war porn

‍ ‍      This is an excerpt from The Gene Pool, a Substack by the journalist and humorist Gene Weingarten. You can read the full version on his site here

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. …

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: The hapless, oppressed peasant from The Wizard of Id is always just about to get hanged. But it never … happens. At least not so’s we can see. …

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.

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. …