On Friday's Washington Week With The Atlantic, the panelists offered a startlingly bloodless structuralist reading of the Iran conflict. One is reminded less of global catastrophe and more of a deeply flawed second-act pivot in a regional theater production.
In assessing the rhetorical contours of the current devastation, The Atlantic reporter Idrees Kahloon dismissed the consequent disruption of the global oil market as merely not the set of economic priorities you want to be sending before you go to the midterms; it is a line of critique that demands we view human tragedy strictly through the lens of its impact on suburban swing voters. One is reminded instantly of the bleak utilitarianism of Aeschylus in The Persians, the suffocating procedural dread of Chantal Akerman in Jeanne Dielman, and, inexplicably, the narrative desperation of the 2004 cinematic vehicle National Treasure.
Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, flanked by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, curated a somber tableau that treated the escalating theater of war as a bothersome subplot to the sacred continuity of the American congressional calendar. It cannot be coincidence that PBS has chosen to frame mass casualty events as a mere referendum on incumbent polling data.
The juxtaposition of geopolitical collapse with local gas prices is a profound aesthetic failure; the war simply refuses to respect the structural needs of the November electorate.