The Body Politic on Fire
The media effort to neutralize Aaron Bushnell’s act of self-immolation in protest against US complicity in and funding for Israel’s siege on Gaza is well under way. It is taking the all-too-familiar turn of isolating his action through diagnosing it as the symptom of a troubled youth with a troubled past; that his self-sacrifice had nothing to do with our country and the state of the world, and everything to do with his mental health and his religious upbringing; that, as a senior active member of the US Air Force which explicitly champions the sacrifice its military members make for their country, Bushnell’s sacrifice does not count as such, and is instead pathological, the work of an “anarchist.” The American media diagnosis of Bushnell as an anarchist with a religious past reveals itself as, ironically and substantially, a national self-diagnosis of a state that produces mental health crises in its citizens, that does not provide adequate or comprehensive care for those with mental health issues, and that for example allows a former president, one who fomented an anarchic uprising amongst members of the extreme Christian right in order to storm the Capitol to overturn the results of a democratic election, to run for president again. To call Aaron Bushnell sick is to betray the sicknesses beleaguering our democracy. While recognizing and honoring the agency Aaron Bushnell employed on Sunday as a choice of self-sacrifice for his country, I also aver that it is this country that has martyred him.
The extremity of Bushnell’s action is a reaction to the extremity of the context; Bushnell was explicit about this in his video of his self-immolation:
My name is Aaron Bushnell. I’m an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Bushnell identifies himself as part of an American military force that has aided and abetted and armed the Israeli occupation for decades; he speaks in its name, he ascribes to himself accountability for his having served in its name, and he marks this moment as a discontinuance of that complicity. What he is about to do is extreme, but it’s marginal in comparison to what “our ruling class has decided will be normal.” His self-immolation is horrifying, but it is child’s play in comparison to how our country is actively aiding Israel to immolate the so-far 30,000 men, women, and children of Gaza which it has colonized. That it is “our” ruling class, Bushnell’s, mine, and yours, means we cannot disavow him from our community. And if our ruling class has “decided” that the extreme will be normal, then Bushnell exposes the horror of this normalization, of normalizing systematic and widespread military death, by turning it upon himself. In this way Bushnell takes measures to give context to his actions.
There is a reason Bushnell goes to such great lengths to control his narrative; it is because Western media consistently suppresses the facts on the ground to construct a narrative that supports Israel. Western news articles call it a “war” between Hamas and Israel in order to create a narrative of parity, but Hamas is not a state, and the vast majority of casualties in this “war” are Palestinian civilians. When western news outlets report the number of these Palestinian deaths, it is almost always affixed to “according to the Gaza Health Ministry,” undermining the tragedy. When it comes to reporting Israeli deaths on October 7th committed by Hamas, however, the number 1,200 is reported without any qualifier. It is presented as objective fact, despite Israel having originally reported that 1,400 people were killed, and major news outlets at the time, including The New York Times, having accepted the number without subjecting it to scrutiny. The Oct. 7th attack is characterized as a “surprise attack,” which is a surprising characterization when a territory has been brutally denied sovereignty for 75 years, and when Gaza has specifically had its food, drinking water, and power blockaded by Israel for 15 years, creating conditions that the UN has described as “unlivable” since 2020. News outlets call Israel’s siege an ”invasion” of Gaza, but it is not an “invasion” if Gaza has been occupied by Israel since 1967, and blockaded since 2007. On the other hand, news stories continually invoke Israel’s “right to self-defense,” but never Palestinians’ right to life in the first place. One almost never hears testimony from Gazans because of the frequent power outages and targetings of communications towers, because of their ceaseless slaughter, because Israel prohibits journalists’ entry into Gaza, and because of Israel’s intentional murder of journalists: as of February 28th, the Committee to Protect Journalists confirms 94 journalists and media workers dead, 89 of which are Palestinian.
Not that this is anything new, or a “surprise attack” from western media: the citizens of the western world have been kept in the dark for a long time about “post”-colonialist projects supported by the United States. June Jordan’s poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” – which refers more specifically to the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon to rout out the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1982 – is nonetheless “Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.” 1948 refers to the Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” the violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their home by the newly Western-minted colonizers Israel; many of them fled to Lebanon. The poem begins on what soon becomes a chorus:
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
And then continues with a litany of what “They said,” i.e. what Israel and Western powers reported in the media to justify their actions, followed by the revelation that this narrative turned out to be untrue:
They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
The use of the past tense denotes a history, an alternative history that encompasses within itself the way western powers narrativized that history, in order to “make history” the way they wanted to. And this is the thing about having power: when someone points out to “our ruling class” that they lied, the “ruling class” has the power to respond “so what.” This is essentially what Joe Biden did on February 27th, when he expressed to reporters blithe unconcern and unawareness as to when a ceasefire might take effect, while eating an ice cream cone. The blitheness of these leaders, throughout time, leads to brutal culminations of these endlessly cyclical histories:
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They calledyour apartments and gardensguerrilla
strongholds.
They calledthe screaming devastation
that they createdthe rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?
“Never again” is happening again, here and now in 2024 – the likening of the Palestinians to the Nazis and the Israelis to the victims, authorizing a narrative of persecution in order to legitimize creating devastation, creating “rubble.” Israel now calls Palestinian hospitals “strongholds,” and has destroyed nearly every one of them. Those people inside, and outside, hospitals that Israel kills, it calls “human shields.”
Why is “never again” happening again, almost exactly as June Jordan describes it, with almost the exact same western media strategies of distortion and obfuscation? To some extent the question is the answer: we are inundated with these horrors about which we are not told, but only shown. There are few titles or captions Western Media will permit which say “US serviceman dies after setting himself on fire in Gaza protest” (Al Jazeera). Instead we have titles like “Airman who set self on fire grew up on religious compound, had anarchist past” (The Washington Post). In other words, “But I didn’t know and nobody told me.”
On the other hand, the poem, again, is written in the past tense: “I didn’t know” means “I know now.” Knowing these things about what our country does without telling us – without receiving our democratic consent – and where 15 billion dollars of our tax dollars is set to go produces more than just a deep-seated sense of powerlessness.
But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad
You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV
You see my point;
I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.
The degree of helplessness and despair; the regularity of the news cycle and its precise, almost subliminal hold on narratives that bolster the western ruling class; Twitter and Meta platforming pro-Israeli views and decreasing pro-Palestinian ones through their algorithms, or the newspaper, or American TV; living in a time of such extreme efforts by western media to hide from us what’s happening and simultaneously immiserate us through funding foreign and colonizing investments; it’s no wonder, then, that there would be such extreme attempts to broadcast, or to be, something different on the news cycle.
Why have I spent so much of this essay focusing on a poem? Because ultimately I am writing about the human experience, and what it is like to live in a time where not only is so much of reality mediated to turn into a spectacle we can’t participate in, but also where the reported spectacle so keenly and so harrowingly does not match the reality of the spectacle. This morning, like most mornings, I was listening to NPR, and the story was diving into the depths of how the Gaza Health Ministry reports its casualties. While, as I outlined above, most western media outlets insinuate or outright state that the Gaza Health Ministry inflates its death toll, in a rare turn NPR was describing how the death toll is actually far lower than reported, since the Gaza Health Ministry only records deaths from direct Israeli military fire. This is 30,000 people, said NPR, and primarily women and children. What NPR meant by “primarily women and children” was civilians, since western media does not consider Arab men to be civilians. The count does not include in it those tens of thousands trapped under rubble, said NPR, and it does not count those killed by disease, starvation, and thirst, from which the entire population of 1.9 million is direly suffering. NPR reported that the few Palestinian witnesses they were able to speak to in the recent past have by now all been killed, including one woman and 22 members of her family.
What is to be done about this? I live in Los Angeles, where there are on average 2 or 3 pro-Palestine protest actions per week, including huge marches shutting down major downtown thoroughfares, disruptions of fundraising dinners for the military, Free Palestine stickers and tags all over the streets, vigils at City Hall. In Washington DC thousands have flooded the National Mall, in Oakland protesters have chained themselves to weapons-carrying cargo ships, in New York City protesters gather outside The New York Times headquarters to expose its Israel-biased reporting, they’ve created a parody newspaper called The New York Crimes. We have Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), the Palestinian Youth Movement, Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, Labor for Palestine, Healthcare Workers For Palestine, Palestinian Feminist Collective, Purple Up for Palestine, Queers for Palestine, Film Workers for Palestine, and hundreds more coalitions of people of all backgrounds all over the country coordinating actions to spread awareness and break through the media blockade. Not once have I heard mention of any of these groups or disruptions or actions on NPR, in The New York Times, in The Guardian, in any of the major western media outlets. It is not only disgusting, it is not only sickening, but it is bewildering to see how entrenched corporate and governmental institutions (and in an age of highly developed neoliberalism, the corporate and the governmental are effectively the same) are in their opposition to their constituents/consumers. It’s a desperate situation, because the situation “will not be televised.”
Which brings us back to Aaron Bushnell. Bushnell is being compared to a number of antecedent acts of self-immolation, but it’s noteworthy that the farthest back is relatively recent: the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who self-immolated in 1963 to protest anti-Buddhist discrimination by the government of South Vietnam, which was, like Israel, backed by the US. Similarly, the Arab Spring was sparked by Mohamed Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation in Tunisia in 2010, which caused revolutions and toppled governments all over the Arab world. Of course there are many more historic acts than these two, but I highlight them because their performances were coincident with the emergences of new kinds of media. Both instances were not only aided by media – TV had just emerged as the dominant media in the 60s, and social media like Twitter and Facebook were essential in the case of Tunisia – but self-immolation as a practice seems almost designed for media. It’s an act of desperation but also of calculation, when systemic social conditions are so bad that the common “what could I do or say, anyway?” is replaced by an act of self-sacrifice that exposes the intensity of those very conditions, and attempts to persuade society to reckon with them. The image and the fact of the act of self-immolation is meant to spread rapidly and consume everything in its spread – to break through and turn to ash the news-as-usual cycle – like wildfire.
In this essay my purpose is not to take a stand on whether Aaron Bushnell is a hero or, as major western news outlets are characterizing him, an anarchist, a religious fundamentalist, someone suffering from a mental health crisis, etc. My point, instead, is to focus on why so many major western news outlets assay to portray him in precisely these ways, and why so many of these articles end by providing the phone number to the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. I think it is because in their effort to neutralize him by isolating him through character defamation – and saying that someone suffering from a mental health crisis is not to be believed is, frankly, disgusting – simultaneously operates as a confession of guilt on the part of the western ruling class, as a communal psychological projection which turns around and betrays a sociological self-diagnosis. To accuse Bushnell of anarchy is to admit that democracy is not functioning in our society. To accuse Bushnell of religious fundamentalism is to admit that the Christian Zionist lobby has elevated support for Israel beyond the reach of public consent. To accuse Bushnell of suffering from a mental health crisis is to admit that our society does not permit, preserve, nor safeguard public health and sanity. To attempt to suppress the political context of Bushnell’s action – an end to US complicity in Israel’s siege of Gaza, and advocating for a free Palestine – is to admit that if Palestine is not free, none of us are free.
**
JARED JOSEPH attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Los Angeles City College. Recent work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. A Book About Myself Called Hell was published with Kernpunkt Press in February 2022, and a novel, Danny The Ambulance, was published by Outpost 19 in September 2023.
