Tuesday 143: Odds n' the end

Picking up the pieces on a rainy Wednesday.

I found myself listening to the experimental band The Books the other day, and watched a short documentary about their process. An animating preoccupation that drove the music was conversation—the idea that any juxtaposition is really a discourse. You put one thing next to another thing and now they're talking.

It's a pretty straightforward surrealist concept, but it's something that draws me to art, whether its poetry, music, painting, or fiction. The work of poets like James Tate and John Ashbery, for example, uses stuff like found text and overheard conversation to both destabilize the poem and deepen its meaning.

The idea goes further than the art too. Driving home after an early morning track workout today (4 x 1.5 miles at marathon pace +10 sec. with 0.5 mile recoveries; absolutely crushed it) I heard a series of news bulletins about Gaza and ICE raids in Chicago, and recalled the adage: Wars of empire always come home.

The conversation in this case is political. Power and capital today seems to be testing the populace: How much will you tolerate? What will you accept? In some cases, the results are funny. I believe that Silicon Valley's most recent forays into technology like blockchain, the metaverse, web3, and now AI, are experiments in just how addicted Americans are to the baubles of modern consumer technology. We can't put our phones down, but we're hesitant to strap the computer to our face, and you can't convince us that living in a shitty Wii universe is in any way fun or interesting.

On a more tragic level, this is a conversation of mass violence. Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza and joint strikes throughout the Middle East (Qatar, Iran) are discursive acts of violence designed to shift perspective, desensitize, and remediate. The domestic rejoinder to these actions is in the same language of violence and the casting aside of institutional law. Just as Israel and the United States ignore the sovereignty (and alliance, to be clear) of nations when they strike Qatar, and the code of international law when they kill civilians in Gaza, ICE ignores constitutional rights when it kicks down doors, destroys property, detains citizens, disappears people.

This conversation in violence is ultimately working toward a scenario in which full-blown military operations like targeted strikes are carried out against the civilian population within the US. If that seems alarmist and you're comfortable dismissing that idea out of hand, consider the possibility of discursive violence's propagandizing effect.

Political Guy Van Jones' instantly vilified appearance on Bill Maher also came to my attention recently, and while the shock of his rhetoric was hard to overcome, I found myself hung up on a particular construction he employed. For the uninitiated, Maher and Jones were talking about Gaza, predictably griping about how it was somehow DEI's fault, when Jones went out and accused Iran and Qatar of “deliberately trying to divide the West against itself” by doing Russiagate:

“If you open your phone, and all you see is dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy,” said Jones on Real Time, earning laughter and applause. “Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby… That’s basically your whole feed.”

So first, I want to put aside how chilling this is: A major political actor—a Democrat, at that—clearly articulating that the problem here isn't that Israel is killing children, but that we're seeing too much of it. The Democratic Party seems to have absorbed the notion that every problem is a language problem (a principle that doesn't delegitimize violence, but rather considers the power of language to be more material) and transmogrified it into "every problem is a media problem," which... Jesus Christ.

What caught my attention, though was the use of "Gaza" as an adjective. In Jones' little parable, naturally everything is mediated through the phone. He goes on to describe the images one sees: "dead Gaza baby," a baby who is dead and of or from Gaza. There is something dehumanizing in the syntax that troubles me even more than the abhorrent sentiment and worldview, which in one sense can be taken as little more than the idiotic musings of a dumb, self-centered, myopic guy who's been told his whole life that he's smart and virtuous, and so doesn't recognize his own capacity for cruelty. The adjectival Gaza has become something other than a place, just as the Palestinians living in Gaza have become something other than people. In this view, Gaza is a mark, a disease. By using multiple descriptors that precede the noun they modify (dead, Gaza --> Baby), we also dehumanize the infant; we insist upon its need to be contextualized, like a "crack baby." The construction mollifies us. It suggests to a Western audience that although Israel is killing babies, these babies are somehow inherently different from the ones you know.

Every day feels like we're closer to the end. Hug your loved ones and do the right thing. It might be scary and difficult, but we all gotta.

Currently reading: Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon, A Wave, John Ashbery