It Had to Go Somewhere

 Yesterday, Jonathan Blitzer published an article in the New Yorker trying to answer the question of why the Trump administration has become so infatuated with its campaign of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea. 

It seems, from Blitzer's explanation, that the administration's interest in this bloodshed is, if anything, overdetermined. Blowing up boats full of civilians checks a lot of boxes for different members of Trump's team. 

For Marco Rubio, it satisfies his itch for regime change in Venezuela. 

In Stephen Miller's case, meanwhile—a war against Venezuelan "drug boats" (a growing number of which appear not to have been engaged in trafficking at all) facilitates his efforts to stigmatize Venezuelan asylum-seekers and to expand Trump's extraconstitutional powers (this is the same guy, after all, who has used the Alien Enemies Act to deport innocent people to a torture-prison in El Salvador with no due process). 

So there are all kinds of reasons why an administration of this moral calibre would want to start murdering people on boats in the Caribbean. 

But, in Blitzer's telling: there's one core, animating motivation that undergirds all the others: namely, pure masculine swagger. Trump, at the start of his term, wanted to prove how big and tough he was. He wanted to blow some shit up.

As Blitzer puts it, slightly more delicately: "Once he was back in office, Trump wanted to see more dramatic military action on the international stage." He then quotes an unnamed person close to the inner workings of the administration: "There’s been an urge, an energy to do something aggressive and different [...] It had to go somewhere."

In short, there was an excess of testosterone and little-man syndrome going around. 

It's a factor whose influence in this administration cannot be overstated. When J.D. Vance oversees the U.S. military firing heavy artillery over a California freeway—in a totally unnecessary demonstration of power that only succeeded in raining shrapnel on the Vice President's own security detail—one cannot look for explanations in the rational calculus of realpolitik. 

Crass as it may be to say, we have to deal here with crass realities: these guys are thinking with their dicks. 

What we are witnessing here is an enormous exercise in masculine over-compensation. And already, more than thirty people have died for it—civilians butchered on the high seas without cause or justification. 

I keep thinking back to what Harold Pinter wrote, at the outset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The words have never seemed more apt—as another unoffending civilian population has to pay the price, yet again, for a U.S. administration's bizarre need to externalize its psychosexual urges.

There's no escape, wrote Pinter. 

The big pricks are out. 

They'll fuck everything in sight. 

Watch your back.