By Humphrey McQueen (May 17)
What’s wrong with me that I’m not depressed? Almost a third of Australians are taking pills. The only thing slowing my getting up each morning is how warm I am under the doona. Am I as much a moral zombie as I accuse those who don’t – won’t – can’t – denounce the genocidal entity?
Having thrived for fifty years without ‘the triv’ and declining to submit to the anti-social media, I turn away from shots of the devastation in Gaza should any flick across one of the four screens at the gym. I don’t need to look to know how monstrous it is. I did not see images of the collapse of the Twin Towers until years later in documentaries. It had been distressing enough to read that people jumped out of windows, phoned their dearest as the flames approached.
In the wake of the first great slaughter, Australian artist Norman Lindsay, whose brother had been killed on the Western Front, protested that exposure to brutal imagery serves only to brutalise brutes and to disable the decent.
Goya’s The Disasters of War from the 1810s, Picasso’s The Destruction of Guernica (1937) and a naked napalmed child in 1966 were more than many people could bear. Decades of the ‘shock and awe’ spilling from bemusements on screens of every size have left scrollers incapable of reframing Adorno’s question about poetry after Auschwitz: visual arts after Gaza?
If you have a sore toe, your entire body is your toe. I have developed a corn on the little toe on my right foot. Toes might be little but they help to keep us erect. I can afford the $11.00 for a packet of relief from the good Dr Scholes. People in Gaza have corns. There are no pads to be had at any price. My blood-pressure tables are cheaper again. People in Gaza have high blood-pressure. Where can they get a moth’s prescription?
50.000. 100,000. Six million. Numbers do not determine criminality. To kill one Jew because she is a Jew is to cross the line. Of course, we become what we do. After the first murder, repulsion and guilt remain possible. How often does one have to kill before becoming a sociopath?
I’m looking forward to being in bed by midnight. A passing motorbike might disturb my slumber but there are no day-and-night drones to make rem sleep impossible. Come morning, I can play my mind-game: should I toss back the covers at 8.15 – or wait till 8.20?
Tomorrow is Saturday and another noonday rally, this one on the seventy-seventh anniversary of The Catastrophe.
I‘ve never felt able to join the chants of ‘Free Gaza!,’ not even to shield myself from having accepted that the Zionist Zealots assassinated more than the Oslo Accords along with Prime Minister Rabin in 1995, as they had with the U.N. Representative Count Bernadotte forty-seven years earlier.
There is no Two-state solution and no One-state solution. The first is what arse-from-his-Albo and Wong parrot to get them out of the cage they have forged from hypocrisy and mendacity, cowardness and complicity. The second became impossible courtesy of the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank by the murderous land-thieves (aka un-settlers). Yet, of late, I do find myself mouthing ’From the river to the sea … forever.’ That whisper is not in hope of another ceasefire, still let of permanent peace. Peace will come when the Temple descends from the heavens onto the Mount.
My hope is that the brutality is not becoming so bestial that my sanity will depend on hollowing ‘From the river to the sea … free.’
In Martin Boyd’s 1928 novel The Montfords, a returned soldier reflects: ‘Now I think we only hope to avoid disaster.’ Disaster is Nutter Yahoo’s fist on the entity’s non-existent bomb.
My hope against hope is that I am again wrong, as I was before Tet about the peoples of Indo-China driving the U.S. imperialists into sea, and about Timor Leste until the East Asian financial crisis upended the Sukarno dictatorship.
Nearly seventy years of activism has reinforced one truth. When we see what the brutes get up to while we are resisting their barbarisms, how many times worse would this world be were we to stay mum.
Sunday will be bleak so shall start the day with my first porridge this year, enlivened with Moreton Bay Ash honey. Anyone in Gaza would be thrilled to find a dry, cold Weet-bix to share.
