Fear, Loathing

Yousef Srour traces the abstraction of death in post-9/11 America.

By Yousef SrourJune 27, 2025

• Politics

A MAN AROUND my age is standing on train tracks—well, on train tracks on my laptop screen—pleading for his life. He says he has a thousand dollars to his name. He lost his sister to brain cancer last year; his family is approaching financial ruin. No matter. Without hesitating, a six-foot, five-inch game show host shoots a speeding train toward a brand-new Tesla and three numbered mannequins, which are promptly destroyed. This episode rolls into the next, in which a coin flip has the power to transform five million dollars into 10.

My childhood dog, Cleo, died on Friday, and like most financially unstable Americans, I still clocked in at work the day after I found out. Three days a week, I’m a clerk at a record store. I check out customers, fingering through bills and keypads on card terminals. An air-conditioned vacuum—in here, the Times news alerts barely register. Benson Boone arrives with his own paparazzi to sign copies of the new album he says he recorded in 17 days.

I walk home past the middle school. A colorful poster is plastered across one of the exterior classroom doors: “ICE is not welcome in our classrooms or our community!” What world have we left for these kids? If ICE were to make a surprise appearance during after-school pickup or at a graduation ceremony, it wouldn’t be the first time. But the brazenness, the overt attempt to instill constant terror, is new, or at least revitalized. We used to sit in understaffed schools waiting for Superman; to these kids, Kai Cenat in a multimillion-dollar Batman costume is the more realistic option. Ask a child what they want to be when they grow up: they want to win the lottery. No astronauts, no doctors—they want to become influencers and streamers or, barring that, have one drop a pile of money into their laps, which will inevitably be siphoned off to creditors and landlords. The dream of social mobility is to hover near zero.

The end of my adolescence coincided with the first election of Donald J. Trump. The alleged silent majority emerged from the shadows and arranged themselves into familiar shapes under new names: the new Nixon (Trump), the new Klan (Proud Boys), the new media (Rumble and Kick). The Slogan and The Red Hat. As a Brown man in the United States, my existence has been politicized from birth. But as of June 9, I’m now subject to travel restrictions even more dramatic than under Trump’s 2017 “Muslim Ban.” Before he turned 21, my naturalized cousin was plucked from an airport by TSA and interrogated to see if he was a part of ISIS. Our persecution will always be predictable. From security camera footage to digital footprints to the very communities that will house us in cities and suburbs, a frowning Middle Eastern man is just a distant bin Laden; even when I sign up for TSA PreCheck, I am, I will always be, the random selection.

Trump’s war with Iran will be the third distinct war of my lifetime, insofar as any of them can really be called distinct. I remember kids yelling “Allahu Akbar” as I passed through the hallways of my high school. Every hijabi woman I know has faced some form of harassment or discrimination. To an outsider, Arabic—my mother tongue, the sound of my grandmother saying that God will give me strength to succeed—is the sound of violence. My parents taught my sister and me that the Middle East was the motherland, the place where our people invented irrigation, where our people ousted dictators for a chance at democracy, where our people pray alongside one another in hope of a world better than this one. In the US, the only images I was fed were Hollywood caricatures shot in San Bernardino or two-dimensional maps from cable news channels meant to show the locations of “insurgents.”

To quote the president’s social media statement following the bombings of the Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan nuclear sites: “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow.” There was no congressional vote on the attacks; I doubt that it would have mattered. Trump is the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States. In the wake of the attack, I’ve seen people write that our last opportunity to make a decision was in November 2024—in truth, American foreign policy in this part of the world was codified decades ago, and is essentially bipartisan. This is new, but it also very much isn’t. I’m sure Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush are smiling from beyond the grave.

As an Egyptian, I can’t help but see familiar faces in the rubble. I tell myself that this moment will pass, this tragedy will become yesterday’s news, as so many have before it. But the pit in my stomach returns. Just as my family must have cried on my first birthday, four days after 9/11, I’m transfixed by the death of that dog from my childhood, a Chihuahua named after Egypt’s illustrious queen, both of whose deaths preceded yet another devastating blow to the Arab world. When Cleopatra took her own life, Egypt was annexed into the Roman Empire; when my oldest companion died in my mother’s arms, Iran would fall to American and Israeli powers in a mere few hours. The predestined demise of my Arab brothers and sisters is cyclical, and this is the omnipresent reminder that there will never be an escape from my name—one of the most common names in Egypt and the entire Middle East—Yousef.

The toll of injured and dead is unironically buried in the chaos. I shouldn’t check, but I do. Is it tens, hundreds, thousands? Millions, as in Iraq? The actual number never seems to matter, does it? War is war. We don’t know the scale yet, so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist. I drive past a marquee advertising Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, this apocalyptic timeline swapped for yet another.

On the ninth day of conflict, Trump continues: “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” He has the droll demeanor of a mediocre supervillain; at least Lex Luthor accepted his baldness. The United States used seven B-2 bombers to deploy 14 30,000-pound bombs called “bunker busters.” My friend’s undocumented mother has been staying in a bunker of her own for the past few weeks to hide from ICE, and may this be the ultimate reminder that no one is safe. No one around the world. According to NBC, Israeli strikes have killed at least 400 Iranians and injured over 3,000. But again, who knows; more ominously, who cares? Even when it’s not explicated—though it often is—the Western coverage of these imperial wars has a clear undertone: Islam is ancient, brutal, barbaric. Funny. Remember when we thought an eye for an eye was enough? How about an eye for an ethnicity?

François Truffaut famously said that there’s no such thing as an anti-war movie, that depiction inevitably, invariably valorizes. I turn back to my screen. A man voluntarily traps himself in a grocery store for 45 days, a YouTuber buries himself alive for a week, a streamer spends the week behind bars in an orange jumpsuit and a simulated jail, news anchors point at the bodies poking out from underneath the rubble, LAPD officers in riot gear stand tall atop a lifeless body. Death is abstracted, abstracted, and abstracted again, until you barely recognize him when he appears on your doorstep. 

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Featured image: Courtesy photo. Overnight Flight, June 21, 2025. CC0, defense.gov. Accessed June 26, 2025. Image has been cropped.