Category: violence

An unseemly rhyme

On the left, a color photograph of a woman in a blue baseball cap with long wavy hair, wearing a tight-fitting white jersey and drawstring gray cargo pants, in front of a cell inside of which can be seen prisoners standing and sitting on bunks. On the right, a black-and-white photograph of concentration camp survivors, sitting and lying in bunks inside a barracks at Buchenwald.

My mind has rebelled against the cascade of bad things the Trump regime has done lately by insisting that I pay attention for a little while to just one of them.

The week before last, the United States effected the spectacular rendition, fascist in manner and deed, of several hundred Venezuelan refugees to a forced-labor prison in El Salvador. U.S. immigration officials began laying the groundwork for the rendition well before Trump came to power for the second time.

As early as June 2024, American immigration officials began detaining Venezuelan refugees for their tattoos—a form of personal expression that, ironically, has been bound up with American national identity since the early republic, when sailors marked their bodies permanently as American in an effort to keep from being impressed into the British navy, which, long after America’s independence, was slow to distinguish American citizens from British subjects (see Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution).

In June 2024, for example, an aspiring Venezuelan streetwear entrepreneur named Frizgeralth de Jesús Cornejo Pulgar, who had been targeted by paramilitary groups associated with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, met U.S. border patrol agents for an asylum interview that he had requested through the agency’s official app and was detained by them because of his tattoos. Not even a declaration from his tattoo artist, confirming that the designs were innocuous, could get him released. In November, Daniel Alberto Lozano Camargo, a Venezuelan asylum seeker working at a carwash in Houston, was detained because of his tattoos, which included the names of his father, his niece, and his partner’s daughter. In December, Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player who had been arrested and tortured by the Maduro regime in Venezuela after taking part in peaceful political demonstrations, also made an appointment through U.S. immigration’s official app to apply for asylum, only for U.S. officials to argue that his tattoos—a soccer ball and a rosary—marked him as a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He, too, was detained.

E.M., a young Venezuelan food vendor and delivery person who has so far only been identified in the press by his initials, fled to Colombia with his girlfriend in 2021, after paramilitaries in Venezuela targeted the two of them for their political activity. In 2023, E.M. and his girlfriend applied from Colombia for asylum in the United States. U.S. immigration agents in that country asked E.M. about his tattoos but, seemingly unconcerned, granted the couple official refugee status in late 2024. When the couple arrived in Houston on 8 January 2025, however, immigration officials designated E.M. a member of the same gang, also on the basis of his tattoos—a crown, a soccer ball, and a palm tree. He, too, was detained. All of these refugees denied gang affiliation, as did their families; none had criminal records.

The day of his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order declaring Tren de Aragua to be a terrorist organization. It seems likely to me, given the timing of the early detentions and of Trump’s first-day proclamation, that a plan was in place, and that officials inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been cooperating with it quietly even before Trump took office. After the inauguration, the collection of refugees accelerated. A Venezuelan barber named Franco José Caraballo Tiapa was detained because of his tattoos on 3 February 2025. When Frengel Reyes Mota, a house painter who fled Venezuela in 2023, checked in with U.S. immigration officials on 4 February 2025, he, too, was detained as a suspected gang member, even though he has no tattoos at all, as well as no criminal record, and even though, in the documents filed against him, “the government . . . uses someone else’s last name in several parts . . . , identifies him with female pronouns, and uses two different unique identification numbers that immigration authorities use to keep track of individuals.” A Venezuelan named Neri Alvarado Borges was also detained in early February; one of his tattoos was an autism awareness ribbon with his brother’s name. On February 8, an aspiring musician named Arturo Suárez Trejo was arrested by immigration officials at his home in Raleigh, North Carolina; his tattoos include a hummingbird, which his wife says symbolizes “harmony and good energy,” and a palm tree, a reference to a Venezuelan expression about God’s greatness that his mother likes to quote. The tattoos that got Andry Hernandez, a gay makeup artist, detained “are flowers and are dedicated to his parents,” one of his lawyers has told NBC News; Hernandez, too, was detained when he showed up for his appointment to request asylum.

In early March, these detained Venezuelan asylum seekers and others were moved to South Texas or Louisiana from detention centers elsewhere, vanishing from courtrooms around the country where their cases were still being heard. The government seems to have made tracking the location of the detained refugees difficult even for their lawyers, but Josh Kovensky, reporting for Talking Points Memo, has uncovered records of detainees being moved on March 5, between March 7 and March 9, and on either March 10 or 11.

On the night of Friday, March 14, the detainees were “told they would be deported the next day to an unknown destination,” and lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, representing five of these detainees, somehow “caught wind of these movements,” according to a narrative of the facts compiled by Judge James E. Boasberg. In the early hours of Saturday, March 15, the lawyers filed for a temporary restraining order, asking Boasberg’s court to prevent the U.S. government from sending the detainees out of the country before their cases could be heard. The lawyers suspected—correctly, it turns out—that the Trump regime was planning to deport the Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the only law to survive from the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts that schoolchildren are taught to deplore, a law that hadn’t been used in seventy-five years. Immigration officials were boarding detainees onto airplanes as early as 7am that Saturday morning. At 9:40am, Judge Boasberg gave a verbal order forbidding the government to send the five plaintiffs named in the case out of the United States. Immigration officials delayed the deportation of those five, but continued to deport the other Venezuelans in custody. At 4pm, the Trump regime revealed that Trump had indeed signed a proclamation targeting Tren de Aragua under the Alien Enemies Act, and at 5pm, Boasberg began hearing the civil rights lawyers’ request for a restraining order. The Trump regime’s representatives in court repeatedly refused to answer when Boasberg asked if detainees were at that very moment being deported, but in fact, the first plane left Harlingen, Texas, at 5:26pm. At 6:47pm, Boasberg enjoined the government from removing from the country anyone detained under the Alien Enemies Act—not just the five named in the lawsuit—and told the government that “any plane containing [members of the class] that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. . . . This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.” When he spoke those words, two planes were still in the air, and a third had yet to depart Texas. Boasberg’s order was entered into the court’s docket at 7:26pm Saturday evening.

The order was not complied with. The first of the U.S. government’s three planes landed in El Salvador at 12:10am Sunday morning—hours after both the oral and the written versions of Boasberg’s order. Boasberg wrote that “the most reasonable inference is that [the Government] hustled people onto those planes in the hopes of evading an injunction or perhaps preventing them from requesting the habeas hearing to which the Government now acknowledges they are entitled.” He was being almost polite. The Trump regime’s defiance of his court’s authority was flagrant.

The government’s planes landed at a “mega-prison” in El Salvador called the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). Soon after they arrived, the president of that country, Nayib Bukele, who has ruled as a dictator since 2022, tweeted, “Oopsie… Too late,” a message that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted. El Salvador, an authoritarian country, currently has “the highest incarceration rate in the world.” Its vice president has told the New York Times, “To these people who say democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes—we are not dismantling it, we are eliminating it, we are replacing it with something new.” Bukele himself has boasted, “Let all the ‘human rights’ NGOs know that we are going to wipe out these damned murderers and their collaborators, we will put them in prison, and they will never get out. We don’t care about your pathetic reports, your paid journalists, your puppet politicians, or your famous ‘international community,’ which has never cared about our people.” The human rights NGOs that Bukele scorns have concluded that “torture has become a state policy” in El Salvador, and report that in its prisons, dead bodies have been left in cells until they stink, hungry prisoners have been made to lick food off the floor, and overcrowded cells are sometimes flooded and then an electric current passed through the water. Incarceration at CECOT, which is a forced-labor camp, seems to be permanent. “The Salvadoran government has described people held in CECOT as ‘terrorists,’ ” the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch notes, “and has said that they ‘will never leave.’ Human Rights Watch is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.”

That the United States government had anything to do with Bukele’s regime at all is in itself a five-alarm fire. And sending refugees to a country with a human rights record like El Salvador’s is not only morally reprehensible—it is against U.S. law. As Boasberg notes in his decision, the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act stipulates that the United States may not “expel . . . any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

What brought the evil done by the Trump regime home to me, though, is the account that Philip Holsinger, a photographer for Time magazine, gave of the refugees’ arrival at CECOT:

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.

On Bluesky, I saw speculation that this gay barber was Andry Hernandez, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. Hernandez is a makeup artist, and the two barbers among the deportees that I’m aware of seem to be straight. It hardly matters. The anguish of the prisoner, whoever he is, rings clear as a bell. And Holsinger’s photographs fill out the picture alarmingly. After arriving in the intake yard, in the middle of the night, the prisoners, shackled at their wrists and ankles, were slapped, kicked, and shoved. As the prisoners’ heads were shaved,

The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

To recapitulate: Two weeks ago, my country, the one I was born in and that I’m a citizen of, sent hundreds of men, many with no criminal record, to a forced-labor camp in a totalitarian country that almost none of these men had probably ever been to. Upon their arrival, they were assaulted, their clothes were confiscated, and their heads were shaved. Those running the camp promise they will never leave. How is this not complicity in sending people to the modern equivalent of Auschwitz? How is this not the moral nightmare that every decent person alive today with any knowledge of history has been dreading his whole life? Whole news cycles of malfeasance by the Trump regime have coursed over us since these men were deported. But Andry Hernandez is still locked in CECOT, where, the Financial Times has written, if it ever reaches full capacity, each prisoner would have “less than half the minimum [space] required under EU law to transport midsized cattle by road.”

As if to prove the Trump regime’s immorality, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, flew to El Salvador the other day to tour CECOT, and had herself filmed in front of a cell where the bunks are four tiers high. That’s how high the bunks were at Buchenwald, as it happens. To anyone who has ever read books about or watched documentaries about the Holocaust, Noem’s video selfie, which she posted to her Instagram account, makes an unseemly rhyme.

Other means

Early in the federal indictment of former President Trump that was released yesterday, special counsel Jack Smith admits that Trump, “like every American,” has the right to say whatever he wants about the 2020 presidential election—and even has the right to lie about it. But it was a crime, Smith asserts, for Trump to use lies to obstruct and distort the tallying and certifying of election results. Smith goes on to indict Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct the certification of presidential election results, and conspiracy to deprive Americans of their right to vote.

The distinction between lying that is free of legal consequences and lying in order to commit fraud and obstruction isn’t a terribly subtle one, but there are going to be people who will pretend they don’t understand it. If Trump has the right to lie to NBC News, they will ask, why doesn’t he also have the right to lie to Georgia’s Secretary of State about Georgia’s election results? So let’s get this out of the way: If I announce at my favorite local gay bar that Ryan Gosling and I have just gotten married, and I succeed in making all my friends jealous, I’m not committing a crime. But if Gosling and I file our taxes together, falsely claiming on the forms that we’re married, in an attempt to pay less tax than we would otherwise have to, it’s fraud. And it’s still fraud even if we don’t get away with it.

There are probably also going to be people who claim that Trump and his conspirators may not have been aware that the claims they were making were untrue. Smith’s indictment shivs that defense pretty brutally. In paragraph 30 (¶30) of the indictment, to take just one bald-faced example, John Eastman, aka “Co-Conspirator 2,” acknowledges in an email that he and Trump have learned that some of the allegations in a verification they have signed are “inaccurate” and that signing a new verification “with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate”—and then he and Trump go ahead and put Trump’s signature on the new verification anyway.

Yesterday’s indictment isn’t as much fun to read as Smith’s earlier indictment of Trump for withholding classified security documents, partly because a more serious matter is at stake (national security secrets are important, but they’re not as important as the right to vote, and Trump seems to have been treating the secret documents as memorabilia, anyway, a motivation so entertainingly venal that it’s hard to treat the earlier matter with the gravity it deserves) and partly because the way Trump and his allies lied—over and over again, shamelessly—is exhausting. The catalog of their lies in Smith’s indictment is practically Homeric. They lie, are told they are lying, and then tell the same lie again. Remember the years we spent trying to argue in good faith with people who were repeating lies in bad faith? These are those people. “It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership,” (¶25) admits a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, in a private email, dismayed by his team’s repeated losses in court and exasperated that the team’s political strategy obliges him or her to pretend publicly to believe in repeatedly debunked claims.

The particular lie that pushed this senior advisor into venting was about election workers at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Giuliani (“Co-Conspirator 1”) told the lie to Georgia state senators on December 3, 2020 (¶21), the lie was publicly debunked by the Georgia secretary of state’s chief operating officer on December 4 (¶23), Georgia’s attorney general told Trump there was no evidence for the claim on December 8 (¶24), Giuliani told the lie again in a public hearing before a committee of Georgia’s state representatives on December 10 (¶26), Trump’s acting attorney general and acting deputy attorney general told Trump the actions at State Farm Arena had been “benign” on December 15 (¶27), Trump’s chief of staff told him the election tallying at State Farm Arena had been “exemplary” on December 22 (¶28), Trump nonetheless tweeted that Georgia’s election officials were “terrible people” who were hiding evidence of fraud on December 23 (¶28), Trump repeated the lie to his acting attorney general and acting deputy attorney general on December 27 (¶29), Trump signed a verification incorporating the lie on December 31 (¶30), and Trump repeated the lie one more time on January 2, 2021, to Georgia’s secretary of state, during the infamous conversation when Trump said he was looking to “find” 11,780 more votes (¶31).

After Giuliani told the lie in Georgia’s House of Representatives on December 10, “the two election workers received numerous death threats,” Smith observes (¶26). The identities of the people who made those death threats are very likely unknown, but almost certainly neither Trump nor any of his co-conspirators made the threats.

Why are they nonetheless part of Smith’s indictment? If the case ever reaches trial, Trump’s lawyers may try to argue that he shouldn’t be held responsible for threats made by a third party. But keep in mind the distinction that is the crux of the case, between lying for the sake of vanity or entertainment and lying in order to obstruct or impede the workings of democracy. A death threat is not an innocuous speech act. It is a promise to use violence. A public lie about a government employee or official, if a reasonable person would expect the lie to trigger death threats, is therefore a kind of force, applied on a government employee or official with respect to the performance of their duties. “An act of force to compel our enemy to do our will”: that’s Clausewitz’s first (if less famous) definition of war. With good reason, the laws in any well-ordered republic forbid acts of war between politicians and/or citizens. Hobbes writes, in Leviathan, that “because all signs of hatred, or contempt, provoke to fight, . . . we may . . . , for a law of nature, set down this precept, that no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture, declare hatred, or contempt of another.” In a state of war, one isn’t necessarily bound by the laws of nature, Hobbes writes, and we don’t want to be living in a state of war.

On November 11, 2020, Trump disparaged a Philadelphia City Commissioner who had said there was no evidence of voter fraud in Philadelphia, and the commissioner and his family were sent death threats (¶42). And on January 6, 2021, famously, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” and one minute later, the Secret Service felt obliged to evacuate Pence to a secure location. Rioters who broke into the Capitol that afternoon chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” (¶111–13). If Trump knows anything about himself, and it may be the only thing about himself he knows, it is that he has a gift for summoning and directing the rage of his followers. It is his instinct in a crisis, almost a reflex. Words for him are instrumental, not representative. He knew what he was doing.

The prospect of violence recurs at two other moments in the indictment. On January 3, a deputy White House counsel warned Jeffrey Clark (“Co-Conspirator 4”) that if Trump were kept in power on the basis of false claims of voter fraud, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Clark replied, “Well, . . . that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” Clark, in other words, looked forward to repressing with military force any protest of the power grab he and his conspirators were trying to effect.

In its legal specifics, the scheme to keep Trump in power depended on the theory that Pence had the authority to reject or return to the states their slates of legitimate electors. On January 4, John Eastman acknowledged to one of Trump’s senior advisors that no court was likely to back the theory, and the advisor warned Eastman that by drumming up public fury on the strength of a theory that could never be put into effect legally, Trump and his allies were “going to cause riots in the streets.” Eastman replied that it wouldn’t be the first moment in American history when violence was needed to protect the republic (¶94). Eastman, in other words, looked forward to bolstering with street violence a legal theory he conceded was unjustifiable.

Clark looked forward to putting down rioters, and Eastman looked forward to being backed by them, but both knew that through lies they were welcoming violence into politics. Clausewitz’s second, more famous definition of war is “a continuation of political activity by other means”—the implication being that politics has its own means. To maintain the rule of law, politicians who go beyond them must be kept out of politics, if not sent to jail.

Time to Let Go

Also available as an issue of my newsletter, Leaflet

Top Gun: Maverick opens with Tom Cruise sitting in a chair, out of character. He thanks the audience for leaving their homes to experience the movie on a big screen. When Peter and I went to see Maverick in a movie theater, the other night, I was surprised by how old Cruise looked. He’s much better preserved than most civilians, of course, but in an age of motion capture and CGI, it’s a choice for a star like Cruise to allow his age to be visible. It occurred to me that the movie’s preface might have an ulterior purpose: to give the audience a moment to adjust to what time has done to the man who has long played the hero of their fantasies.

Cruise’s age is decidedly diegetic in the movie that follows. His character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is still flying planes for the Navy, more than three decades after the fictional events of the first Top Gun movie, and Maverick’s persistence in his vocation is understood, within the movie’s storyline, to be both failure and success. Failure, because Maverick is still just a captain all these years later, having refused to, or having proved unable to, accommodate himself to the military as an institution. Success, because, after three-plus decades of just flying planes, he’s very good at it. The ambiguity shrouds Maverick the way his black leather jacket does. It’s the same kind of jacket he would have worn more than three decades earlier—maybe it’s even the very same jacket—and we remember how in those days it seemed to participate in his virility. On a man in his fifties, however, an article of clothing that was archetypally sexy a generation ago has a certain pathos. (I say this as a man in his fifties.) Cruise looks great, but the jacket and the teardrop-shaped aviator sunglasses that go with it remind us so sharply of what Cruise looked like thirty-six years ago that they accentuate the contrast with his earlier physical self. We’re meant, I think, to feel a little sorry for him for still trying, and to feel bad that we feel that way. Which is, unexpectedly, a gentle feeling.

Top Gun: Maverick turns out to be a longitudinal movie, one that plays on and with the passage of time as it can be seen telling on the bodies of its actors, like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood; François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel movies; and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. In this class of movies, there can be moments of almost unbearable poignancy, exceeding the usual aesthetic frame around a movie. The passage of time can seem to be collapsing as one watches. A great role is a vital moment in the life of an actor, and when an actor revisits such a role, the viewer is aware of watching not only a fictional character’s resurrection but also a real person confronting a work of art that he may have thought at the time that he was the master and creator of, but which, in the years since, he has probably come to realize he was shaped by in ways he could never initially have intended, no matter how consciously he then thought he was working.

The first essay I ever wrote for my blog was about the original Top Gun. Peter and I watched it on a DVD mailed to us by Netflix, in April 2003, neither of us having seen it during its 1986 release, when we were teenagers. Peter now has no memory of having watched it at any time, but I looked my old essay up on my phone the morning after we saw Maverick. I was so angry in 2003! I wrote so knowingly! I seemed so certain of the points I was scoring against my enemy, whoever that was! Maybe a blog can be longitudinal, too? It was all so long ago.

In the spring of 2003, America was invading Iraq for the second time, and Top Gun was already an old movie, time-traveling from an America that hadn’t gone to war for a generation and was on the verge of discovering that it had a hankering to kill again. By 2003 America had consummated that desire, and I was angry, I think, because the Top Gunof 1986 seemed to me to have done what Marxians call ideological work toward that end. My theory seems to have been that the movie had whetted an appetite for violence by manipulating its male viewers’ anxieties about inadequacy and about having feelings for other men that were too strong. It was hardly a reach for me to come up with such a theory. In those days, to justify the U.S. military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, psychologists like Charles Moskos theorized something similar. It was understood that very few soldiers are willing to die for something as abstract as a nation and in practice risk their necks only for the other people in their unit whom they have become close to. Moskos thought open homosexuality would interfere with what he called unit cohesion. The military needed for soldiers to feel close but not in that way. If they started making love to each other, they would stop loving one another.

The year 2022 calls for different ideological work. America has lost its appetite for war. In fact it no longer has the stomach to digest the ones it’s still fighting, and consequently there is little discussion by journalists, and virtually none by politicians, of what we’re doing in Somalia, where we recently increased our military presence, or of our ongoing complicity with war crimes and humanitarian catastrophes in Yemen. In 2003, I thought Top Gun was a movie about short-circuiting mourning in order to induce a mindset more amenable to killing. Maverick, however, is just a movie about mourning. Period. Which isn’t to say it’s honest; more on its disingenuousness in a moment. But despite that disingenuousness, it is, surprisingly, a movie about decline and loss, visible from the movie’s very first frames in Cruise’s weathered face. Val Kilmer also reprises a role from the first Top Gun movie, and Kilmer, who in real life is recovering from throat cancer, is even more cruelly changed by time. His character tells Cruise’s, at one point, “It’s time to let go.” Cruise resists, of course, and the movie’s highs, which are considerable—I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the ride, and I even recommend it—stem from the fantasy that a man in late middle age can have one last hurrah. I think the viewer is meant to experience the hurrah on the screen as fantasy; I think the movie wants the viewer feel that Kilmer is right, that the end is coming, that, in fact, it’s pretty much here.

The sequel gestures toward rehearsing the neoliberal sermons about masculinity preached in the original. In Top Gun, the danger was that Cruise would feel too guilty about not having saved his fellow aviator Nick “Goose” Bradshaw to make a good soldier. In Maverick, the corresponding character flaw, which the screenwriters have given Goose’s son, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, is a tendency to “overthink,” to delay firing until sure everything will work out. Which isn’t on the same level at all. In an early scene in a bar, a new generation of young aviators mock Cruise as “Pops” in a jolly hazing, tossing him out to the street when he can’t pay his bill. In Top Gun, it was Cruise’s short stature that signaled that he was a beta struggling in a world of alphas; in Maverick, it’s his age. In both movies, his smile encodes his survival strategy—submission without deference. Cruise is able to make being thrown out of a bar look like crowd-surfing. There’s no longer quite the same arousing and threatening scent of testosterone in the air, though, no longer quite as strong a sense that Cruise is the lone dolphin in a school of sharks. This is a war movie for the Ted Lasso era, when, instead of idealizing the free market of male egos, audiences want to see people on screen being kinder to and more understanding of one another than almost anyone in real life has the emotional wherewithal to be. Among the young aviators in Maverick, only one has the full-fledged blond-beast frat-boy assholishness that prevailed when Cruise himself was a student. In real life, that archaic style has been exploded, and in a military context, even rendered nauseating by the war crimes of people like the Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist any more; of course it does, and it’s still dangerous, but in the way of a cornered rat. Viewers know that if such a personality still tends to show up in elite military fighting units, it’s to some extent because it thinks it can take refuge there. And is safe not even there, really. One of the young aviators who makes the cut onto the final mission team is a woman, and another, perhaps even more tellingly, is a man whose call sign, “Bob,” is no more than his real name. The joke is that he isn’t even trying to be something other than ordinary. Maybe he’s gay? It would make a certain kind of metaphoric sense that in a post-closet world, the gay would be the one without an alter ego.

As for that disingenuousness: Ideology’s weapon, in the sequel, is nostalgia. The viewer is meant to sigh a little over the way technology is forcing pilots like Cruise and his young protégés into extinction. A colonel nicknamed the “Drone Reaper” is said to be shuttering the Navy’s dogfighter programs in order to pour more money into unmanned aerial vehicles, and the implication is that Cruise is a John Henry, who can’t help but keep trying to prove humanity’s superiority to machines, which is to say, to capital. “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot,” is Cruise’s refrain in the movie, and his character totals half a dozen fighter jets, with as much abandon as if they were so many Ferris Bueller Ferraris. In reality, even though drones are replacing fighter jets, militaries today are more capital-intensive than ever, which, some economists theorize, is why America’s heavy military expenditure over the past quarter century failed to redistribute wealth the way that military expenditure during World War II did. Now more than ever, a nation may be understood as a population that can be taxed so reliably that you can take out a loan against the taxes; if you want to know who’s going to win a war, figure out which side has access to better (deeper, more continuous) financing.

Of all the reasons to feel bad about drones, the withering away of pilots may be one of the weakest. From the point of view of people being bombed on the ground, jets were never any more sporting than drones are. The nostalgia trip offered by Maverick is one last fight the old-fashioned way—a return to an ignorance that drone warfare has made more difficult. The nationality of the enemy that Cruise and his team are fighting is never named, and when the enemy pilots appear on screen, they’re hidden inside bug-like flight suits with opaque visors. In fact, thanks to drones, soldiers today often watch the people they have been asked to kill for so long that they begin to feel a kind of intimacy with them—and nonetheless still sometimes end up killing innocent civilians. And sometimes also end up becoming aware that they have done so. In a recent New York Times article about the moral injury that soldiers are now subject to, there’s a haunting story: An intelligence analyst working at an Air Force base is asked to take out a target in Afghanistan said to be a high-level Taliban financier. The analyst and his team track the man for a week, watching him tend his animals and eat with his family, and then a pilot on the team kills the man, remotely. A week later the man’s name appears on the target list again. They killed the wrong guy. This happened two more times, the analyst told the Times, before the analyst threatened to kill himself, was talked out of it, and was “medically retired.” In Top Gun: Maverick the fantasy is that it’s still possible to fly over these moral compromises at Mach 10 speed.