The Show Must Go On

The First Cut is the Deepest, Part 1 - MET - Chapter 50

“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”

• Friedrich Nietzsche

Martin Divisek/EPA

Intellectual paralysis, more commonly known as writer’s block, occurs when the question uppermost in the writer’s mind is no longer what to write but what not to write. 

It happened to me a few days after 7th October when the unstoppable reality of Gaza collided head-on with the impossibility of saying anything about it that wouldn’t be desperately naive, rashly offensive, unforgivably misguided or shamefully uninformed.

To say nothing, on the other hand, would be to lend either tacit approval to the Hamas massacre or explicit approval to Israel's subsequent reaction to it when neither of them could be condoned by anyone with a beating heart.

The intervening weeks have served only to petrify the quivering green doubts of my anxieties into the bloodless silence of a stone. 

I made a small library of false starts: 

I was going to tell you the tale of the two turkeys that ended with such comicotragic consequences at New Dell farm in 1965. It didn’t work because I felt obliged to end every paragraph with the words: Meanwhile in Gaza…  

I started and abandoned a story called Gelofteland, a light-hearted recap of F.A Venter’s eponymous novel about how the Afrikaners came to believe that God himself had blessed their claim to all the land between the Orange River and the Limpopo. I was going to use this image to underline the point:

Al-Shuhada Street within the Old City of Hebron

Twenty-three paragraphs later I realised how spuriously offensive and trivialising the historical parallel would appear to both sides of the Gaza equation. 

I started and abandoned a story about my Jewish father-in-law and my Palestinian partner. It was sententious, inappropriate and way too personal.

It wasn’t long before competing, confusing and contradictory thoughts were rising to the surface of my consciousness like survivors of a shipwreck gasping for air. 

Why did I feel obliged to express an opinion? Who would care if I did or if I didn’t? What right did I have to have one?  Who was I, anyway, to dare to venture one, a white South African living in Brazil with no stake in the outcome, with precious little knowledge of the history of the region, with no political axe to grind one way or the other, with no access to any information more privileged than what the rest of the world was seeing 24/7 on the BBC and CNN; or by reading what the rest of the English-speaking world was reading in the New York Times, the Daily Maverick, The Guardian or, yes, even on X? And what would my opinion be worth in the furious global storm of them?

As the saying goes, they're like assholes, after all. Everybody has one. 

But my thoughts and questions still gasped for the oxygen of common sense. When none was forthcoming I began to understand what Nietzsche meant. I had been gazing too long into the abyss. 

Finally, in desperation, I retreated to the one subject I knew something about: Propaganda.

I had been writing it all my life, unofficially to get this or that person to help me out of my constitutional helplessness or to melt the heart of this or that prospective girlfriend; officially for the SABC in the seventies, and between 1981 and the present as a copywriter, Creative Director and comms strategist for several hundred different brands and services promising to assuage many of the fears or satisfy most of the longings that define and constitute the human condition.

The switch was decisive. There were two wars going on, not one. The first was terrifyingly, horribly and distressingly real. It was viciously visual, vile and visceral. It was unfolding before our eyes. But seeing, we know, is no longer believing. 

The war that mattered wasn’t the one we were watching. It was the war behind the war, a sustained and brilliantly contrived assault on the natural barriers most of us put in place to discriminate between the credible and the incredible, the logical and the absurd, the speculative and the verifiable, the digestible and the indigestible, the swallowable and the vomitable. 

It is blindingly clear now that this invisible war was and is the one that really mattered and still matters most to the people on both sides whose lives, limbs and loved-ones are a long and very safe distance away from the no-longer-unimaginable horror, pain and suffering routinely being inflicted on the guilty and innocent alike by the obscene machinery of 21st century warfare. 

Not the war on our screens. Not the blood and the grief and the rage and the despair. That is simply the collateral. The victims are dispensable extras in a show that must go on. 

Because what mattered and what matters is only what we made of it when it began, what we make of it now and what we will make of it in the end. It’s not about those buried in shafts of broken concrete or impaled on the shards of their broken ground mourning their loss, despairing in their faith,  lamenting the unlamentable, praying for death to stop the pain.

The war is about us. The war is for us. The war is aimed at us — the millions or billions in armchairs fascinated by the horror of it; at the prurient many who don’t yet know what to think or suspect or believe but who can’t refrain from relishing the bloody details revealed in their nightly episodes of horror; at the armchair commentators breathing in the fire and breathing out the smoke of it in sighs of anguished helplessness, in searing diatribes of racist anger, or simply suffocating in the acrid smog of truth burning to a crisp on the evening’s braaivleis of lies. 

It has become a drug, a habit, a fix. We are voyeurs addicted to rising bile, to regurgitating fat, and to the cannibalism of otherness. 

The end-game has nothing to do with how the war ends on the ground. Victory will not go to the party with the least lives lost or the most territory gained. The spoils of victory on one side of the other will be measured solely in the weight of opinions for and against. 

What matters now is only how we receive it, how we perceive it, how we respond to it, how we interpret it and how it will shape our neatly post-rationalized views on the politics and geopolitics of it at the endless end. It is being prosecuted not for territorial gain, not with any plan in mind to redraw the borders or to reconfigure a new dispensation for Israel, Palestine or the wider Levant. These may emerge later to justify the success or failure of one side or the other. 

The intent of the war is entirely epistemic. The technology that will win it isn’t manufactured by Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Saab AB, Dassault Aviation, Sukhoi, Mikoyan, EADS, Leonardo, Thales Group, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corporation or Boeing. 

It’s manufactured by geeks who know which neurons to fire in the human brain, and which buttons to push in the human heart. 

Their expertise is in media, psychology, sociology and behavioural economics. Their tools are words and images; their skills are in social media, deep-fake, fear, name-calling, euphemism, glittering generalities, blame-transfer and fictional testimonies. 

The dividend will be harvested in votes cast in the world’s most influential democracies for those politicians who most vocally support the narrative that wins the propaganda war when the dried blood is no longer visible under the settled dust.  The results will lend a sheen of democratic legitimacy to the subsequent shipments of WMDs sailing the blue seas or the world’s wide skies to the actors we favoured on one side or the other. 

As a people, we tend to feel very proud of ourselves because of democracy. We walk into that booth and cast our votes and wear that adhesive I voted sticker as if it is a badge of honor. But the truth is more complex. We have as much responsibility coming out of the booth as we do going in. If the people we elect are sending people to their deaths or worse, sending other people half a world away — whom we never even consider because they don’t look like us or sound like us — to their deaths and we do nothing to stop it, aren’t we just as guilty?

And if we want to see a war criminal all we have to do is look in the mirror.

• Bob Dylan, from The Philosophy of Modern Song

When it ends, or if it ends, it matters not. We’ll still be here, waiting on the edge of our seats for Season 3, Season 4 and Season 5. Sucking it up.

To be continued…