The Black Angels Over Afghanistan

Reviewed in this post: The Black Angels: Passover, helicopters, Afghanistan and postmodernity

Temperature in Dushanbe: 95 Fahrenheit / 35 Celcius

Sometimes you come across an album that just seems purpose-made for a certain activity -- running, working out, reading by yourself, falling asleep to, driving at night -- as if the musicians had that very activity in mind when the album was recorded. A few weeks ago I found one of those perfect matches: flying in a helicopter over the border with Afghanistan and listening to The Black Angels' Passover. There is something perfect in the synchronicity between The Black Angels' deadly slow drone and the floating, motionless movement of the helicopter over mountain peaks. Jameson refers to the helicopter as a quantum leap in technological alienation: with its strange, floating movement and its panoptic vision of the world below, it is a concentration of the postmodern experience. I would argue that it may be one of postmodernity's most representative machines. Below us, the abstracted shapes of Afghan villages, little fans of green among the dry mountains, clinging to the banks of a velvety river, populated by little blobs of color drifting among their puzzlepiece fields, exude a feeling of peace. Above them tower the jagged, toothy peaks of the Pamir range while The Black Angels' "Young Men Dead" plays on my headphones:

Fire for the hills pick up your feet and lets go.
Head for the hills pick up steel on your way.
And when you find a piece of them in your sights,
fire at will, don't you waste no time.

The helicopter provides a feeling of total abstraction and observation, a disconnectedness not only from what is below but from life itself. The scene in Full Metal Jacket with the door gunner on a Huey picking off civilians in the rice paddies below makes perfect sense. There is no blood, just the fascinating ragdolling into the grass. The noise of the blades further cuts of the world. You are the center of the universe and inside the roar. They -- blobs of color, peaked straw hat or turbaned head -- do not truly exist in your world. It must have come as a total shock to the Soviet helicopter gunship pilots when a SAM streaked up from down there and sent them into oblivian: the helicopter lulls one into a feeling of total safety, of floating invulnerable through the ether above the unimportant, irrelevant mortal world.

It's a dangerous lesson in the increasing abstraction of waging war, and I can clearly see how civilian casualties would occur. Truly, from this height, guilt would become an abstract concept, and the ability to distance oneself from the "enemy" is increased, while the ability to identify who the "enemy" really is is decreased or even eliminated, unless they are lugging a shoulder-fired missile around.

The Black Angels make the parallels between the post-colonial wars we were fighting then and the post-colonial wars we are fighting now easy to draw in their song "The First Vietnam War:"

Sixty thousand men died
While you were here
You came into our homes
And you took our kids
And you ask for more now
For this new war
And you ask for more now
Vietnam War

And even this level of helicopter abstraction is low compared to our joystick - piloted drones punching out the bad guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas. There is something ironic in that collusion of total military abstraction and Vegas, the very symbol of postmodern consumerist glee. And how easy is it to lose touch of what you are "really" doing when you are remotely piloting a drone? To remind them of the task at hand, drone pilots in Nevada wear full flight suits -- although they never leave the ground. And a full staff of psychologists and military chaplains is on hand to help them deal with their doubts about robo-violence.

Happily, I'm on a peace mission: I've been on the ground in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Jalalabad, and Bamyan, and I want no part of determining whether someone is or is not an "enemy." But Passover with its layers of psychedelic guitar and political lyrics rarely heard in the rock of the aughts, provides a clear vision of where we are -- still fighting colonial wars against people that, increasingly, we are unable to put into human focus.