War Porn

In the 1960s, there was no shortage of pro-war propaganda in the United States aimed at young men, even in comic books — but not the image above or anything quite so nakedly and revoltingly … political. I had to implore ChatGPT to make it for me. The point is, back then, even we had limits.

There are no limits today in Trumpworld. You may have heard that The White House has been filling social media with vacuous violent videos glorifying Donald Trump’s war on Iran, with macho imagery aimed primarily at teenage boys and toxically masculine Gen Z’ers. These clips use sports, movies, music and video game memes to celebrate the crash-boom carnage we are inflicting on Iran. They do not overtly brag about incinerating a school full of little girls, yet.

We’ll get to the specifics in a moment. But let’s step back into yesteryear.

Violence has never been a forbidden topic in American mass media, even the stuff aimed at the young and impressionable. But a form of decency prevailed.

For example: This hapless, oppressed peasant from The Wizard of Id is always just about to get hanged. But it never … happens. At least no so’s we can see.

Here’s a 1950s comic book so devoted to glorifying combat that “war” is in its logo twice. But the situation it depicts is so overheatedly stupid it make you laugh.

In the 1960s kids were encouraged to wipe out enemy sniper’s nests by ack-acking them to smithereens. Tom Paxton even wrote a really good protest song about it.

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The point is, our hands are not spic-and-span. However, to the best of my knowledge and the limits of my research, the American White House has never been at the forefront of this sort of thing. Never has any party in power shown such gloating bloodlust as Trump and his dimwitted amoral ideologues are, with their infernal infotainment.

On TikTok and X they are peddling short videos romanticizing the war, glorifying cruelty. The imagery is of this generation’s cool Caucasian badasses — Iron Man, Walter White, Saul Goodman, Mel Gibson in Braveheart, and, um, Spongebob Squarepants, all to the narrative of Mortal Kombat, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, to the soundtrack of Metallica, AC/DC and, of course, Nelly doing “Here Comes the Boom.” Their target audience is clearly adolescent males, post-adolescent males, and MAGAniacs of all stripes.

War is hell, said General “Scorched Earth” Sherman. War is swell, says Donald “Bone Spurs” Trump.

Actually, it is worth seeing William Tecumseh Sherman’s full quote about war, in an 1879 address to the graduating seniors of The Michigan Military Academy:

“I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that someday you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it!

“You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, War is Hell!“

Sherman was wrong, the Trump ads are telling us. War is BOOM BOOM, death raining from the sky, hell wrought on others from thousands of miles away by American soldiers with joysticks. The mangled bodies are not seen. They must be presumed.

Here’s one video. The refrain is “Wasted,” the term brought to prominence in Vietnam: It was the word war criminal William Calley used to direct his troops to machine-gun women and children in a ditch.

Here’s another. This one even employs Superman to hooch up the audience.

One more: We’re “unrelenting,” “unapologetic,” the White House says. “Wanna see me do it again?” Spongebob says.

And finally, the coup de grace: It’s one starring Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. Trump is bragging about assassinating the Ayatollah before the Ayatollah got him: “I was the hunted and now I am the hunter.”

Trump, says Hegseth, “got the last laugh.”

See, war is a game! It’s all for laughs.

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In other revolting news brought to you by Trump and his Pentagoons, we learn that Hegseth has banned all news photographers from his press conferences. He did that because he didn’t like how he looked in recent photos taken during a media appearance. Apparently, they somehow made him look like a little banty puffed-up pouter pigeon.

Pouter pigeon

I was going to end here by publishing some of those actual photos of Hegseth. But I have something better. Here are two recent images of Hegseth drawn by one of American’s greatest political caricaturists, my friend Trevor Stone Irvin. I wonder if Pipsqueak Pete will like them.

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Okay, that’s it for the day.

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Here is a standard doctor’s pain scale:

And finally:

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