| SHOP EXCLUSIVE SUBSCRIBE  This weekend, we saw choppers over Saigon redux. But that turned out to be just the introduction, as a new kind of horror made itself known in the form of video emerging from the chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Seven people are confirmed dead as people desperately seek an escape from a country falling into a new kind of tyranny at a rapid pace. At least two of them reportedly fell from a U.S. military plane they desperately clung to as it took off, surrounded by people on the runway. Watching feels like a further betrayal of these people somehow, a grotesque voyeurism reminiscent of many initial reactions to the Falling Man, and yet we may have a duty to bear witness. God knows this country of ours, including its media types and its members of Congress, will turn its Great Eye elsewhere soon enough. I will and we all will.
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 I'd made it so far into adulthood, avoiding the conversation, shrugging off the laughs. Then I met her.  "There is tragedy to the whole thing, but it's not that simple."
 John F. Kennedy was very fond of the old saw that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. What we watched unfold in Afghanistan over the weekend, as the Afghan army dissolved, the Afghan government collapsed, and the president of Afghanistan ran for the hills, turned that mossbacked shibboleth on its head. For 20 years, we propped up an army that was an illusion and a government that was a mirage. For 20 years, as the Washington Post illustrated in a criminally unremarked-upon series of brilliant reports in 2019, our government lied to us and it lied to itself. This defeat had a thousand fathers, of both political parties, in uniform and out. They were in the business of war, the business of politics, and the business of informing the citizens of this country about both. All of them failed at their jobs, miserably, and the awful images from Kabul this weekend were precise measures of their failures—and, regrettably, ours.
  Scientists who study extraterrestrial intelligence actually have a few questions about us.
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Monday, August 16, 2021
These Videos from Kabul Airport Are Horrifying
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