Irandiana Jones and The Lost Crusade

There are few certainties left in this day and age, but one of the last sure things is that history marches on. At times it slows down, as if to signal a hard left or (more often) right turn and at others it legs it down the straight lines, running stop signs and running over pedestrians. It’s at times like that that you want to call up Fukuyama and yell at him. Francis, you motherfucker, History was supposed to be over and yet here it fucking is, it just did a handbreak turn over my cat while flashing the “my heart goes out to you” salute out the window. Do something!

But there is nothing that Francis can do. There was very little that other theorists could ever do about history. Take Marx, for instance. The German who left us several seminal texts about capitalism, while being notoriously bad with money, once said that history comes “first as tragedy, then as farce”. Bollocks to that, Marx, you self-important orangutan. Maybe history comes as tragedy and farce, but then it just keeps coming and coming until you’re cooked and both tragedy and farce no longer have any semblance of meaning.

I know this because this relentless onslaught of history past the farce part has cost me something dear and formative.

The year was 2001, and George Bush the II-nd was shell shocked. A bunch of terrorists with less flight experience than Nathan Fielder crashed a bunch of planes into a bunch of business towers. The vast majority of said terrorists were Saudis, so, of course, in retaliation the US invaded Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. I was an impressionable young man of 14 with stars in my eyes, a liberal view of geopolitics and a strong, one would say Kantian, dislike of war. I went to protests, and I have the photos to back that up. I made a t-shirt. I made it in paint. It had slogans on it and a worldview, a three-sentence analysis of America the Good becoming America the Rotten. My friend’s t-shirt just had an image of Bush’s face looking like a monkey. Guess who got to be on TV later that day.

But protests aside, more than anything else, I went online. To vent.

The internet was different then, none of the dead-internet bullshit we see today. There was plenty of other bullshit, but the internet was definitely alive; you could hear its heartbeat in the screeching of dial-up and the clicking of LAN. Photoshop was taking off, YTMND was a thing, Something Awful was blowing up, 4chan had started decanting into the cesspool it has always been. Out of this intersection of war anxiety, Photoshop and silver-age Internet culture, American Crusade 2001 was born. And I loved it.

American Crusade 2001 was a set of trading or collectable cards born out of a parody of real, honest-to-god trading cards put out by the (American) company Topps to celebrate the (American) 1991 Iraq War. You can see them here. They’re real, and they’re spectacular.

The American Crusade trading cards are doubleplus spectacular. They’re an eclectic blend of Manicheism, Orwellian references, ironic nazi lingo, surveillance state anxiety (this was the age of the Patriot Act), and overall country-fried doomerism more common nowadays than back then. All in signature geriatric millennial aesthetics. It was the id of the internet, of the thinking online refusenik speaking out against a war (two really) that you were deemed unpatriotic and borderline criminal if you dared raise your voice against.

All that is gone now, like tears in the rain. The original website is gone, all the mirrors are down, and a piece of internet heritage is all but wiped from existence. If you search for “American Crusade 2001 trading cards”, Google’s helpful algorithms try to redirect you to buy the original 1991 trading cards. Because that is the internet today - buy shit, create content or consume it in exchange for your data. All that stands between this piece of history and oblivion is our memory and (thankfully) the Internet Archive. God bless the Internet Archive.

Speaking of God-bothering, perhaps the greatest insult added to injury is that if you skip the “trading cards” part and just Google “American Crusade”, the result is something else entirely. Did you know that Pete Hegseth - Christian Nationalist, one of the stupidest men alive and current ringmaster of the circus that is the US Department of D̶e̶f̶e̶n̶s̶e̶ WAR!!!!!!1 wrote a book? This millennialist psychopath, who has tattooed crusader lingo onto his body, published a memoir called “American Crusade”. And because of that, his moronic budget-Tymothy-Olyphant internet presence (and book) is drowning out the little relic of a kinder age and the kinder god that was the early Internet and its anti-war trading cards. But there is some humour in that.

The fact that a sociopathic warmonger who wanted a holy war got to wage one in Iran because of different reasons while, at the same time, overshadowing (net-mogging? SEOmaxxing?) the last remains of protest from back when Farce last came a-callin’ is both sad and funny. It’s a medley of tragedy and farce fit for an age of cooked brains and deep-fried futures.

One might say it’s almost dialectical.