death and complicity in 1080p

Yesterday, on a Sunday morning warmer and more drenched in light than any other over the past four months, I awoke in a plush, soft bed and watched a family die (warning...this is disturbing stuff). I had forgotten to close the curtains the night before and so the sun poured through the window, flashed across my half-closed eyes in a futile attempt at interruption, intervention. The video begins with a Ukrainian man (he has a rifle draped over his shoulder but it can only be asserted with conjecture that he is a soldier) standing alongside a road used as an evacuation route, describing atrocities presumably committed by invading Russian forces the day before. He references children being killed, "civilians [being] taken away," and yet there is no opportunity for clarification because he is mid-sentence when the mortar plummets from the sky, impacting hard asphalt paved over soft Ukrainian earth fifty feet from where he stands, lacerating him with shrapnel. His compatriots drag him away and the focus of the video shifts, so rapidly that the viewer immediately forgets about the initial protagonist, to a family lying motionless across the street. They are all dead, a mother and two children and the family friend accompanying them in their desperate attempt to flee, and the sound of their dog barking from the carrier is the only noise emitted from a familial unit intact only moments ago. The barks jostle awake the elderly dog that I am dogsitting and I rise from bed to take him down to the street below. It's so lovely out that I walk in short sleeves over asphalt that covers soft earth.

Since the war in Ukraine began, Ilya Kaminsky's 'We Lived Happily During the War' has been shared with such a frenzy of enthusiasm in our society's public spaces - the arenas of contemporary discourse known colloquially as the 'Instagram story' or the 'Twitter feed' - that it can reasonably be seen as the symptom of some collective malaise. The poem is compact, its message straightforward in its denunciation of the wartime plumpness that infects all who hear the whine of incoming artillery through phone speakers rather than their own ears. It is an eloquent piece but it has not been shared because people found the language elegant. If anything, it has been reposted so relentlessly because it, better than anything else just yet, speaks a new language most elegantly. Death, violent and visceral - death incurred upon, for once, those with white skin - has been placed closer to the peacetime public's eye than ever before and those of us swaddled in soft linens cannot close our eyes. To share the poem is to condemn the perverse motives inherent to any violent conflict, to announce recognition of warm, sated distance, and to acknowledge the flimsy privilege that accords said distance. What is that distance from? It is from many things but above all, it is from death. And what does that distance from death make us feel? That question is harder to answer.

Last Thursday, Kyle Chayka published a piece in The New Yorker titled Watching the World’s “First TikTok War." It is a strong beginning to what I expect will become an entire field of media analysis, and it needed to be written. Nearly 90% of Americans already look first to the Internet for their news, a pattern of legacy media disruption that has surely only hardened since the first Russian boot stepped over the Ukrainian border twelve days ago. Chayka, cognizant that Americans are increasingly turning to TikTok and Twitter to make sense of global complexities, focuses largely on the reliability of the homemade digital content that has emerged from Ukraine, the ways through which it can and has been repurposed for propaganda purposes, and the implications of these new mediums of consumption upon the ever-dynamic world of news media. It is an excellent article and yet for all Chayka writes about this newfound manner of digesting war, he dedicates conspicuously few inches to death and none at all to the morbid fascination that defines so much contemporaneous wartime online engagement, that compels so many to stare at screens until dusk folds into dawn.

Chayka invokes death only twice in his piece, once at the beginning and once at the end. Both times, it is in relation to a photo of a dead Russian soldier that ran on the cover of the New York Times. He employs it as an "example of traditional photojournalism" and he does not know how right he is. It is the only kind of visual evidence of death that typically makes it to the front of a paper like the Times; it is wartime death in its most anonymous, sterile form. The corpse's defining features are obscured; the image entirely bloodless. It lingers, but only for so long. It is a stark contrast to the cornucopia of suffering available online, where the viewer's numbness is assured only after repeated viewings of viscera, lifeless faces left unblurred, and bullet wounds still gaping.

It is strange that Chayka fails to mention death more than he does because if you are searching for unvarnished death online, now is the time to look - and you won't have to look far. Entire communities have emerged to catalog the deadly consequences of Europe's first major ground war since 1945. Reddit, always a haven of the grotesque, will display videos of amputated civilians laying motionless in Kyiv streets on its front page without you having to type a single word into its search tool. Many of these videos bear the identifying watermark of a TikTok user, betraying their origin and posing the worrying question of how much has been exposed to the many young children who flock to the site. The same stuff typically appears a few hours later on Twitter, frequently shared by reputable journalists or political leaders under the veil of offering an authentic perspective of the war and often, without a warning. This kind of content has always been available, albeit less attainable - before, you had to know where to look and, more importantly, you had to want to look. It is not elusive today.

There is no stanza in Kaminsky's poem that describes the bizarre feeling of closing a screen and immediately replacing the sounds of anguished screams with the hollow songs of chirping birds. But nowhere else is that aforementioned distance felt more keenly, nowhere else do we know more acutely the shame of war happening to other people.

So, why has Kaminsky's poem only now gone viral? He published it in 2013; death and war have not been in short supply over the past decade. After all, this poem, for all its applicability, did not proliferate widely last spring as Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza nor did it adorn Facebook pages as last summer's troop drawdown in Afghanistan spiraled into catastrophe. Is it because Kaminsky is Ukrainian? Is it because the dead bodies contorted in gutters lack the expected, societally normalized black or brown skin pigmentation? Or is it, perhaps, that with visual accounts of horrific suffering omnipresent today, it has become more impossible than ever to lighten oneself of the burden of guilt? It is complicity, is it not, from which we are all eager to find distance.

Kaminsky does not shirk from the fact that complicity is the central emotion his poem seeks to evoke; he readily stated as much in a recent interview. It's easy to feel complicit when the dead bodies share your skin color and it's easy in a different way when you see everyone posting the same poignant poem and you've yet to say a thing. But it's even easier to feel complicit when you are watching bombs crash, so abrupt in the first viewing and so inevitable in each following one, and you cannot speak through the screen to warn the victims. In a conflict where combatants carry a Kalashnikov in one hand and a GoPro in the other, where death can be watched when your date gets up to use the bathroom and then immediately set aside when she returns, it is anything but easy to avoid the constant nudges of comfortable complicity.

Powerlessness has defined the Western digestion - or, perhaps, indigestion - of this war. America/NATO cannot involve itself more tangibly than via leveraged sanctions and the sharing of arms and intelligence (while effective, they hardly relieve the feeling of not having done enough), lest we instigate a nuclear WWIII. The average citizen, deeply taken by Zelenksy's leadership and the Ukrainian peoples' remarkable stoicism, can do little more than make unconsummated Airbnb reservations or write online notes of solidarity. It is not a feeling that those accustomed to the horribly well-practiced notes of American intervention are familiar with, nor one that delivers anything resembling inner peace and so for many, the impulse has been to immerse oneself further within this conflict, as if sufficiently bearing witness could serve as a salve for the prudent powerlessness that so eerily resembles complicity. It cannot, of course, but that does little to stop anyone from trying.

We place ourselves, consciously or not, in those videos of death, just as we place ourselves within Kaminsky's poem. That poem was shared as widely as it was because to share it was to absolve oneself. Who can accuse you of failing to recognize your own complicity when you have already confessed? Watching videos of wartime deaths on repeat is no different. One more video watched is one more piece of evidence that you are not innocent, not naive, and therefore, less complicit than those who cover their eyes. The more mournful a lamentation you leave in the comment section below, the more clear-eyed and possessive of compassion you are. No one is more defiant of Putin's autocracy and opaqueness than you are, he who does not shy away when confronted with war crimes, but who instead demands to see the world for what it truly is, in images that move. It is easy to convince ourselves that as we share the poem, watch the video, we diminish our complicity. But we are wrong to allow ourselves to believe what is convenient. Each video is a reminder of the sweetness of our lives, lives happily lived in the time of war. Nothing more, nothing less.