Tuesday's Child Is Full Of Grace
You just can't count on poets to be fair
Links are at the end.
The Washington Post has several opinion pieces on the conflict in Gaza today. Let’s begin with Max Boot’s, entitled “If Israel can defeat Hamas, it would be a major blow against Iran’s proxy strategy.”
Max will carry water for any old oppressor, which is why his rhetorical boats repeatedly sink. The apotheosis of his career as a writer and neoconservative comer was marked by the single greatest sentence ever composed by an apologist for empire—appearing, appropriately, in an essay called The Case for American Empire, where he wrote that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodphurs and pith helmets,” a sentence that tells you not only where his sentiments lie but also what’s in his closets and what’s on his bookshelves.1
Boot says that although nothing so far has deterred Iran from its proxy aggression against the U.S., Israel, and the U.S.’s Gulf state allies—not sanctions, not blockades, not covert military actions—a victory over Hamas might do the trick.
He doesn’t say what that victory might look like; just that it would eliminate the organization’s military capabilities. He also manages to write roughly 800 words touching on the situation in Gaza without once mentioning the civilian casualties there, and the impact those might have on the consequences of an Israeli ‘victory.’
Boot has forsworn neoconservatism, and he has surrendered his trademark fedora, but he still has a taste for orientalism: he can’t stop himself from referring to “Iran’s fiendishly clever proxy strategy,” as though the wily Persians are tops among the all the world’s countries deploying proxy warriors.2
The UN reports that around 4500 children are dead (3500) or missing so far during the Israeli assault on Gaza, all while Israeli officials say that their highest priority is minimizing civilian casualties.
“Threats go beyond the bombs and mortars”, UNICEF’s James Elder stressed. Infant deaths due to dehydration are “a growing threat” in the enclave as Gaza’s water production is at five per cent of the required volume due to non-functioning desalination plants which are either damaged or lack fuel.
When the fighting finally stops, the costs to children “will be borne out for decades to come”, he said, due to the horrific trauma faced by survivors.
Mr. Elder cited the example of a UNICEF staffer’s four-year-old daughter in Gaza who has started self-harming because of the daily stress and fear, while her mother told colleagues, “I do not have the luxury to think about my children’s mental health – I just need to keep them alive”.3
One child; how much could one child cost?
Also writing in The Post, sort of, is Atef Abu Saif, the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. A Gazan by birth and for much of his life, Saif was visiting family in Gaza when Hamas attacked Israel and the Israeli retaliation began. He’s been sending messages to friends and associates outside Gaza ever since, which The Post has assembled as diary entries.
I’d never heard of Saif, as I’d guess most readers here and at The Post haven’t. You can tell he’s a writer, though. The first entry is from the day following the night of the Hamas attack, when Saif was at the beach with his son, his cousin and a friend. They initially thought the Israeli shelling was of the sort they’d lived with all their lives, just the IDF lobbing a few bombs in their direction to emphasize the realities, but soon realized this was a full-scale attack from which they had to flee.
When we reached the car, I hit the accelerator before the others had even closed their doors. I drove like mad, as people leaped in front of our car, hoping to get a lift. We stopped and let five men pile into the back. We sped off again, honking to clear the way. I turned to Mohammed: “Where is Ismael? Did we leave him to the rockets?”
Mohammed laughed. “No, we left him to the sharks.” He had told Ismael to go on: His house wasn’t far from the beach. Mohammed’s shark joke didn’t make me feel any better.
For hours, no one knew what was going on. Then the news trickled in. A friend, a young poet and musician named Omar Abu Shawish, had been swimming, just like us, in the sea in front of Nuseirat Camp when he and a friend were hit by a shell from a passing warship. They were reportedly the first two Gazan victims.
That was October 7. Saif had the opportunity to return to the West Bank through the crossing from Gaza to Egypt but he decided to remain to do what he could for his family and fellow Gazans. His 15-year-old son insisted on staying as well, something Saif now regrets having acquiesced to. Ten days later, he lost the cousin who married his wife Hanna’s sister, and the cousin’s entire family but for a daughter, Wissam, who has had both legs and a hand amputated and, by October 22nd, was existing in the hospital without painkillers or sufficient water.
Today is the 16th day of the conflict. I’m still alive. Gaza is no longer Gaza. When I woke this morning and looked down from my window into Jabalya Camp, I saw dozens of young men removing the rubble from buildings hit by missiles, desperately trying to recover the corpses crushed beneath. For eight days now, we haven’t been able to retrieve the bodies of my wife’s sister, her husband and their son. Hanna phones every morning asking for news.
. . .
As electricity is off most of the time, even if you do have water, you can’t pump it to the tanks on top of the buildings. And not everyone can afford to buy bottles of water. In the first few days of the war, the price of a small bottle rose to 10 shekels, about $2.50. I need water for Wissam, who is lying in the hospital, burning up. It’s as if she still feels the heat of the explosion.
When Saif visited his niece in the hospital on October 25th, the day of the diary’s second-to-last entry—the most recent is from the next day, this past Thursday—he found her suicidal and asking him to kill her. He told he couldn’t, it was forbidden; she told him she would ask Allah to forgive him if he did it.
Earlier that day, before he went to the hospital, he had been awakened by a blast at a neighbor’s house.
We ran to the window and looked at the street below. We heard the sound of walls collapsing and saw glass everywhere. Our noses were filled with the heavy smell of burned metal and wood. We counted three strikes and started our usual guessing game. Where was the hit this time?
In the morning, Mohammed told me it had been the Al Halabi family house. Initially, six bodies were found and 15 people were rescued, with others still missing in the rubble. I went down to support the rescue efforts. We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket; you find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced meat.
Ah well. He’s only a propagandizing proxy of the fiendishly clever Persians, and his dead, every Gazan’s dead, are propagandists too.4
Another Washington Post piece which barely touches on the dead in Gaza and Israel, offers a U.S.-centric recounting of events in 1973, another troubled time for this country and the world, what with the oil boycott, Nixon’s downfall, the Arab-Israeli war, and the shock to the systems of the reactionary right, and compares that year to this one.
The writer, CUNY historian Ted Widmer, notes that Arthur Schlesinger Jr, minter of the term “imperial presidency” in his 1973 book of that name, referring to the continual accretion of executive power, predicted that
presidents such as Nixon would come around every 50 years and it was incumbent on voters to defeat leaders who display the worst in human instincts. As he put it: “Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.”
Yr. editor here doesn’t see how any American president, even personal favorites such as FDR, can be said not to display or at least subterraneously enact the worst in human instincts, but in terms of sheer garishness the Nixon-Trump parallel does sort of stand out. The piece is well worth reading, and is available here without the paywall.5
What else, what else, what else . . . oh yes: a story in The Intercept, penned by an infuriated Christopher Ketcham, helpfully explains how so many economists came to be absolute morons about calculating the costs of global warming present and future, and by implication how their idiocy has helped spark the current spate of climate scientists sounding the red alert (which occurrence conjures up a parallel, in my mind at least, between the pernicious myths of scientific and journalistic neutrality).
Purely quantitative analysis is the amphetamine of the mainstream economist. The steady dosing keeps his pencil sharp and his eyes blind. It has not gone unnoticed that graduate schools produce a kind of ingenious hollowness in economists who race to the finish on the schools’ assembly line. As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.6
Ketcham’s story would serve as a good companion piece to the one by Geoff Mann I mentioned a few days ago, in the London Review of Books, where Mann writes about irrationally optimistic climate models based on data which don’t actually exist7, and to the one in last December’s BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, where the authors note a 10-fold increase between 1992 and 2022 in the number of scientists signing on to a declaration of a world climate emergency.
Recent years have seen an unprecedented trend in scientists speaking out on the climate crisis. We applaud this trend and view it as a natural consequence of scientists being citizens concerned about the preservation of the planet for future generations (Nelson and Vucetich 2009). When backed by sound and transparent scientific arguments, the potential for scientists to educate the public and speak truth to power can be a driving force for the needed policy shifts. Indeed, vocal and articulate scientists played a key role in bringing issues such as nuclear annihilation and ozone depletion to the fore. In this spirit, we implore our fellow scientists to speak out on climate and other environmental issues. In addition to speaking out, some researchers have argued that the situation is so dire that we are at the point where peaceful civil disobedience by scientists is needed (Capstick et al. 2022).8
(Capstick et al.’s 2022 Nature editorial calling for civil disobedience from scientists is here, and not paywalled.9)
Ah well.
Tuesday’s child might be a saint but they’re as fucked as the rest of us and maybe more, depending on where and when.
Yr. editor has lately required infusions of jazz straight in the mainline.
Sunny Stitt, Bud Powell & J.J. Johnson, “Sonny Stitt, Bud Powell & J.J. Johnson;10” Bud Powell, “Blue Bud;11” The Bud Powell Trio, “Blues in the Closet;12” Kenny Durham, “Whistle Stop.13”
That, Comrades, is all I got and it is sufficient unto the (Tues)day. Share it if you like it, and consider subscribing if you haven’t done—it’s free unless you want to pay.
Take care, be well, and don’t forget to duck.
Abu Saif in The Washington Post (paywall-free)
That was excruciatingly depressing to read. It reminds me that economists are like generals and politicians in that they have no idea what effect their random neuron firings have on the lives of actual humans, nor do they care to know.
Bud Powell's NIGHT IN TUNISIA is life-saving; it's like a secular prayer repeated in the arcanely arranged steps that open ecstacy. I just wish someone could shoot it into my veins, like ketamine (do they actually shoot that into your veins???)