What will always flummox the state is the prospect of the individual — of many individuals — employing negation as a political tactic. What to do with someone who doesn't rush the podium, doesn't spit on the flag, doesn't do anything to ease the state's transition into the comfortable arena of violence? What to do with someone who says: I will have no part of this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent on active participation? Forced into this kind of space, power becomes enraged, and behaves accordingly. Legislators rush to pass bills outlawing boycotts, not only in obvious violation of the same freedoms those legislators are sworn to protect, but also a practical impossibility, this quest to stop people from not buying something. Terms like "economic terrorism" are tossed around by the same people who are quite happy to pull their donations from universities and literary festivals and anywhere that doesn't sufficiently silence whatever voices they want silenced. University administrators express shock at the utter inappropriateness of students' demands to cut ties with weapons makers and institutes complicity with occupation, and punish those students by withholding their degrees.
The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking toward — never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it's not cynicism, it's not doing nothing — it's a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.
I don't know what to do with this book. Sit with it, I guess. Sit with the guilt of my general inaction and inadequacy.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, is a takedown of the West, its hypocrisy and faulty foundations. It's less about Gaza than I thought it would be, more about the inability of anybody (westerners) to do anything about it.
A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one's nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else. [...] It's the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wile — and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. [...] My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there's no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn't conformity or nonconformity — it's self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them.
Of course, we're against genocide, it's morally deplorable. Of course, we're against apartheid, and Nazism, and racial inequality. Of course, we're against cruelty to animals. Of course, women should have the vote, and we should protect our planet. So why the fuck does it take us so long to do anything about it? (And when we do, it's only because it's become advantageous to do so.)
I expected it to be a difficult book — depressing in its chronicle of the genocide of Palestinians. In fact, it was unputdownable, and not nearly as grim as the barrage of bad news I compulsively seek out daily. I'm not sure who this book is for — it preaches to a choir of leftists. This book it will not convince the fascists who walk among us of the error of their ways; they may hold it up to us as proof, "See what hypocrites you are!"
The very act of praising this book could be seen as merely performative — that I'm on the right side of history, or so it will be seen some day.
I feel scolded for not doing anything about the state of world. That is, I feel that what I do doesn't make a difference (and I sense that this sentiment is shared by the author). But I do what I can. I read, I educate myself. I engage in discussion with others, even if it's just the girls over drinks on Friday night — it helps me hone my own opinion, occasionally it shifts someone else's. I march, I protest, I show up — at least sometimes, and even if it's only when it's convenient, my being there still counts (numbers matter, optics matter). I don't buy Israeli products. I don't buy US products. Etc. I try. This week I joined the New Democratic Party of Canada, because I want to do more than just vote (radical democracy! "public" shouldn't be a dirty word!).
Francine Prose says, "There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian takeover." Everything else is a distraction. Is it? The Epstein files are a distraction from Venezuela. Venezuela is a distraction from Gaza. The weather is a distraction from Ukraine. Tariffs are a distraction from changes to immigration policies. Do you even know what's going on in Cuba? Why is it not bigger news that the NRA is breaking from the GOP? News stories I read one day are buried the next. Two plus two equals five. I long thought I knew which issues should take priority. Today I am surprised to find myself thinking that maybe it's the lasciviously scandalous one that's most important after all — the one where the men in power protect the men in power.
And they just keep killing more Palestinians.
It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit, exclaim even, that no descriptions of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.
[...]
What is this work we do? What are we good for?
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 conduit of beauty.
Still, sit. Sit.
And then maybe walk away. Use your imagination, and be better.
