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[Note for TomDispatch Readers:  Mark Wilkerson’s new book, Tomas Young’s War, is a powerful tale of an American soldier who spent only five days deployed to Iraq in 2004 as this country’s second war there was just heating up. His conflict, his battlefield, it turned out, would be at home in the years to follow and the book is a riveting account of bravery -- of heroism, actually -- on the home front of a kind that normally isn’t associated with antiwar activity.  We at TomDispatch consider it a must-read. Wilkerson, a veteran of an earlier American conflict -- in Somalia in the previous century --  has agreed to send a personalized, signed copy of the book to any reader willing to donate $100 or more to this website ($125 if you live outside the United States).  Check out our donation page for the details. Tom]

I can’t tell you exactly why I clicked on the article, but it was probably the title: “The Double-Tap Couple.” To me, a “double tap” is the technique of firing two gunshots in quick succession or employing two strikes in a row, as when U.S. drones or Hamas carry out attacks and then follow-up strikes to kill first-responders arriving at the scene. But this piece was about something very different. The headline referred to the popular app Instagram where you double-tap to “like” a photo.

The article turned out to be a profile of two twenty-somethings, a married couple who go by the noms de social media, FuckJerry and Beige Cardigan. They are, says author David Yi, “micro-celebrities” of the modern age. He is “tall, with a chiseled face, handsome”; she “has big doe eyes with cherub-like cheeks.” They dropped out of college and -- first he and then she -- became Instagram meme curators; that is, they find photos with wry or funny captions elsewhere on the internet and post them for their millions of followers. “Though both are social media sensations, neither is quite content with what they’ve accomplished,” Yi tells us. She “wants to pursue her first love, fashion, but isn’t quite sure what she’d want to do.” He’s currently cashing in with FuckJerry merchandise -- hats, t-shirts, even “Vape juice.”

I read the article to the point at which FuckJerry (née Elliot Tebele) told Yi about his long slog up the Instagram follower food-chain: “It took a shit ton of time to get to, and it took a long time with a lot of work.”  I stared at my phone in abject confusion.  Something wasn’t right, so I scrolled to the beginning of the article and started again.  But it was just the same.  Justin Bieber is a fan.  Followers include the “Kardashian-Jenner family.”  He wears “skinny jeans and vintage Nikes.”  She sports a “statement coat and a pair of sparkling Chloe boots.”  Then I hit that quote: “shit ton of time... a lot of work.” I still couldn’t make sense of it and began studying the article as if it were a riddle. I read it maybe five times and again and again when I hit those phrases about time and work my brain would buckle. 

At that moment, I was nearing the end of a month-long reporting stint in South Sudan and waiting to find out if I’d be able to talk to a teenage girl, a late millennial with more than memes on her mind.  She had rebuffed the 60-something man her family had arranged for her to marry and her relatives had displayed their displeasure by beating her to the point of unconsciousness.  That conversation never happened, but I’d already logged several weeks' worth of interviews with shooting survivors, rape victims,  mothers of murdered sons, wives of dead husbands.  All this in a country where, for firewood and water -- that is, the means of life -- women walk desperately far distances in areas where they know that men with AK-47s may be lurking, where many are assaulted and violated by one, two, or even five men.  In other words, a land where few would consider meme curation to be “a lot of work.”

I’d obviously hit that unsettling juncture where voices from home become dulled and distorted, where you feel like you’re hearing them from deep underwater.  I’m talking about the vanishing point at which your first-world life collides with your crisis-zone reality -- the point of disconnect.  Mark Wilkerson knows it well.  He found himself in just such a state, serving with the U.S. Army in civil-war-torn Somalia during the 1990s.  That’s where he begins his inaugural TomDispatch piece, a rumination on his journey from soldier to veteran to chronicler of the all-too-brief life of another veteran, in his recent and moving book, Tomas Young's War.

I eventually gave up on Yi’s article, unsure why I couldn’t understand the life and times of FuckJerry.  After I got back to the U.S., however, I signed up for Instagram and took a look at his account and Yi’s story began to make more sense to me, if only in a tragi-comic way.  Later in the piece, he writes of his subjects being “caught in the maelstrom” when a competitor is criticized for “stealing” memes.  It’s a strange society that produces both meme maelstroms and, in distant lands, lethal ones that leave millions dead, maimed, desperate, or displaced.  So before you become FuckJerry’s 9,200,001st follower, let Wilkerson guide you through slivers of two American conflicts, their aftermaths, and the points of disconnect along the way.  Nick Turse

One Man’s War
Bringing Iraq to America
By Mark Wilkerson

Memorial Day is over.  You had your barbeque.  Now, you can stop thinking about America’s wars and the casualties from them for another year.  As for me, I only wish it were so.

It’s been Memorial Day for me ever since I first met Tomas Young.  And in truth, it should have felt that way from the moment I hunkered down in Somalia in 1993 and the firing began.  After all, we’ve been at war across the Greater Middle East ever since.  But somehow it was Tomas who, in 2013, first brought my own experience in the U.S. military home to me in ways I hadn’t been able to do on my own.

That gravely wounded, living, breathing casualty of our second war in Iraq who wouldn’t let go of life or stop thinking and critiquing America’s never-ending warscape brought me so much closer to myself, so bear with me for a moment while I return to Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, and bring you -- and me -- closer to him.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a reminder that you can still get a signed, personalized copy of Rebecca Gordon’s powerful new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, for a contribution of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States) to this website.  Check out our donation page for the details.  Tom]

If you happen to be a potential American war criminal, you've had a few banner weeks.  On May 9th, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter presented former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger with the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award, that institution's “highest honorary award for private citizens.”  In bestowing it on the 92-year-old who is evidently still consulting for the Pentagon, he offered this praise: “While his contributions are far from complete, we are now beginning to appreciate what his service has provided our country, how it has changed the way we think about strategy, and how he has helped provide greater security for our citizens and people around the world.”

Certainly people “around the world” will remember the “greater security” offered by the man who, relaying an order from President Richard Nixon for a “massive” secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, used a line that may almost be the definition of a war crime: “Anything that flies on anything that moves.”  The result: half a million tons of bombs dropped on that country between 1969 and 1973 and at least 100,000 dead civilians.  And that’s just to start down the well-cratered road to the millions of dead he undoubtedly has some responsibility for.  Public service indeed.

Meanwhile, speaking of American crimes in the Vietnam era, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, who ran for president of the U.S. and then became the president of the New School in New York City, was just appointed to “lead” Fulbright University Vietnam, the first private American-backed school there.  Its opening was announced by President Obama on his recent visit to that country.  Only one small problem: we already know of some children who won’t be able to apply for admission.  I’m thinking of the progeny-who-never-were of the 13 children killed by a team of U.S. SEALs under Kerrey’s command and on his orders in South Vietnam in 1969 (along with a pregnant woman, and an elderly couple whose three grandchildren were stabbed to death by the raiders) -- all of whom were reported at the time as dead Vietcong guerillas.

It seems that if you are a distinguished citizen of the most exceptional country on the planet, even war crimes have their rewards.  Consider, for instance, the millions of dollars that were paid for memoirs by top Bush administration officials responsible for creating an American offshore torture regime at CIA “black sites” around the world.  Must-reads all!  With that in mind, turn to TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, to consider what “justice” for such figures might look like in a different and better world. Tom 

Crimes of the War on Terror
Should George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Others Be Jailed?
By Rebecca Gordon

"The cold was terrible but the screams were worse," Sara Mendez told the BBC. "The screams of those who were being tortured were the first thing you heard and they made you shiver. That's why there was a radio blasting day and night."

In the 1970s, Mendez was a young Uruguayan teacher with leftist leanings. In 1973, when the military seized power in her country (a few months before General Augusto Pinochet’s more famous coup in Chile), Mendez fled to Argentina. She lived there in safety until that country suffered its own coup in 1976. That July, a joint Uruguayan-Argentine military commando group kidnapped her in Buenos Aires and deposited her at Automotores Orletti, a former auto repair shop that would become infamous as a torture site and paramilitary command center. There she was indeed tortured, and there, too, her torturers stole her 20-day-old baby, Simón, giving him to a policeman’s family to raise.

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[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Steve Fraser's superb new book, The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America, is still on offer at our donation page.  Any reader willing to contribute $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States) can get a signed, personalized copy and give this website a lift. And here's a deep bow to those of you who have already done so!

I’ve long had a weakness for commencement addresses, or at least for what they might be rather than what they usually are, which is why I’ve written them relatively regularly myself.  Since no actual college or graduating class has ever asked me to give such a speech, I’ve addressed the graduates of 2015 and other years from what I’ve called “the campus of my mind.” I couldn’t resist doing so again. Tom]

Donald Trump Is the Mosquito, Not the Zika Virus
Class of 2016, Tell Us Who We Are
By Tom Engelhardt

Graduates of 2016, don’t be fooled by this glorious day.  As you leave campus for the last time, many of you already deeply in debt and with a lifetime of payments to look forward to, you head into a world that’s anything but sunny.  In fact, through those gates that have done little enough to protect you is the sort of fog bank that results in traffic pile-ups on any highway.

And if you imagine that I’m here to sweep that fog away and tell you what truly lies behind it, think again.  My only consolation is that, if I can’t adequately explain our American world to you or your path through it, I doubt any other speaker could either.

Of course, it’s not exactly a fog-lifter to say that, like it or not, you’re about to graduate onto Planet Donald -- and I don’t mean, for all but a few of you, a future round of golf at Mar-a-Lago.  Our increasingly unnerved and disturbed world is his circus right now (whether he wins the coming election or not), just as in the Philippines, it’s the circus of new president Rodrigo Duterte; in Hungary, of right-wing populist Viktor Orbán; in Austria, of Norbert Hofer, the extremist anti-immigrant presidential candidate who just lost a squeaker by .6% of the vote; in Israel, of new defense minister Avigdor Lieberman; in Russia, of the autocratic Vladimir Putin; in France, of Marine le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Front party, who has sometimes led in polls for the next presidential election; and so on.  And if you don’t think that’s a less than pretty political picture of our changing planet, then don’t wait for the rest of this speech, just hustle out those gates.  You’ve got a treat ahead of you.

For the rest of us lingerers, it says something about where we all are that, once through those gates, you’ll still find yourself in the richest, most powerful country around, the planet’s “sole superpower.”  (USA!  USA!)  It is, however, a superpower distinctly in decline on -- and this is a historic first -- a planet similarly in decline.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We have a special offer today. A new book by TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser, whom we consider one of the cannier observers of the American scene, is just out: The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America. It’s a blazing account of the subject we may most need to understand these days, the rise of the populist right, and it's done through the history of a single slogan. As Barbara Ehrenreich has aptly put it, Fraser's book “is necessary background reading for anyone seeking to understand -- or just endure -- 2016.” I second that. Any TD reader willing to donate $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States) can get a signed, personalized copy of it with our thanks for helping keep this site’s voice strong in this strange moment. Just check our donation page for the details. Tom] 

Someday, these may be seen as the decades when the United States started hollowing out.  First, good working-class jobs fled the country, while the “rust” spread through belts of industrial production, towns emptied, and the good times headed elsewhere.  Then, infrastructure -- from bridges and highways to subways and dams -- began to fray.  More recently, something else hollowed out, too: American politics.  That may seem less than obvious in a season in which the political process has become a 24/7 media obsession.  But think again.  One of the country’s two parties managed to cough up 17 of the strangest candidates ever paraded on a stage, evidence of an organization that had clearly stumbled off a cliff, even as its voters elevated the P.T. Barnum of the twenty-first century to presidential status.  The other party was so dead in the water that, as its leading candidate for the presidency, it could only cough up a former first lady and secretary of state who had lost her previous presidential run ignominiously and was dragging a caravan of rotten baggage behind her -- oh, yes, and one forgettable governor, as well as a senator who proclaimed himself a “democratic socialist,” but not (until late the other night) a capital "D" Democrat.  And if that isn’t the definition of a political organization that seems to be rusting from the inside out, what is?

When it comes to hollow, don’t forget the election news, which has been inflated to monstrous proportions even as it’s emptied of content.  Donald Trump, the man who creates endless news cycles out of the gossamer of insults and half-thoughts, has been the perfect vehicle for such a process, which is being mined for gold by the media equivalent of the 1%.  Take the great debate-to-be that, for a single day’s news cycle, grabbed the headlines, the one that talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel suggested to The Donald.  He accepted on the spot, followed with alacrity by his prospective opponent Bernie Sanders, only to promptly extinguish the possibility in another blast of headlines, news reports, and talking heads a day or so later.  In doing so, Trump used the “i” word -- “inappropriate” -- to declare the proposal out of bounds.  The man for whom nothing is inappropriate issued a statement so name-callingly eloquent that it might have come from any sixth grade classroom.  It began: “Based on the fact that the Democratic nominating process is totally rigged and Crooked Hillary Clinton and Deborah Wasserman Schultz will not allow Bernie Sanders to win, and now that I am the presumptive Republican nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second-place finisher.”

And oh, yes, among the undoubted casualties of the hollowing-out process: the Democratic Party's version of liberalism, which has in recent years become the credo of the other party of the 1%. Today, TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser, who has covered the rise of a new Gilded Age in America (and the fall of just about everything else) from The Street to the streets, considers the fate of liberalism in a potential new era of right- and left-wing populism.  Think of this post as a launching pad as well for his new book, The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America, a striking history of the 1% and the rest of us, all summed up in a single political image. Tom

Bernie, The Donald, and the Sins of Liberalism
An American Version of Class Struggle
By Steve Fraser

Arising from the shadows of the American repressed, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been sending chills through the corridors of establishment power. Who would have thunk it? Two men, both outliers, though in starkly different ways, seem to be leading rebellions against the masters of our fate in both parties; this, after decades in which even imagining such a possibility would have been seen as naïve at best, delusional at worst. Their larger-than-life presence on the national stage may be the most improbable political development of the last American half-century.  It suggests that we are entering a new phase in our public life.

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Here's last week’s good news on America’s war fronts: finally, there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

From one end of the Greater Middle East to the other, things are looking up for Washington. A U.S. Air Force drone struck for the first time in Baluchistan province and took out the leader of the Taliban with two Hellfire missiles (whereupon the Pakistani government denounced Washington for violating the country's sovereignty). The action was taken, President Obama later announced, as part of “our longstanding effort to bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan.” (Admittedly, you may not have heard much about such peace and prosperity recently with fierce fighting raging on Afghan battlefields, the Taliban gaining ground, the government in its usual pit of corruption, and the country maintaining its proud position as the uncontested global leader in the production and sale of opium.)

Soon after, the president paid a historic visit to Vietnam and finally put to bed memories of a disastrous American war there in the only way conceivable -- by ensuring that American arms and munitions would once again be allowed to flow freely into that country. And while he was at it, he sternly rebuked China (without mentioning it by name) for its actions in the waters off Vietnam.  "Nations are sovereign," he said, "and no matter how large or small a nation may be, its territory should be respected."

On the other side of the Greater Middle East, U.S. Green Berets were photographed in northern Syria engaged with Kurdish rebels in fighting aimed at someday retaking Raqqa, the “capital” of the Islamic State. Several of those soldiers were wearing the insignia of the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Forces, or YPG (which the Turkish government considers a terrorist outfit), even as the Pentagon continued to insist that theirs was a non-combat role. In other words -- in the good news category -- those boots, whatever the photos might seem to indicate, were not actually on the ground. Meanwhile, some genuinely upbeat news arrived in the midst of a little distinctly out-of-date bad news. Members of the U.S. team now conducting the air war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq told New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt that, despite thousands of air strikes, their predecessors had essentially botched the job, thanks to “poor intelligence collection and clumsy process for identifying targets.” Fortunately, they were now in charge and the results were stunning. The Islamic State was finally being hit in its pocketbook, where it truly hurts, damaging its “ability to pay its fighters, govern, and attract new recruits.”

“Every bomb now has a greater impact,” reported U.S. air war commander Lieutenant General Charles Brown Jr. Yes, after 15 years of American air war across the Greater Middle East, it seems that, from Pakistan to Syria, the Obama administration has finally found the winning formula. If, as Schmitt’s piece indicated, you want confirmation of that, who better to turn to than the very people who have gotten the formula right?  Having no access to similar in-the-know figures capable of throwing light on the subject of Washington's ongoing conflicts, TomDispatch instead turned to outsider Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of a groundbreaking book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, to assess the recent spate of upbeat news from America’s war zones. We sent him directly into that infamous Vietnam-era tunnel of darkness to see what might be glimpsed so many decades later when it comes to the American way of war, and here’s his report. Tom

Milestones (Or What Passes for Them in Washington)
A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Bridge to Nowhere in the Greater Middle East
By Andrew J. Bacevich

We have it on highest authority: the recent killing of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan marks “an important milestone.” So the president of the United States has declared, with that claim duly echoed and implicitly endorsed by media commentary -- the New York Times reporting, for example, that Mansour’s death leaves the Taliban leadership “shocked” and “shaken.”

But a question remains: A milestone toward what exactly?

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