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o i think it'd be naive to imagine a total grasp is had by anyone, at all, anywhere really. like most all of real life, but more intense and chaotic, war is a temporal process, so it's never really "present" simultaneously anywhere. what i think we can know is a collage. no collage is ever complete (so every collage is what it is, a collection and organization of fragments) and in some cases the fragments that were adjacent in real time are important for context & so for understanding, and in other cases the collage produces the understanding.
i think that's just the way we are in time-space, and that's what knowing is like so long as we're dealing with processes. you can know the outlines (so for war, you can know, say, the broad strategic situation or you can know the logistical chains) but you can't really "know" events. you know fragments. you make stories about them ex post facto.
all this nonsense about certainty. i don't know where it comes from. well, i do, but i can't figure out why anyone takes it seriously. except that it makes being in the world seem a bit less scary because it allows the illusion of stability. there's recurrence but no stability. not really. not when you think about it.
anyway, my biggest objection with the way this information was framed is a version of the above: it was presented as "the reality" when in fact much of it is a documentation of 92,000 or so pictures of reality. there's no objectivity, and these documents make no pretense to them, nor should anyone make a pretense that they do.
but they do present a picture that's entirely out of phase with the marketing of the war. so it's a problem for political consent. personally, i oppose the war so am fine with that.
second, we've seen a series of responses from the war marketing machine to the leak. they've been simultaneously poo-pooed (o "we" already know all this) and declared a Danger to Our Boys. so they're not secret secrets. how's that work? and now you're seeing another push-back: o these documents aren't "the whole story" well no shit. and adding factoids to them arbitrarily isn't the whole story either. it's just another story.
problems of interpretation, of judgment and the data its based on: they never, ever go away.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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