Op-Ed

Last Tuesday there took place a disgraceful display of visceral malignancy in the United States House of Representatives Chamber in the south wing of the Capitol building. The House, long characterized by its aversion to truth, justice and what was once the American way, has been corrupted by special interests who have effectively bought an overwhelming majority of legislators, to include the leadership of the two major political parties. In the area of foreign policy, as well as a spill-over into many domestic and constitutional issues, there is no more powerful lobby than that of the state of Israel, and its power was on full display on Tuesday afternoon when Representative Rashida Tlaib was censured for the crime of being of Palestinian ancestry and speaking up against the ongoing genocide of her people by the Jewish state. Nearly all Republicans voted to condemn her together with a considerable number of her fellow Democrats.

https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/11/changing-the-war-no-more-sentiment-of-armistice-day-to-the-war-glorifying-propaganda-of-veterans-day/

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.” – WWII General Omar Bradley

Sitting safely at my desk, looking at photos of bombed buildings and knowing that missing children are buried under the rubble, imagining (unavoidably) what this must feel like . . . oh my God, empathy gives way to horror. Move on, I tell myself. Write about something else. All wars are like this.

But the big question won’t go away: Why?

Beyond all the reasons and excuses for the continuing carnage of Gaza, beyond the U.S. justifications for its complicity: Why?

Every war foments this question, but only if you care about the victims. If you don’t — if you embrace one side’s justification — the dehumanization process kicks in and, if you’re sitting at home reading about it on the Internet or watching it on TV, it starts morphing into a video game. Crash, boom, hooray! This is war and we’ve got no choice but to win, no matter the cost . . .and no matter that a victory carved out of corpses in the rubble only means that further war and further hell (for everyone) are inevitable.

Why?

We — by which I mean most of humanity — are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.

You know, violence is morally neutral — and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers. Make the world a better place.

“In the midst of our grief and pain, let’s remind each other who we are.” .

These are the words of Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She goes on: “We are people committed to tikkun olam, the repairing of the world. The Israeli government and U.S. government are justifying massive atrocities, tearing this world further apart, and doing so in the names of us and our beloved families. When we say never again, it includes Palestinians, and it means right now.”

Humanity’s cancer shows up in Israel and Palestine. Missiles fly, hell makes global headlines, thousands of people die, many of them (oh God, of course) children.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declares: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. . . . We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

That’ll show ’em! Revenge rules. Kill the human animals, even if they’re toddlers.

Something happened on Tuesday, as I began researching this column — I wound up having to give myself a COVID test.

A good friend had just tested positive and, well, we had recently gotten together. I needed to see if I was OK. I note this not because there was bad news — I tested negative — but because . . . well, I’m not quite sure. I had never self-administered a COVID test before, or had any such test at all in several years. I felt fine. I didn’t feel sick. Of course I’m OK, I had whispered to myself as I inserted the swab into my nostril. But the test results could be a shock — that’s the whole point of taking it.

Even though there was no shock, I still felt as though something had grabbed my soul. I was unable, in the aftermath, to calmly push forward as an intellectual and delve into my chosen column topic: the narrowly averted government shutdown (and whatever it might have meant). My emotional space felt hollow. The column simply wasn’t there. Now what?

A megalomaniac is a pathological egotist, someone with a psychological disorder who exhibits symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with greatness, power or wealth.

 A sociopath is a person whose behavior is antisocial, often criminally greedy, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility, empathy or social conscience. Sociopaths never sincerely apologize nor are they capable of exhibiting remorse for wrongs that they have committed.

 A narcissist is person who has an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration, sexual gratification, applause and a lack of empathy for others.

  A paranoid person or group exhibits excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of other individuals or groups.

 A xenophobe is a person who is fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or of people from different countries or cultures.

 A demagogue is a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

If the right gets its way, maybe in a decade or two, the United States will be free of its slave-owning past.

All gone – gone with the wind. It’s just not taught anymore. Yeah, we had a civil war – about “states’ rights” – and then we moved on: We conquered the West, saved the world first from the Nazis, then from the commies, and remain the greatest country ever. Hurray for capitalism! Any questions?

‘Panem et circenses’, said the Romans - ‘Bread and circuses’. 

 This maxim served the Romans well. In times of crisis and whenever they needed a distraction from military defeats or political infighting at the highest levels, they simply entertained the masses.

 Caroline Wazir wrote an article in The Atlantic in 2016, linking entertainment and the need for political validation in the Roman Empire.

 “The Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome” is a good summation of how thousands of rare animals - at least rare for the Romans - were transported to Rome to be butchered at the Colosseum. 

 The practice was used in the early years of the Roman Empire to win approval for ambitious emperors and, during the age of decadence, to distract from the failures of struggling Caesars. 

 Ultimately, the entire exercise had little to do with entertainment for its sake and everything to do with distraction.