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We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance.
National anthems and military flyovers and little flag lapel pins are all well and good, but for a life stunted by a particular kind of repression, the driving force will never be toward something better, but away from something worse.
This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.
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For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power. History is a debris field of such moments.
And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.
The most glaring example in the Western world is Fox News, an entity that more than any other has normalized the practice of severing any relationship between the truth and what one wishes the truth to be.
They say what you’re supposed to do, in this line of work, is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I heard that saying a lot, as a young journalist. Believed in it, too. It’s a quote originally from a piece of fiction, spoken by a character who can’t stand the press.
For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day.
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Years later it dawns on me that the immigrant class, which in one form or another describes (or will come to describe, in the looming, cataclysmic decades of the Anthropocene) most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure.
It is somewhat pointless to note that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election, or that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren’t a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government’s disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and
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In 2014, when an Israeli newspaper runs an opinion piece in which the writer describes Palestinian children as “the explosives of the future,” there’s no ambiguity as to what is happening, what is desired to happen. Seven months before the Hamas attacks of October 2023, when the same newspaper publishes and then quickly deletes a post titled “When Genocide Is Permissible,” the bedrock of polite intellectual discourse that liberalism so desperately and invariably sees as a hallmark of its own enlightenment
In moments such as these, when the lies are so glaring and the bodies so many, millions will come to understand that there is no such thing as “those people.”
When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.
Victims of empire aren’t murdered. Their killers aren’t butchers, their killers aren’t anything at all. Victims of empire don’t die, they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.
The Bush- and Obama-era practice of labeling just about any man killed by the U.S. military as a terrorist until proven otherwise is one of the most pernicious policies to come of the post-9/11 years, and for good reason. It doubly defiles the dead, first killing then imposing upon them a designation they are no longer around to refute.
To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library.
If they didn’t hate the West before decades of their lives were taken from them, mustn’t they hate it now? What is the statute of limitations on resentment, on rage, on revenge?
It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.
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atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die.
It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.
The average author doesn’t make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books don’t even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.
Because sometimes the powerful commit or condone or bankroll acts of unspeakable evil, and any institution that prioritizes cashing the checks over calling out the evil is no longer an arts organization. It’s a reputation-laundering firm with a well-read board.
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“Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.”
The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood—only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque—what we do to one another so grotesque—that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a
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The main event sees a CNN moderator lob questions at nine Republican hopefuls, all of whom take turns doing the sort of thing Republicans have been doing for most of the twenty-first century, painting the United States as simultaneously the greatest country on earth and a nightmare place.
that no matter how much red meat they throw out, they are still unable to give the party’s base what it craves. The only man who doesn’t have this problem is Donald Trump. He is armored in a baseness the other candidates simply don’t know how to wear. He understands what his opponents don’t—that the people who will decide this election have gone well past red meat. They want the body served up alive.
As with rage, there is an invisible force to fear, a gravity. I can no more push my fear upward into another echelon of privilege than those above me can help but let theirs fall, with terrible force, onto the lives of those below.
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The debate eventually migrated to a hypothetical situation in which someone bombs a lemonade stand with the purpose of scaring people away from lemonade stands, on account of the bomber’s distaste for lemons.
After two decades of destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan laundered through the silencing power of the term, it is tempting to make the argument that “terrorism” as a societal designation (meaning something that goes beyond the realm of legal terminology and into the realm of what we are willing to allow our societies to do and to become) is applied almost exclusively to Brown people. When a white man kills dozens of people in a concert or a synagogue or a school, it’s a crime. A hate crime, sometimes. But terrorism requires a distance between state and perpetrator wide enough to fit a
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Maybe this extreme reluctance to acknowledge, let alone study, the kaleidoscopic pathology of terror isn’t just driven by the oft-stated fear that to try to understand something is inseparable from pledging allegiance to it.
Anyone who has ever been forced to contend with the empire’s footprint knows this argument by heart. We treat you so much better than we have to; why are you so angry? Why did you make us do this to you?
Today I watched footage of a man kissing his son’s foot as he buried the body so torn apart by the missiles that the foot was one of the only pieces the father could find in the rubble. Tell me this man doesn’t know love, hasn’t been made to know it in a way no human being should.
This work of leaving, of aiming to challenge power on the field where it maintains the least glaring asymmetry, demands one answer the question: What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering?
I cannot argue with you, cannot convince you of anything, because when you and I look at these pictures we see, fundamentally, different things.
It is a disorienting thing, to keep a ledger of atrocity, to write the ugliness of each day as it happens. The months smother the months, soon the years will smother the years.
Maybe this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history books arrive.
