I’ve been following Teju Cole for a while, and like what and how he writes, and his playlists. This is from seven years ago, about Obama’s drone warfare., his “A reader’s war“, which appeared in The New Yorker in 2013, February 10. Cole starts out by praising the “reader in chief” Obama for his erudition that is so welcome after the anti-intellectual Bush years. Then there are the drone wars, though, one bad guy killed at 17th attempt, the 16 fails leaving uncounted “collateral damage” behind, every one a human being killed – literally – out of the blue. Cole:

I sit rigid in my seat, thinking, I don’t want to die, not here, not yet. I imagine those in northwest Pakistan or just outside Sana’a who go about their day thinking the same. The difference for some of them is that the plane is already hovering in the air, ready to strike.