God Friended Me positions itself as a show about how we live now , but it is more accurately a show that communicates what Berlanti , Lilien , and Wynbrandt apparently believe the corporations that make TV believe the largest swath of viewers believe about how they live now .
A feel-good comedy-drama in which the weekly literal deus ex machina is God ’ s Facebook account speaks to viewers by allaying cultural anxieties about negativity on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life , and whether the use of our data by large tech companies will prove harmful or benevolent .
Between God and Science in the Surreal Silicon Valley of ‘ Devs ’ God Friended Me ’ s responses to these anxieties are optimistic and simple : God has a plan ; others will use the exposure of our personal lives on social media to help us ; and anger , unhappiness , and loss are often caused by miscommunication .
In one episode , Miles ’ s friend suggestion is a young father @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in court for a grand larceny charge of stealing a car .
When the crew finds him , he explains that he is running because he does not want his infant daughter to go into foster care , an inevitable result if he goes to prison .
This is a brutal , common occurrence in the American criminal justice system , one without easy resolution and impossible to truly solve without structural change .
But the show provides an easy fix : Russell did not steal the car ; he was hired to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who is already in jail on unrelated charges .
Miles persuades Emmett to admit to the crime , Russell is acquitted , and the show neatly sidesteps the question of whether people who steal cars deserve God ’ s personal help .
Although Facebook has made no official statement about it , God Friended Me could not have been made without the tech company ’ s permission to use its name and interface .
This makes God Friended Me feel like a dialogue between a technology corporation and a media conglomerate ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perversely fixated on telling feel-good stories and questioning the need for data privacy .
As a network comedy-drama , it uses common traumas as setups for the catharsis of an improbable solution .
As a show about technology , those solutions often involve accessing sensitive personal information online without permission .
In one episode , Miles ’ s Facebook friend suggestion from God is Julia , the daughter of the woman his father is about to marry .
Miles discovers that Julia and her husband , Sam , are getting a divorce , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tells him that the divorce is largely due to the couple ’ s inability to conceive .
We cut to the following day in Rakesh ’ s office at a tech startup , where Miles , Rakesh , and Cara are brainstorming a solution to save the marriage , which they believe is the God account ’ s agenda .
Rakesh has hacked into Julia ’ s insurance account and sees an unusual claim : an ob-gyn visit that included an ultrasound .
Miles remembers that Julia avoided drinking champagne the night before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her— “ We didn ’ t mean to pry , really , ” Cara says , erroneously , “ but we know what you ’ re keeping from [ Sam ] ” —Julia reluctantly confirms that they ’ re right , she is pregnant , but she doesn ’ t want her husband to know .
The episode ’ s plot becomes only more convoluted after that .
The leap from the desire to help another person to accessing her medical records and then confronting her about a decision not to share reproductive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in real life but is entirely normal in the universe of God Friended Me , a world in which invasions of privacy undertaken with good intentions are not only blameless but also charming and heartwarming .
In an interview with Wynbrandt and Lilien , journalist and religious blogger Kate O ’ Hare ponders the different implications if the God account ’ s origin is divine or human .
( On the show , Miles tracks down a lead that the account is a stolen DARPA algorithm , which appears to be a red @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it is , in fact , run by God . )
“ If the God account does not have a supernatural or alien origin , that means there ’ s someone on Earth who has the capability of doing what the God account does , ” O ’ Hare says .
“ And while that ’ s cool , it ’ s also a little scary.
” “ Well , I mean , scary , yes , but they are [ doing ] very good things , ” Wynbrandt replies .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I think , is justified .
”

This article appears in the June 15/22, 2020 issue.
In his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote that “man cannot know God, for he is ever the unknown God.” God Friended Me would disagree. Watch a handful of episodes of the CBS comedy-drama, and you can sketch God’s personality in broad strokes: God likes Fibonacci, the song “That’s Amore,” AI-generated art, mixed martial arts, cops, causing drama at family gatherings, and The Maltese Falcon. If you have a secret child (as many characters in the show do), God thinks that you absolutely should seek him or her out for a reconciliation, no matter the circumstances. God is all right with monarchy (as long as rulers advocate for incremental, progressive change) and thinks it’s an acceptable payoff to hack into personal medical records if the aim is to prevent a divorce. God is not quite ready to support legalizing recreational marijuana and thinks you shouldn’t run from a bench warrant. God hates it when teens run scams on Facebook.
God Friended Me follows the path of podcaster Miles Finer (Brandon Micheal Hall). He’s the millennial atheist son of a family of Episcopalians, and his podcast is devoted to his religious skepticism. But one day he receives a mysterious friend request from a Facebook account calling itself God. Miles begins receiving strangers’ profiles from the account as friend suggestions, which he disregards as a hoax until he encounters the people in public, usually finding them in some state of extreme distress. Over the course of the first season, Miles gradually accepts his role as the God account’s prophet. He enlists the help of his friends Cara (Violett Beane) and Rakesh (Suraj Sharma) to follow its social media bread crumbs and intervene in the lives of people who need help. Soon, Miles scraps the God-is-dead discussion on his podcast and instead tells inspirational stories about the account’s good deeds.
The God account’s interventions during the recent second and final season include getting a veteran back together with his girlfriend, raising money via GoFundMe for a child’s kidney transplant not covered by health insurance, persuading a precocious teen not to hack into classified Department of Defense files, and ensuring that the vaguely feminist princess of a made-up Central African nation named Longo will ascend to the throne instead of her scheming, conservative brother. (The God account also, controversially, nabs Cara’s stepfather for insider trading.) Each episode functions as a brief morality play for a peculiar moral worldview. It’s not quite Christian, although most of the show’s religious characters are Christians. The God of God Friended Me is not recognizable from any of the world’s major religions but appears instead to be profane in origin.
God Friended Me works out these ethical dilemmas by something we can call network TV moral theory: In each episode, a character faces a common, difficult decision—how to heal broken trust in a family, how to recover from serious material loss—in circumstances written to make those decisions much easier than in the real world. This worldview also fixates on individuals: The account is run by an entity with vastly more information and power than any of the characters on the show, which the entity uses not for mankind’s salvation or cosmic justice but to improve the lives of a handful of people without making drastic changes to the structures that caused them strife in the first place. Miles and his friends search high and low for the entity behind the God account, but they’ll never find them, because the God of God Friended Me is the CBS Entertainment Group and the network comedy-drama format in general. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
God Friended Me is executive produced by Greg Berlanti, a prolific television producer who recently signed a $300 million deal with Warner Bros. Television Group, a division of WarnerMedia. He currently holds the record for producing the most live-action scripted TV shows airing in the same year: 18, including the CW series Riverdale, Supergirl, and Arrow. The show’s other executive producers include cocreators Bryan Wynbrandt and Steven Lilien, longtime friends who frequently debate religious questions. (Both were raised in Jewish households. Lilien is still religious, and Wynbrandt is agnostic.) The idea for the show sprang fully formed from Wynbrandt’s mind in 2011, when he saw a Facebook notification on his phone while driving to meet Lilien. “I just thought to myself, ‘What if God or something calling themselves God started sending you friend suggestions?’” he recalled in an interview with Religion News Service.
As the idea developed, Lilien and Wynbrandt began to see social media and religion as analogues. Wynbrandt said they were fascinated by “the idea that, like religion…[social media] is supposed to be a positive [place]. It’s something hopeful, something that’s supposed to bring people together, but it’s perverted by humanity in a lot of ways. You see it being used to divide us.”
Are the problems with social media similar to the problems with religion, as Wynbrandt suggests? Depending on your beliefs, religion was created either by a higher power or by generations of people searching for answers to existential questions. Social media was invented in the last three decades to turn a profit from a to-be-determined revenue source that turned out to be surveilling users and selling their data. God Friended Me positions itself as a show about how we live now, but it is more accurately a show that communicates what Berlanti, Lilien, and Wynbrandt apparently believe the corporations that make TV believe the largest swath of viewers believe about how they live now. A feel-good comedy-drama in which the weekly literal deus ex machina is God’s Facebook account speaks to viewers by allaying cultural anxieties about negativity on the Internet, the secularization of contemporary life, and whether the use of our data by large tech companies will prove harmful or benevolent. Related Article Between God and Science in the Surreal Silicon Valley of ‘Devs’ Stephen Kearse
God Friended Me’s responses to these anxieties are optimistic and simple: God has a plan; others will use the exposure of our personal lives on social media to help us; and anger, unhappiness, and loss are often caused by miscommunication. In one episode, Miles’s friend suggestion is a young father named Russell who fails to show up in court for a grand larceny charge of stealing a car. When the crew finds him, he explains that he is running because he does not want his infant daughter to go into foster care, an inevitable result if he goes to prison. This is a brutal, common occurrence in the American criminal justice system, one without easy resolution and impossible to truly solve without structural change. But the show provides an easy fix: Russell did not steal the car; he was hired to move it by an acquaintance named Emmett, who is already in jail on unrelated charges. Miles persuades Emmett to admit to the crime, Russell is acquitted, and the show neatly sidesteps the question of whether people who steal cars deserve God’s personal help.
Although Facebook has made no official statement about it, God Friended Me could not have been made without the tech company’s permission to use its name and interface. This makes God Friended Me feel like a dialogue between a technology corporation and a media conglomerate; the holy text produced a dipartite god perversely fixated on telling feel-good stories and questioning the need for data privacy. As a network comedy-drama, it uses common traumas as setups for the catharsis of an improbable solution. As a show about technology, those solutions often involve accessing sensitive personal information online without permission.
In one episode, Miles’s Facebook friend suggestion from God is Julia, the daughter of the woman his father is about to marry. Miles discovers that Julia and her husband, Sam, are getting a divorce, and when Miles presses her, she tells him that the divorce is largely due to the couple’s inability to conceive. We cut to the following day in Rakesh’s office at a tech startup, where Miles, Rakesh, and Cara are brainstorming a solution to save the marriage, which they believe is the God account’s agenda. Rakesh has hacked into Julia’s insurance account and sees an unusual claim: an ob-gyn visit that included an ultrasound. Miles remembers that Julia avoided drinking champagne the night before, and when he and Cara confront her—“We didn’t mean to pry, really,” Cara says, erroneously, “but we know what you’re keeping from [Sam]”—Julia reluctantly confirms that they’re right, she is pregnant, but she doesn’t want her husband to know.
The episode’s plot becomes only more convoluted after that. The leap from the desire to help another person to accessing her medical records and then confronting her about a decision not to share reproductive information with a soon-to-be-ex-husband would be alarming in real life but is entirely normal in the universe of God Friended Me, a world in which invasions of privacy undertaken with good intentions are not only blameless but also charming and heartwarming.
In an interview with Wynbrandt and Lilien, journalist and religious blogger Kate O’Hare ponders the different implications if the God account’s origin is divine or human. (On the show, Miles tracks down a lead that the account is a stolen DARPA algorithm, which appears to be a red herring; the series finale heavily implies that it is, in fact, run by God.) “If the God account does not have a supernatural or alien origin, that means there’s someone on Earth who has the capability of doing what the God account does,” O’Hare says. “And while that’s cool, it’s also a little scary.” “Well, I mean, scary, yes, but they are [doing] very good things,” Wynbrandt replies. “So, the means to the end, I think, is justified.”


thenation--2020-05-14--Trump’s New Press Secretary Fits Right In

With an employment history distinguished by hypocrisy , dishonesty , racism , xenophobia , homophobia , and shamelessness , Donald Trump ’ s new press secretary , Kayleigh McEnany , might be the president ’ s most perfect appointment yet .
The press is treating her lack of training in journalism or government as unique , but McEnany is , in fact , following in the footsteps of Heather Nauert , who burst onto the media scene 20 years ago with no qualifications , save for a burning desire to be famous and an ability to persuade an older white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put her on television to pontificate about politics .
Now these are exactly the kind of “ qualifications ” that land a person in a top-level government job .
( Nauert , Trump ’ s former State Department spokesperson , would probably be the nation ’ s UN ambassador today had she not withdrawn her name from consideration as a “ personal decision.
” ) McEnany rose to prominence as a result of her Twitter feed .
Back in 2012 , at age 24 , she tweeted hilarious “ jokes ” like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How I Met Your Brother ” —followed by the punch line “ Never mind , forgot he ’ s still in that hut in Kenya ” and the hashtag “ # ObamaTVShows.
” Weirdly , this did not get her hired at Fox , but it didn ’ t hurt her chances at CNN , where she originally presented herself as an anti-Trump Republican .
At the time , she complained that Trump ’ s statements were “ racist ” and dismissed his campaign as not serious and “ a sideshow.
” But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and so McEnany—just a law student at the time—was somehow recast in that role , along with the hapless Jeffrey Lord .
Apparently Zucker didn ’ t care whether what McEnany said was true or even made sense .
Like some other male cable TV directors , he may have thought right-wing blondes were just fun to watch .
As to the question of why he would hire people for the 2016 election with a willingness to defend Trump ’ s lies and zero journalism experience , Zucker told The New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ‘ Oh , I can ’ t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany , ’ But you know what ?
They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are.
” McEnany has now replaced Stephanie Grisham , who followed Sarah Sanders and Sean Spicer as White House press secretary but managed to avoid Saturday Night Live ’ s mockery by failing to hold a single press briefing during her nine months in the job .
If there were any doubts about McEnany ’ s suitability for the position , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 25 , when as the Trump campaign ’ s national press secretary , she announced on Fox Business , “ We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here , we will not see terrorism come here , and isn ’ t that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama ?
” In proud Trumpian tradition , McEnany began her tenure with the statement “ I will never lie to you .
You have my word on that ” and then proceeded , immediately , to lie .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ course , but also about Brett Kavanaugh , Joe Biden , Robert Mueller , Michael Flynn , and the FBI , among others .
Here , for instance , is McEnany ’ s reading of an FBI memo referring to Flynn : “ Quote , ‘ We need to get Flynn to lie , ’ quote , and ‘ get him fired.
’ ” Fox News Has Always Lied to Old People .
This Time It May Kill Them .
Here is what the memo actually said : “ What ’ s our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to lie , so we can prosecute him or get him fired ?
” Remember , McEnany is a public official whose salary is provided by taxpayers and whose job is to inform the press—that is , to tell the truth about what the executive branch is doing .
And yet the woman whom the New York Daily News called an “ often soft-spoken Bible-loving conservative rising star ” and whose “ energetic spinning of the administration ’ s struggle against the coronavirus , ” according to The New York Times , has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doggedness ” could not do her job for 15 minutes without undermining its essential reason for being .
And here ’ s the worst part : It ( mostly ) worked .
The regular morning update from Axios ’ s Mike Allen repeated her dishonest “ I will never lie to you ” pledge without any explanation or context .
So did the next day ’ s Times , with a headline that read , “ ‘ I Will Never Lie to You , ’ McEnany Says in First White House Briefing.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story itself was pretty accurate . )
The clearest headline that appeared in a major news outlet was above Aaron Rupar ’ s article for Vox : “ Minutes after pledging to not lie , the new White House press secretary lied a whole bunch.
” OK , so the president ’ s press secretary is hardly the most important person in any administration , but this one is exemplary of the Trump White House .
Everywhere you look , Trump has appointed people who view the purpose of their job as to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lead .
We have an attorney general dedicated to undermining the rule of law and a secretary of state who destabilizes our alliances and trashes our treaties .
Plus Trump ’ s recent appointee as director of national intelligence is someone who juiced his résumé and gives every impression of being a conspiracy theorist .
The only reason he might be confirmed is that Trump appointed an even nuttier and possibly even more destructive person as the acting director .
Every time one of these appointments occurs , the press pretends that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk about battling the coronavirus as if we were at war .
And we are .
But we ’ re at war with our own government , with Trump treating the executive branch as his personal army , bent on the destruction of our constitutional democracy .
And though the president is clear about his intent when he calls honest journalists the “ enemy of the people , ” so far , too many members of the media can not stop themselves from collaborating .

This article appears in the June 1/8, 2020 issue.
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With an employment history distinguished by hypocrisy, dishonesty, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and shamelessness, Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, might be the president’s most perfect appointment yet.
The press is treating her lack of training in journalism or government as unique, but McEnany is, in fact, following in the footsteps of Heather Nauert, who burst onto the media scene 20 years ago with no qualifications, save for a burning desire to be famous and an ability to persuade an older white male network executive—Fox News’ Roger Ailes—to put her on television to pontificate about politics. Now these are exactly the kind of “qualifications” that land a person in a top-level government job. (Nauert, Trump’s former State Department spokesperson, would probably be the nation’s UN ambassador today had she not withdrawn her name from consideration as a “personal decision.”)
McEnany rose to prominence as a result of her Twitter feed. Back in 2012, at age 24, she tweeted hilarious “jokes” like the one promoting an imaginary TV series—“How I Met Your Brother”—followed by the punch line “Never mind, forgot he’s still in that hut in Kenya” and the hashtag “#ObamaTVShows.” Weirdly, this did not get her hired at Fox, but it didn’t hurt her chances at CNN, where she originally presented herself as an anti-Trump Republican. At the time, she complained that Trump’s statements were “racist” and dismissed his campaign as not serious and “a sideshow.” But CNN president Jeff Zucker needed pro-Trump pundits, and so McEnany—just a law student at the time—was somehow recast in that role, along with the hapless Jeffrey Lord. Apparently Zucker didn’t care whether what McEnany said was true or even made sense. Like some other male cable TV directors, he may have thought right-wing blondes were just fun to watch. As to the question of why he would hire people for the 2016 election with a willingness to defend Trump’s lies and zero journalism experience, Zucker told The New York Times in 2017, “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’ But you know what? They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
McEnany has now replaced Stephanie Grisham, who followed Sarah Sanders and Sean Spicer as White House press secretary but managed to avoid Saturday Night Live’s mockery by failing to hold a single press briefing during her nine months in the job. If there were any doubts about McEnany’s suitability for the position, she likely put them to rest on February 25, when as the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, she announced on Fox Business, “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn’t that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?”
In proud Trumpian tradition, McEnany began her tenure with the statement “I will never lie to you. You have my word on that” and then proceeded, immediately, to lie. The lies were about Trump, of course, but also about Brett Kavanaugh, Joe Biden, Robert Mueller, Michael Flynn, and the FBI, among others. Here, for instance, is McEnany’s reading of an FBI memo referring to Flynn: “Quote, ‘We need to get Flynn to lie,’ quote, and ‘get him fired.’” More From Eric Alterman Conservative Jews Made a Terrible Bargain With Trump and the Right Over Israel December 21, 2022 Todd Gitlin Told His Truth Everywhere He Went February 8, 2022 Why the Media No Longer Cares About Nicaragua September 28, 2021
Here is what the memo actually said: “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
Remember, McEnany is a public official whose salary is provided by taxpayers and whose job is to inform the press—that is, to tell the truth about what the executive branch is doing. And yet the woman whom the New York Daily News called an “often soft-spoken Bible-loving conservative rising star” and whose “energetic spinning of the administration’s struggle against the coronavirus,” according to The New York Times, has earned “grudging respect for her sheer doggedness” could not do her job for 15 minutes without undermining its essential reason for being. And here’s the worst part: It (mostly) worked. The regular morning update from Axios’s Mike Allen repeated her dishonest “I will never lie to you” pledge without any explanation or context. So did the next day’s Times, with a headline that read, “‘I Will Never Lie to You,’ McEnany Says in First White House Briefing.” (Though to be fair, the story itself was pretty accurate.) The clearest headline that appeared in a major news outlet was above Aaron Rupar’s article for Vox: “Minutes after pledging to not lie, the new White House press secretary lied a whole bunch.”
OK, so the president’s press secretary is hardly the most important person in any administration, but this one is exemplary of the Trump White House. Everywhere you look, Trump has appointed people who view the purpose of their job as to destroy the department they were chosen to lead. We have an attorney general dedicated to undermining the rule of law and a secretary of state who destabilizes our alliances and trashes our treaties. Plus Trump’s recent appointee as director of national intelligence is someone who juiced his résumé and gives every impression of being a conspiracy theorist. The only reason he might be confirmed is that Trump appointed an even nuttier and possibly even more destructive person as the acting director. Every time one of these appointments occurs, the press pretends that the person is on the level.
People talk about battling the coronavirus as if we were at war. And we are. But we’re at war with our own government, with Trump treating the executive branch as his personal army, bent on the destruction of our constitutional democracy. And though the president is clear about his intent when he calls honest journalists the “enemy of the people,” so far, too many members of the media cannot stop themselves from collaborating.