Civilization
There’s a gun to your head and a gun in your hand.
With the gun in your hand you must kill a child.
Or, you can kill yourself.
That’s what the gun to your head demands of you.
If it makes it easier to kill the kid knowing they are Jewish or Muslim, Black or White, Democrat or Republican then you are falling in line, learning the narrative.
Because the gun to your head is called “Civilization.”
Welcome.
Where Is Now?
Anyone believe god is smiling of late? Anyone want to argue for enlightenment values today?
That is what I was thinking a few weeks ago when I was in Florence, looking at Michelangelo’s David after reading about October 7th.
The parties of god and their proxies are killing each other again. That was the headline. Tourist after tourist was indulging in taking a selfie before a masterpiece of independent thought. That was my experience.
Since then I have landed in America and traveled around to find, not surprisingly, no agreement among friends and loved ones about Gaza. At one kitchen table the conversation is how we must write to our congresspeople to demand they condemn the genocide of Palestinians. At another kitchen table the conversation is how we must send goods and money to Israel. Biden has suddenly established his value in some homes and become newly impossible to support in others. And so on.
From opposite sides of the issue my friends host me with more kindness than I deserve.
The headline is war and slaughtered families. My experience is love and hospitality.
My friends know what they believe and struggle to contain their feelings.
I don’t know what to think and struggle to find mine.
The Love Problem
If there is a way to kill other peoples children and not have it cause problems later, we have not found it.
And the strategies we direct towards those we are sure are evil rarely take into consideration the reality that even evil people love their kids.
If the grandmother in Palestine crying in the rubble of her neighborhood deserves her fate for being Hamas adjacent or the dad murdered on the 7th deserves his for parenting after the Nakba, both might have greeted you at their threshold with tea or coffee, if only they had been given that chance.
Tribalism and blood lust and casual slaughter are primal. But so is hospitality. And even your sworn enemy wants to practice it.
The horrors of history are largely the record of tea not served.
Betrayals
Two women I know to be of big heart and generous spirit—one is young, the other older—use virtually the same patter of speech and facial gestures to express disbelief and outrage and exasperation. Let “Israel” and “Gaza” be placeholders and they say more or less the same thing but from opposite sides of the proper nouns they use. These are women who share a similar love of books and ideas, music and food, art and spirit. Were they to meet they might easily see each other as mother-like and daughter-like. But “narratives” shaped by their parents and their leaders, their teachers and their media—their media which is “our media”— put them on opposite sides of what is happening.
(I put “Narratives” in quotes because I have heard this word often these past few weeks and highlight the point about media because while the long post that follows lacks any thesis, how the scroll on our phones impacts us is a recurring subject here. You may find that subject trivial or academic or even offensive given all the actual horror going on. When the center is obvious to you, someone wandering the circumference will look foolish or be a threat. Nevertheless, I am not sure how any narrative, including the “narrative” narrative, can hold any center when each of us pull on it from the perimeter.
When I was growing up this sort of assertion was made about television, a device designed to make us passive watchers and active consumers. But the phone and its scroll are designed to make us active watchers and vested consumers. Television let those on the edge imagine themselves at the center of everything. It was fantasy, often a fantasy of individuality, but we partook in it together. The phone puts each of us in our own righteous bullseye asserting a belief all others should stand there too. It is insanity, and we all of us practice it on our own.
But back, now, to my friends.)
Both my daughter friend and my mother friend use the word “betrayal.”
I have heard that word almost as often as “narrative” over the last few weeks.
We murder others, I think, and betray ourselves. And I think of what Stanley Cavell writes in an essay on King Lear: “We would rather murder the world than let it expose us to change,”
We would rather murder the world than let it expose us to change.
In terms Lear might use, the scroll fools us into thinking we are god’s spies.
Despite that, perhaps because of it, we act like those who kill Lear’s daughter, Cordelia, people he calls “men of stone.”
Scroll The Shark
Compared to my friends I know little about the history of the region. If my Muslim friends or those who support Palestine claim Israel is an apartheid regime, plenty of evidence appears to back them up.
If my Jewish friends claim the world needs a Jewish state and that this state is under constant threat, they have the history and pictures to prove it. I have little doubt antisemitism explains much of the basic problem.
Everyone has these arguments to make. Everyone says it is about lenses and history and land and, yes, narratives. And it all sounds true. Or true enough.
It feels like debating a shark. Not the shark of Hamas or Israel, of one truth or narrative or lens or another, but the shark of religion and unconscious desire and scrollable news.
After all, how much more information could be out there?
Which narrative am I not privy to?
Am I to think, “if only Jews knew the facts of colonialism” or, “if only Palestinians remembered the facts of failed peace accords” this understanding of “the true narrative” would make something better?
Does not all this ride on an old assumption that the word “facts” points to something?
Has not the last decade rendered a fact something other than an honored stakeholder in any common ground over which we might agree or disagree? Is the creation and expansion of such ground—sacred space in the enlightenment effort—possible when we let facts alternate and be formed by influence? Facts no longer sink into bedrock, they just switch sides, often in real-time, often because of the “likes” they receive.
Always thus, you may say. And maybe that’s true, or true enough.
Why These Sharks?
On my scroll I see this Gaza thing.
This but not Sudan. This but not Ethiopia. This but not Ukraine. This but not Syria. (Remember Syria?) This but not the teenager clawing out cobalt for the computer I use everyday to write. (I murder that world rather than change.)
Today’s meme about which baby it is no longer kosher to kill always excludes some other kid who lacks requisite clickbait or association with more influential influencers. And sure, the preceding paragraph may be a kind of “what about-ism” that serves little. But it is all too easy to say “what about” today and yet doing so does not serve focus or solving deep problems. It serves the scroll and those who profit from our scrolling.
Prequel and squeal both, this episode of humanity at its worst arrives like the movie: Everything All At Once.
Before the Internet those who curated the news offered up a vaguely trustable “above the fold” tradition. News was reported based on an “important to us” criteria. If that “us” has long since been exposed to have been exclusionary rather than inclusive, what makes an event newsworthy now is its value to the corporation, YouTuber, or the crass talking head talking on behalf of some crass ideology.
The lens of “I” replaces that lens of “us” and serves no common fantasy except that we must each defend our bullseye of righteousness, each of us a target all of us keystrokers with their finger on the trigger.
Everyone, to overwork and mix this metaphor, is shark solo, shark dangerous.
Always Thus
“All drama in leadership and life is caused by the need to be right. Letting go of that need is a radical shift all great leaders make.” (Dethmer/Chapman)
About the news of Gaza itself, I see people taking sides rather than responsibility, justifying the unjustifiable, and speaking with blood in their mouths. They demonstrate that painful (and pain-filled) human capacity to gorge on the flesh of an enemy (or the idea of an enemy) before wondering what makes them so hungry.
Briefly, I wanted to hope some good could come out of this if only we could treat it like a heart attack: fast, powerful, and so frightening we would be forced to think seriously about how the plak of realpolitik, technology, materialism, and stupidity make it easy for us to treat each other as enemies of old religions and failing nation-states rather than as neighbors in the interconnected global village we must nurture if the future is going to get better.
Both 9-11 and COVID were chances for civilization-wide reflection too, however. We used the first to justify revenge rather than as a great teachable moment about the rule of law. From the pandemic, we have returned to business as usual, except with higher prices, increased corporate profits, and greater divisions of wealth. So I suspect this current grim opportunity to reflect on how emergencies suggest too much stress in the system will once again be lost.
A friend says, “We are in a time of registering damage without the wisdom to do anything about it.”
Serious
If we were serious we would bomb Mecca, the Vatican, and the Temple Mount. A likely way to begin Armageddon, you will say, but if we must bomb something I prefer these targets over neighborhoods. And I am up for trying a world without any holy sites, where we must suffer the life people live in those secular wastelands, places like Denmark.
But then if they were serious the faithful of all stripes would be cowering in shame and repentance for what is done in the name of their god and in that part of the world where, were their books or prayers worth five cents, you would see an ongoing nirvana.
Instead, we hear—laughably—that “God is great” and that Islam is a religion of peace.
“Israel will exist until Islam obliterates it.” Where’s the peace in that? And yeah, I know Hamas revised its charter to take that out but what is in it now is hardly reassuring: “By virtue of its justly balanced middle way and moderate spirit, Islam – for Hamas - provides a comprehensive way of life and an order that is fit for purpose at all times and in all places.” Great. Theocracy. What could go wrong? It is difficult to know which is more frightening, those who take this seriously or those who do not believe that hundreds of millions of people do. Or that if you replace the word “Islam” with “Jesus” and “for Hamas” with “for the GOP” you get the most ascendant, important, and dangerous political players in America.
But then again, were he serious the pope (who looks suspiciously like a cross-dresser standing on the balcony of his palace) would prove the worth of his “life after this one” belief by leading an army to Gaza to act as human shields for both Israelis and Palestinians. Those Christians in America and elsewhere who push for a theocracy based on that same belief could certainly join him.
(You will have to excuse my pointing out hypocrisies here. I know it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Or should I say like shooting civilians at home? And I know I am not being respectful at all of the faithful. I admit I have no interest in that. Because either we are going to teach evolution in our classrooms or we are asking to live as if in The Inquisition. While I aim to write, here, away from or under the prevailing narratives, in the world of the scroll—or any world—we will either, to crib Sam Harris, practice open-ended conversation or use violence. And religion is a conversation stopper.)
Were we serious there would be only one munitions factory in the world and we would use what it produces to bomb all the other bomb makers. (But where would the profit in that be? And who is tracking the stocks that are going up this month? For whose portfolio is this war a boon? )
Serious would be Silicon Valley taking any accountability for an algorithmic upgrade to make our bloodstream of information a little more life-giving and a little less poisonous.
If we were serious every school kid in the world would know of a hundred-year plan for how a finite planet becomes a place where their grandchildren and the grandchildren of their enemies will get along, share water, and even thrive. (But find the leaders who are working on that rather than their portfolio.)
If America were serious our leaders would use public health care, ride public transportation, and send their kids to public schools and/or we would just elect our leaders by lot just as, if we were serious, Netanyahu would live in Gaza, leaders of Hamas would go to Temple, Biden would spend the bulk of his time in the reddest of red states and the Davos crowd would be demanding higher taxes on themselves.
But, well, by now you will think I am anything but serious.
How about this:
If they were serious, kids and faculty at elite schools would be protesting less, figuring out how to heal more. “We will meet for three days and talk only about music and sports and Organic Chem. Then, on the fourth day, we can broach the subject of each other’s narratives about Gaza.” They may need to scream among their peers (as one young Arab friend is doing) or meet together to share support (as a young Jewish friend is doing), but if Jews and Arabs at Harvard et al—presumably the smartest and most capable of their kind—cannot follow the best practices for mediation and learning and healing on a campus where everyone is well fed and where there are no rockets overhead then, seriously, what is the point of a world-wide education system directed at admitting our best and brightest into Ivy League type colleges? To make more people like Netanyahu and Biden? To add to your portfolio? Sorry boys and girls (and theys), but you want to protest the system as if you are not the system. You insist on moving from identity to perspective to grievance while demanding “safe space.” Yet even a high school dropout can tell your space is safer and more protected than anywhere in the history of the world, let alone Israel or Palestine. Time to get tough. Time to get brave. Time to speak up for open-ended conversations. Because you can either follow along in the tribes and tribalism of the world we—your parents—have left you, or you can do something different. You can cry that you want the mommy and daddy of the administration to do something or you can do something better yourself. (Unlike any previous generation, you have the tools to create and raise new flags.) Your Jewish or Arab classmate may be the very representation of the problem in how they argue, in the narrative they spout, and in their insistence they are right. But so long as you are doing likewise you too are the problem. On the ship of the future you want to be a captain, right? Well, then, you can’t go scurrying beneath deck, rip up the sails, or kill your shipmates now. Time to suffer creatively. Time to talk to one another. Time to be leaders worth following instead of followers not worth hiring. Because if you, of all people, can’t do better than the rest of the world it is hard to justify all the resources you demand. So show us some truth and light, offer up new allegiances, forge friendships out of difference, or please, can we use your dorm rooms for the homeless in Harvard Square, New Haven, and the rest?
(So long as you are on a post-enlightenment campus, your authority is not to testaments old or new, Jesus or Muhammad, but to Socrates. Dialogue baby, dialogue.)
Oh yeah, parents, if you were serious you would not expect a college president to declare a side here. Not only am I reasonably sure Hamas and Israel do not check in with Ivy League before committing an atrocity, a college president holds a position and serves an office; they captain a ship. Privately they may feel deeply one way or the other. But we need them to keep the space safe for contention and disagreement, to keep the institution sailing. Don’t like that? Want your kids fighting for Palestine or the IDF? Cool. Take your kids out of school. Want the school to divest from this or that fund? Fair enough, there is lots to discuss there. But here, on campus, we put dangerous ideas front and center and then eat lunch together. You and your kids have come to think this space is meant to protect you from anything you can imagine. On the contrary, it is meant to be just safe enough for kids to imagine fixing everything. Their success is not measured by the corner office they win but by how much beauty they add to the world, the clean water they provide others, and the number of enemies they turn into friends through commerce, debate, and the sharing of tea. Anything, anything, anything other than weapons.
Serious is not the left alligning with people who hate gays, hate women, hate science, and, oh yeah, hate Jews so much it is part of their charter just as serious is not the right equating strength with bombs, the rule of law with faith, and the terrible divides of runaway capitalism with an ideal social order, nor is it the masses echoing talking points that serve everything except serious renewal and serious healing. Despite our techy tools, if not because of them, we have learned to speak like those most vested in the suffering of others.
Always thus?
Of course, too, if we were serious a mass shooting like the one in Lewiston, Maine would . . . oh, never mind. Obviously, America is so absurdly broken around guns that it makes the situation in Gaza look hopeful.
We would rather murder the world . . .
I will add that if we were serious every parent would want phones banned from their kid’s school. But instead of doing what every educator can see as fundamental, parents push back because they do not want to take on their own phone addiction and because they fear being unable to contact their kids when a Lewiston-like shooter comes to class.
To be serious now is to put preparation for getting slaughtered ahead of, let us say, a kindergarten where your grandchildren and the grandchildren of your enemies can play together. In this, at least, our sisters and brothers in Israel and Palestine have all sorts of terribly serious lessons to teach us.
Florence
A few weeks ago (and for the second time in my life) I stood in the Accademia Gallery in Florence to see Michelangelo’s David.
Since we first met thirty-five years ago I’ve lost hair, added paunch, and failed to slay my giants. He, meanwhile, remains the most beautiful and most ready of men.
Yet for all that, he may have aged less well than have I.
On my first visit, I learned how moving art could be. Of the three pieces of art that have made me cry, this statue was the first. T
hat stone is alive, you think.
That marble man is about to step forward, you think.
That’s no illusion, you are sure, that is the beautiful self unalloyed.
Today the space to be so moved is either not in me or no longer available in the Accademia.
Because now a parade of visitors form a lay-up line to pose in front of the statue with some Instagram-worthy smile so a partner or friend can take their picture.
When I visited in the late 80’s I remember thinking how all the people packed in were a distraction. But in a binary sense, I still had the “one” of being with the statue and experiencing its genius. Now, with all the phones, I left a zero.
(Agent Zero, reporting for duty.)
If it is the height of hubris and the bottom of attentiveness to use this work of art as a sign you arrived, the David als represents a point in history when such narcissism was unleashed on the world. In a sense Dave gave birth to the frustration I was having with the picture-takers around him.
The beauty and life in that marble is far more impressive than anything in The Bible or The Quran, I would argue, but for sure the aesthetic strength and representational authority discovered in the Renaissance begins a long undoing of church and god that made our focus the individual self. While ultimately science would be the chief player in this shift because of the lifestyle it made possible, the Florentines knew to put David in their town square rather than in a church. Like Shakespeare giving birth to the self-evident, David stood as an early symbol of me and “citizen” over Jesus and “sinner.”
Born in the Renaissance, cultivated in the Enlightenment, and made triumphant (though full of anxiety) as the Modern, the authority of art, the method of science, and the privileging of the individual is how we get to Steve Jobs, his goddamned phone, and the endless scroll of participation without sacrifice, reflection, or decency we all make habitual now.
To put it another way, standing in the church of my beliefs in Florence, I watched the faithful pray to a self they make thinner by that act.
So bomb the David too, I guess.
Gravity
For sure no leader today will die before justifying, if not celebrating, whichever killing offers them leverage on their Main Street. If political and economic advantage comes with blood, so be it. That’s what it means to be a leader today. You have to be a killer who can spin murder into what your tribe will give a “thumbs-up.” The people as Cesar, or Caligula.
Always thus? I dunno. But as today’s version of the coliseum or Russian Roulette happens on our screens in real-time, all the outrage that follows—real, vested, and opportunistic—looks parasitic and performative as much or more than persuasive. In our economy (and ethics and culture) of spectacle, it is an exhausting chore to distinguish the performative actors of chaos from authentic servants of the good. Nor is there much evidence being able to make such distinctions matters, in part because one crazy-making element of the scroll is how our attempts to be sensible and use a proper narrative immediately makes us target-able, accused as being in the wrong bullseye and/or Karen-like. Watch interviews with officials on either side of the current conflict and see them get frustrated because their attempts to explain reality as they see it are undermined by a journalist using, in essence, a phrase Mr. Trump loved, “people are saying.” These officials may well be what Pound called “liars in public places,” but they are not being told “you lie” or “you mistake reality” so much as “you seem to be evil because you do not acknowledge a reality based on other people’s fantasy, the one they have gotten to by scrolling through a whole bunch of online nonsesne.”
In this way, we shape our understanding of the moment, the world and history, not through facts or debate, but through demography and whim. It is a problem that television largely invented and certainly codified, as George Trow made clear in his great little book about television Within The Context of No Context.
But what, we should ask, is today’s spectacle? What pretends to offer us the context and narrative meant to tell us we are “serious human beings?” It is those clips of concertgoers running for their lives and apartment buildings being leveled. Those are the money shots, the 9/11 aesthetic, the AR-15 scenes we rehearse over and over in movies and video games which crop up now and again in that land called “reality.” We are reminded that the “gram” in Instagram and the “book” in Facebook point to a lexicon that once made distinctions and definitions, and so facts, possible.
. . . Facts . . . “peace be upon them” I want to write.
A crisis like Gaza or a mass shooting in Maine forces us into “Hey, look at this” mode. (But then so does Taylor Swift.)
Catastrophe and horror offer a simulacrum of old-fashioned gravitas.
But catastrophe and horro comes with that maddening twist that your outrage must be performative too. Or even more frightening, our unconscious knows we need to create scenes “that matter” so that we can dip back into the weight of reality for a lick of the red pill, for a reminder that a cave of shadows is only a bummer if you have no money shot to share.
My hospitable friends, the ones hosting me of late, do not wish to perform. They want to shout and grieve and have their sense of justice restored. They want to solve problems, the real and emotional they see in front of them and live with. They would walk the road back from betrayal. But how do you do any of this when “to be” is to be performative and when the self we once immortalized as strong, ready, and concerned is now the background for the pictures we take? We’ve turned ourselves into a Hollywood set, a backdrop, of who we want to be.Having done that we should not be surprised that life in the bullseye feels tissue-thin.
How can you take me seriously when, in these most serious of times, I want you to dialogue with my selfie?
A Brief Note On “Privilege”
I get it. How could anyone not? Some of us have all sorts of opportunities, protections, and buffers against our own screw-ups and the worlds injustices. Others lack all this.
Still, I think words like this meant to make people feel guilty are a bad tool for getting people to build better systems.
I want to be as responsible as possible, not given yet another way to signal my virtue.
What I should be aware of is not (just) my privilege, but my position. On the campus of Harvard or Yale, even if I am a poor student who has no privilege elsewhere, I am positioned away from rocket fire. If I am rich and white in Johannesburg, I am about as privileged as you can get but I live behind a wall and barbed wire.
It makes sense to help people see the advantages they have had. It makes more sense to make the worst neighborhood in the world groovy, to ensure the safety of everyone’s actual position.
And as this recent conflict shows, we all feel poorly positioned by such events, even if we are nowhere near Gaza or Jerusalem places where, whatever their privilege, no one enjoys a good enough position.
I suppose I am arguing for thinking of life in 2023 as taking place in a global village and arguing against both zero-sum gain politics and militarism as well as against the current version of liberal politics. One has always been deadly for someone and the other has come off the rails of its intention, losing all efficacy as a result.
All Person Shooter
One slant on all this is the old problem that war energizes the screen as peace does not.
In Paradise Lost God is the central bore of a famously boring book in which only the devil provides the relief of evil and fun and self.
In movies, the black hat appeals to us more than the hero.
When I was a boy watching that famous series about WWII, World At War, I understood the stated purpose to be history and document, but I was tuning in to see tanks and bombs.
Gladiators in the Coliseum, heretics burned at the stake, pedestrians murdered en mass (in camps or via drones), planes slamming into buildings . . . this is the programming we want to see.
“Cool,” some part of us must think. “Let’s see that again.”
(Think of how we saw the 9/11 footage repeated as if on a loop. That was the first time we got our fantasy brought to us live and in the equivalent of high-definition TV.)
Titillated by what we militate against (as we have always been), movies and television served up this contradiction as a supercharged buffet. But the phone makes this ingestable as our constant and crazy-making “feed.” We upchuck our deepest sickness, film what we regurgitate, share it, and call the whole process “social” and “media.”
Of course, no one twists into this contradiction or craves the 9-11 aesthetic as much as believers in church with their rapture or believers at the mosque with their virgins. No one except maybe the Hollywood producers and Video Game designers who know that an ever-so-cool kill is what sells. If it makes you the hero of your first-person shooter fantasy, all the better.
This is not to say atrocities in Gaza are the result of movies or video games. It is to say the difference between the screen of pretend and the mirror of responsibility has never been more obvious, never harder to define or describe.
Everyone’s pulling from the perimeter, scrolling hard through targets, turned on by standing in—or seeing toward—a bullseye.
Somewhere between Shakespeare and each of us wearing a VR mask all day is a tipping point at which ethics and aesthetics, commerce and compassion fuse beyond all distinction. It is the furnace of such fusion that makes me think, for instance, we responded to 9-11 with Shock and Awe to show those Cave Dwellers they would not out Hollywood Hollywood when it comes to awesome explosions.
You might disagree, but somewhere along the line, you will need to convince me that the visuals of 9/11 did not strike a national nerve almost as much as the body count. On the scroll, how we kill each other often matters more than who is killed or why and, unfortunately, today’s successful terrorist knows how to present things with what the Oscar Schindler in Schindler’s List calls “panache.” Our systems and our scroll now empower fact-free zones, lionize the billionaire crowd, and assume we cannot share tea until one of us owns the whole world, assumptions broadcast and spread by “art” and “culture.”
To put it another way, our most basic fear is born from something even the best of moms and dads will never be able to do: see us as much as we want to be seen. What our deepest baby self wants is to be never overlooked. “The opposite of love,” says Elie Wiesel, “is not hate, it is indifference.” (View our activity in the bullseye through that.) For Freud, this meant there is not enough love in the universe for even one child. For us, with the scroll as one tool and drones as another, it means we would rather be anything other than what god scrolls past.
Everything Is Everything, Or Almost
Jews are in pain and angry. Palestinians are in pain and are angry. The rest of us swipe onto a side or scroll down to what’s next.
Now it’s music, now it’s sports, now it’s a cat video, now its a hot chick, now its some bro, now I get a text from my friend and now—oh look—someone is declaiming the slaughter of families.
All this “now” is a fatal blow to any narrative, cohesion, or context.
Where is now? When is now? They come to the same thing.
—Agent Zero, Come in Agent Zero. What’s your position?
—Lost in my bullseye.
It is the absence of any narrative, all cohesion, and every context that makes each wacko narrator viable, every crazy conspiracy cohere, and all truths true enough.
(There is a wonderful book about Russia called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. But as you read it all you can think about is America and a world where Everything is True and Nothing is Impossible.)
As we all comment, speak, like, vote up or vote down, we frame our context, choose our truth, and privilege our narrators. The coagulate between you and me or any of us and the world becomes association rather than, say, facts. (Peace be upon them.)
We like to say we are in a post-truth era but it is more the case that the truth as we once thought of it does not light up given the circuitry of association we now use to plug into culture.
When some talking head attempts to distinguish “explain” from “justify” in referring to why Israel bombs neighborhoods or Palestinians shoot civilians they work in that old paradigm of words, as if the game is for me to listen and learn. Even if not swallowed up by my suspicion that they are just performing their vested selfie-self talk, that old narrative game does not power up and energize my associations, with associative energy coming only from what is cool enough to keep me from scrolling form a moment or two.
I digress for a moment to say that all this marks an end to that academic discipline I once pretended to teach: critical thinking. If you like you can say critical thinking came to an end with the election of Donald Trump.
The unlikely MAGA-ite reading this should not assume I mean Hillary Clinton was somehow the obvious choice. That is not at all what I mean. Mr. Trump did not signal the end of critical thinking because he won but because in order for him to win language as a maker of context (through definitions, distinctions, and, ultimately, the common ground of facts) had lost its function.
The best example of this is still “Make America Great Again.” Not so much a dog whistle (dogs understand language too), this tag offered pure voltage for associations about men and women, black and white, rich and poor that no dog would get, even if the associative circuitry I have in mind is Pavlovian. These associations and associative links turned some on and disgusted others. But my seeing that you are turned on or your seeing my disgust is key. In a way, we now commonly call “polarizing,” we are both energized in a field outside language.
(An image of our cultural exchange might be one of the countless scenes in a Marvel movie in which characters shoot “energy” at each other. What is this energy? Why do they have it? What is its source? Inevitably, the hero triumphs because they summon their “will,” a nod, I suspect, to a bottom-line narrative about how you win or lose in capitalism or faith via some inner something and not the system around you, how you were right all along to see yourself as deserving your happy bullseye. But, anyway, whatever that trope of shooting energy suggests, it is certainly profoundly other than two people debating over, or working to create common ground. )
Having displaced language from the position it has held for thousands of years as our chief tool for doing difficult work, we lack it now when we want to find our way back from betrayal.
The real world betrays you because Hamas slaughters your cousins or Israel crushes those whose plight you identify with. This ignites an emotional sense of betrayal, of wanting to respond to horror and grief, and because justice is so fleeting. But since 9/11 or the proliferation of phones or the Trump election, it feels harder, maybe impossible, to stake out space in the culture or in yourself.
You are “turned on” by those you agree with, which is cool until what you want is to be calm and find repose and reflect, as difficulty so often demands and which wisdom building requires. And yet you are also “turned on” by those you disagree with because in the associative circuitry of the internet (and the brain) associations your enemy fails to make charge up your own associative links. What they see as negative charges your positive associations by . . . association. There is no off switch and those on the other side do not just misunderstand a narrative or lack information, they fail to salivate when it is dinner time. How can I talk to these people? They use their brain wrong.
Television made the medium the message. The scroll makes the message unmediable.
Men of Stone
When Lear says “Oh ye are men of stone” he is holding the corpse of his murdered daughter.
The accusation Lear makes might just as well be directed to those of us in the audience as those on stage. After all, we hear him and we have been watching this horror too. Why, you might hear Lear asking, did you pay your money, get to the theater, sit down, and choose to take in this terrible drama? And why do you do nothing?
The question still stands. Or stands more than ever.
My friends feel stress thousands of miles away from its epicenter and cannot help but be in the theater of horror.
None of us, least of all me, lives off the grid (out of this theater) enough to claim innocence.
When nothing is out of sight, nothing is out of mind and if everything is a choice of what to click on, everything we see is what we voted for.
Oh, look, the newly murdered. I did that.
Our deepest fears are at the surface of what we scroll and life comes with far more indictments than it once did.
We are all bullseyes now.
Against Genocide? Hey, Me Too. (Mostly)
As a matter of course we hear that Israel must defend itself.
Well? Must it?
Would Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr or Jesus argue for the “defense” we are about to see and are seeing?
Israel could run away.
It could do nothing.
It could grieve. It could tear down all the walls and invite all the Palestinians over for dinner.
It could commit suicide and stand before its god with a clean conscious.
Or—coolio—maybe genocide is the answer.
Kill all the Jews. Kill all the Muslims. Kill all the Blacks. Kill all the Whites. After all, it works in The Bible and The Quran.
Kill them all now.
Personally, I find my thoughts run to the homicidal whenever someone cuts me off in traffic or takes a selfie in front of the David. And while once upon a time I believed the gap between a final solution and our first impulse could be wedged apart by civilization. But now, as I am saying, I find it easy to see civilization holding a gun to our heads, a phone-shaped gun.
And if we step away from any tribe and all allegiance to claim “all lives matter,” then wouldn’t it be better to remove one or another of these troublesome pieces from the chessboard of disaster?
Sorry Palestinians, given that not even any Muslim country will take you in and how they too just use you as leverage against Israel, your time is done.
Sorry Israel, but without you we are free of any triangulation and can just get into a full on holy war/war over oil. Time for you to go.
If George Bush can justify attacking Iraq by saying we won’t know if it will work for a hundred years, why should we not obliterate these nuisance makers and claim it will help more lives matter an eon from now?
A seriously bad solution? Oh, for sure. But that’s just because we know that it is hard to kill someone else’s children without it coming back on us sooner or later: The love problem as I called it earlier.
We step back, or up, as if raised by Google Earth to imagine the genocide a God might carry out. Do we justify the work of slaughtering families and destroying neighborhoods based on that view? We do.
And yet we might use that vantage point to see ourselves positioned in our global village too.
What a privilege, to act like god’s spies.
Man’s Work
The Captain who kills Lear’s daughter is hired on the spot. When asked if he will undertake this employment he says, “If it be man’s work, I’ll do it.”
Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, Modi, Erdoğan, Orbán . . our basic notion of leadership and work could stand the upgrade by being a little more feminine.
In Amsterdam, the way everyone rides bikes weaves the city together and generates (relative) peace. It is also obviously good for girls in a democratizing sense. They are not doing man’s work, but the work of life.
I cannot say the same about the phone . . . or drones or AR-15’s. (
God Is The Metaphor That Won’t Die
We will always have this idea that there is something beyond us to speak to, always need to anthropomorphize transcendence, and always stick an illusion to our future. But like all figures of speech, God only works in the imagination.
Once you speak the word “God,” and certainly as soon as you say something like, “God wants us to . . .” Or “Because God says so . . .” you have lost the point and demeaned the value of the image. Everywhere visible but nowhere seen, God is subatomic, not overarching.
The only way God works is outside of all context.
Think “God” but never say this out loud.
Or say “God” and nothing else.
Start Again
Everyone is up in arms for totally understandable reasons and yet nothing makes sense.
Anyone can talk to anyone and yet communication has never looked more broken.
We can see it all but we are worse than blind.
The facts are anything but helpful but one fact we know: Lots of people in Gaza and Israel and elsewhere are going to die and suffer immeasurably.
What is our duty to their humanity? Or is the very idea of duty to humanity swept aside by polarizing beliefs, tiresome identities, and endless scrolling?
At the moment, by fearsome consensus, our duty to humanity appears to be supporting one killer or another, energizing brutal commerce, and selling vested talk or the idea all talk is vested.
Always thus, you may rightly say once again.
Still, if you don’t mind, and without pretending I live in reality, I am gonna scroll past all that as best I can.
In my bullseye I will offer you tea or coffee should you ever care to join me.
—
Look after yourself.
Look after someone else if you can.
Thanks to Rafe Erin, Anshie, Jerry, Debbie, Mickie, Ezra, Hannah, Noah, Max, Ahmed, Selima, Amy (and the other Amy), Simon (big) and Simon (the drooler), Greg, Todd, Thea, Charlie, Sarah, Moises, Tony, Susan, Olivia, Jana, Yolmo, Dash, David, Susan, Levin, Kirk and Janet for talking, disagreeing, correcting, informing, hosting, feeding and looking after me.
Thanks, too, to anyone reading.