Obama’s new book has been making the rounds. It’s everywhere on social media, much like Michelle Obama’s book a couple of years ago. Both book covers glow with the same photoshop finish, two attractive people a bit shy about the power of their own magnetism. Smart, effortlessly debonair, moneyed. Diametrically opposed to Trump’s vulgarity, civilized in their discourse (“to protest a man in the final hour of his presidency seemed graceless and unnecessary,” he’s written about protests against Bush), and confident in the gushing response from their stans. Obama, the drone president. The man who dropped 26,000 bombs his last year in the White House. Literary rock stars like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith fangirl over his remarkable writing and unimaginably difficult presidential decisions. The decency of his character is assured, in spite of his war crimes. He’s got the Netflix deals after all and the power to gift us Biden. He makes us feel nostalgic for the good old days, when America was truly great. Everyone knows he killed almost 4000 people in 542 drone strikes, deported more than 2.5 million others, and force-fed Muslim men categorized as non-human in Guantanamo. Yet here we are. He didn’t just do the broadly brutal, presidential butchery we expect from American presidents, to keep us safe, he made it more personal. He handled kill lists, droned a 16-year-old American kid in Yemen along with his 17-year-old cousin, started spanking new wars, and called the president of Yemen to halt the release of a journalist reporting on drone casualties in that country. But the boring repetition of these atrocities can easily be set aside. Pictures of dead children or their wailing mothers don’t really register if they’re not wearing the right clothes or speaking the right languages. We can say sensibly that collateral damage is a price we are willing to pay, as long as someone else is actually paying that price. Would we be equally understanding about the droning of our own children for the greater good of the world? Why is that a crazy question? Maybe that’s just how it is these days. Everything whitewashed, packaged like an Apple product, branded like a captivatingly effete IG influencer, and placed adroitly like sponcon. It’s hard to tell the news from the ads or Hollywood films from military propaganda. Everything ground together into a bland paste of vacuity. Makes one hungry for guerrilla filmmaking and some raw, unvarnished truth.