The headline in the Drudge Report this morning asks the question “Drones Hunting Radiation?” This links to a Newsweek (it always kills me to write that, since what is Newsweek now is an insult to what was once a great newsmagazine) story, which is little more than a recap of a TikTok post from a CEO of a drone manufacturer that Newsweek tells us has gone viral (without any data to back this up) speculating that perhaps the drone swarm in New Jersey—if it in fact exists at all—might be hunting for something like radiation or a gas leak.
So, we have formally entered Don DeLillo’s universe, except we no longer need an actual “airborne toxic event” to set off a cultural panic, like in “White Noise,” but just the TikTok speculation of one. While, actually, this theory is more comforting than the rampant speculation that Iran has a mothership feeding drones into the U.S. or perhaps an alien invasion is underway. The details really don’t matter, all that does matter is the paranoia and panic over what people see in the skies.
And all of this, of course, comes less than a week after a completely anonymous Ivy League grad with back problems and a soft spot for the Unabomer decided that writing manifestos and politically heterodox social media posts would never get him anywhere, so he better man up and shoot a health care insurance CEO if he ever hoped to be taken seriously. This merely confirmed what DeLillo told us nearly 40 years ago:
Years ago I thought that it was possible for the novelist to change the inner life of a culture. Today, human bombers and killers have captured this terrain
We’re living in an age where the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword” seems ironic. Is there a political cost to be paid anymore for brutality? Every act of violence seems to do little more than justify the even greater act of retribution, all of which is shrugged off in the end as being relatively nothing compared to the brutality of the past. Homilies about human progress don’t seem so comforting when moral progress appears to be eroding.
But DeLillo stands to the side reminding us that this isn’t new, it’s been a feature of America and the world since the Cold War. President-elect Trump recently threatened that Gaza will see retribution from the United States as has never been seen in our history unless all hostages are released by inauguration day. So many thoughts spring from this—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, but also the now widely-shared assumption that all Trump threats can be ignored, because we know he’s really a pacifist at heart and just likes to pose as a madman for effect. This isn’t some wild speculation, it was a feature of his re-election campaign.
Eventually that new understanding of Trump will be tested, perhaps putting us right back to where we began with him, concerned about leaving this guy in charge of the nuclear button, but this time not because he’s bloodthirsty and irrational, but rather because he’s emotionally insecure and irrational. You can’t simultaneously play the role of global peacemaker and avenging angel, not unless everyone in the world finds a way to manipulate Trump into thinking he’s won while they rob him out the back door.
Sometime in the second Trump term, he will be made a fool of, and then God help us, because if Kamala Harris proved anything in her brief campaign, it’s how easy it is to bait this man. What next after that?
Lenny Bruce’s gallows humor, imagined by Don DeLillo as a series of stand up routines during the Cuban Missile Crisis in his masterpiece “Underworld,” comes to mind. In the words of DeLillo’s fictionalized Lenny:
We’re all gonna die!
