Strategic Action

On the politics of what we call things

There are four names now. The feed offers them plainly, without ceremony, in the format of a list: Capt. Cody A. Khork, and three others. The account that posted them says it used to do this during Iraq and Afghanistan, when no one else was. History repeating itself as a content category.

The same morning, a few posts down: it's not a war. It's a "strategic action." The semantic distinction travels through the algorithm like a weather system, a high-pressure zone of official language moving against the low.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the feed, Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail is logged as a removal target. A march about the right to exist in the historical record, scheduled for removal from the historical record. The circularity has a quality of malice so complete it becomes abstract — less a policy decision than a theorem, something you could prove.

The atmospheric pressure reads 30.18 inches. The sea heaves 3.3 feet. The buoy floats through all of it, indifferent and dutiful, recording instruments in the dark.

You begin to understand that the naming is the war. The refusal to name is the war. Selma to Montgomery was named because people marched and bled so that it would be named. The four soldiers are named because someone decided the official forgetting should not go unchallenged. The war is called a war by the people dying in it and called something else by the people who sent them.

The embroidered jacket gets 8,595 likes. This is not a criticism. The jacket is genuinely beautiful — green thread, patient work, a person who sat still long enough to finish something. It belongs in the feed the same way the buoy belongs in the ocean: witness, instrument, faithful recording of what is.

The pressure holds. The swell rolls at 2.3 feet. The names stay named, for now, in the places that still say them.