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The boy and I were watching ABC Nightly News tonight while eating bratwurst and a nice salad with pears and raw onion. The salad was excellent: both of us were surprised. And the brats, boiled in bear and served on brioche buns, were delightful, and as I write this, I’m realising that the bountiful alliteration didn’t hurt.

This isn’t about that, though, because the news tonight was all about the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. The other day the coverage focused on the rocket attacks and the endlessly described “eerie silences” on the streets of Tel Aviv, but tonight was a lot worse, discussing personal stories of people watching their families get shot in front of them while their wives or kids or grandmothers were hauled off to go who knows where and serve likely as human shields, potentially worse. The boy and I talked about it, and I told him in no world is there an excuse for that sort of evil. He’s now eleven, in sixth grade, starting to study things like the Civil War and the like with more than just a patriotic “this is our country’s history” take on things, so I don’t want to sugar coat this particular historical moment.

In my heart of hearts, though, I was struggling a bit. There is no part of my psyche that can manufacture the kind of inhumanity that would allow me to sympathise with the Hamas gunmen over the past few days, but what was somehow easy to bring to mind was a sense of mindless, numbing, and inescapable despair that must go along with being a middle aged dad in the Gaza Strip. Unable to leave, unable to find a job, watching your kids grow up trapped in what is in effect a permanent and inescapable refugee camp, I could easily bring to mind an existential sense of non-being. I couldn’t transfer that to a sense that it would be okay to kill another human being because of it, or take away the child or spouse or loved one of the people who are running the camp to certain death; no, because that would actually separate me from being able to feel despair. The art of being human is, on a certain very basic level, choosing not to commit the willful atrocity in the face of personal hopelessness. Being human is to choose despair over dehumanising another: it is, to use Buber’s language, to always refuse to de-Thou the other.

It got me thinking of Mersault in The Stranger, whose creator would, I think, agree with me but he would make his creation do quite the opposite, in the nihilistic pursuit of being not human; or the coward in The Red Badge of Courage, acting as a human in his flight and ironically returning to his tribe gun in hand – renouncing his sinless cowardice in favour of murderous manufactured bravery.

It also had me thinking of the fact that, for the past few decades, Americans have been bombing, rocketing, and droning to death countless thousands of Arabs across the Middle East. That’s awful, of course, but it’s still no excuse – no reason – to kidnap an Israeli grandmother, rape her for the YouTube value, and then kill her, as one anecdote related on the ABC Nightly News last night. The terrorists even chose their film angles to maximise the intellectual horror: there is only one way to interpret watching young happy men with guns round up Jewish women, hitting them as the go, and loading them onto transports. My guess is the young men with the guns, abusing the prisoners for the cameras, were too stupid to understand the propaganda weapons they were being made to be, but the unseen men behind the smartphones photographing them knew exactly what they were doing, and the fact they never show their faces for all of that makes it even more abhorrent.

And yet: not so abhorrent that I could imagine ever participating in any of it. I can vaguely imagine what it might have been at age 20 to get drafted and serve in the military, and I have enough friends who have served to know that a part of the induction experience is to tone down one’s humanity enough to allow that killing spark of inhumanity to emerge. In battle, it can be the difference between living and dying – to say nothing of victory or defeat.

I wasn’t enjoying myself thinking any of this; it seemed to lead nowhere, or rather, it leads only to a recognition that, even if I can’t imagine it, a substantial portion of the world not only can imagine it but lives it, they choose it. Earlier in the day I had watched the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom on Bloomberg TV effectively lose her shit: “never has the Holy Land seen atrocities such as this, never”, she said, ignoring the Israeli massacres during the pre-1947 civil war, ignoring the Crusaders and Saladin, ignoring Masaba, ignoring half the Old Testament. Even as I thought that, though, I thought “well, she’s upset, and this is part of the process by which you recover your humanity.” And then the Israeli defense minister popped up and told a press conference that Palestinians – not Hamas, mind you, but Palestinians – had to be fought without mercy because they were “animalistic”. Oh Buber, where are Thou?

My son interrupted my bleak reverie. “I think the Palestinians have just given up, I mean really just given up. They are probably mostly all going to be killed by the Israelis, Dad, but they don’t seem to care anymore.”

He talked about how someone at camp told him that rats, if you corner them, will attack you, even though they know you’ll kill them, because it doesn’t matter any more. They watched a lot of Ratatouille at camp on the weekends, so I think that’s what he was talking about – I remembered the scene.

I told him people aren’t rats, except when others treat them that way. And even then, I told him, we still get to choose whether or not we want to kill on our way out, like rats, or if we want to forgive, like human beings.

He thought for a moment and said he understood. I told him I hoped he’d never face that choice, but if he did, that he’d forgive in his last moments of life, instead of trying to keep justifying the other person’s desire to kill. He said he wasn’t sure what he’d do, but he understood what I was saying.

There is, of course, a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, just as there is a solution to racism in the US, and to tribalism in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The answer is for one side to simply stop viewing the moment of their torment as a reason to torment further, even if it means their own death. And if one side does that simultaneously, indeed, it will simply be wiped out – the mechanisms of hatred being so ingrained that they’ll be unable to stop themselves. It won’t even be a sin: it will be a heroic, saintly act on the part of the side that chooses to martyr themselves, and the follow through of the other side to wipe them out will just, simply, be a Pavlovian response. Pure animalism kills pure rationalism dead – it is what it is.

What’s worked in the past is the symbolic refusal that comes up against a random forgetfulness or arrogance or whatever to act in response. P.W. Botha choosing to let Mandela live – and write, and be his best human self – in prison instead of just killing him like Biko, for example – wrong move for the white nationalists, right move for humanity. Had all of South Africa’s black Africans simply laid themselves down, it would have been a simple bloodbath, and every single one of them doing the same caused a private death. But one guy taking a step back, and facing one evil guy who forgot to be evil that day, and you have the potential for something to spark, something good.

Oddly, though, that requires continuing to care. My son’s right, today: it feels like the men and women and children of Gaza have given up. Some are now wandering aimlessly in their tiny strip of land, trying to avoid getting hit by Israeli shells or found by the inevitable wave of invading soldiers to come sometime soon. Some are arming themselves up with what, in the movies, would be a comic sense of purpose, even though we can guess what the outcome will be. Thousands of Israeli soldiers are girding for a battle with a predetermined narrative arc, getting ready for what will surely be decades of future moralistic PTSD to haunt their dreams.

In and amongst them are plenty of people like me, I think – those who may be called upon to shoot, or called upon to rear up after being cornered, and who are unable to imagine themselves doing anything other than reflect. They’re terrified, I think, but I also think they’re more ready for what will come in the next few hours and days than the barbarians on either side of the barricades. They haven’t given up, the way my son put it, and they haven’t stopped imagining the other side as human. In a place like Israel and Gaza, maybe the numbers of those in the middle, those who can still distinguish themselves by their inabiilty to hate, are approaching limit zero. And if that is the case, then it will not have mattered who started the violence this last time – whether it was the accumulated horror of living in an occupied land, or the immediate horror of living through a pogrom conducted by an amatuerish horde of monsters. Blaming those who respond to the last spark is a pointless exercise.

Far better, though, this evening most of all, to be focused on those in the middle, however few, the ones who haven’t given up, who still radiate warmth towards their fellow man, regardless of past transgressions, and who see themselves in the sins of others. May the bullets not find them, and let them be the ones who emerge tomorrow – and may they face off against others who feel the same. The ones who rape, who kill, who order the shellings, who enjoy targeting the missiles; who perpetuate the hatreds on both sides – I cannot imagine killing them, I cannot imagine doing evil to them. But I can wish them to go away.

After the ABC Nightly News, we watched “Wheel of Fortune”, where an almost unbelieveably dim set of good, happy, honest Americans – one hispanic, one white and (to be honest) quite portly, and one black – did an absolute hack job of guessing some pretty easy clue phrases (it took forever to get “A thing of beauty”, the morons). Alan and I made reentry to our reality, and I was thankful.

Because we both have to get up tomorrow morning and face the world again. Good luck and Godspeed to all of us.

A few weeks ago, I walked the southern half of the New River Path, from Enfield Town to Canonbury.  The two important things to know about the New River is that it is neither new nor a river.   It is an aqueduct that runs for 45km from Ware, in Hertfordshire, to Islington, and was constructed just over four hundred years ago, to bring fresh water from the river systems north of London into the city.   The scheme initially ran into engineering and financial problems but was completed due to the efforts of Hugh Myddelton, a business leader and entrepreneur in the first half of the seventeenth century, who is memorialised today by a statue that stands on Islington Green, just off Upper Street.  The New River Company, an early joint stock company, ran the aqueduct for many years, although it is now integrated into the Thames Water infrastructure and still supplies the reservoirs on the eastern fringes of London, between Hackney and Walthamstow. 

Plentiful clean water is an essential prerequisite for civilized urban life, and it is worth remembering that as recently as the nineteenth century, much of London did not have a reliable supply and that there were a significant number of annual deaths from the diseases associated with contaminated water.  From time to time the problems associated with poor water management became overwhelmingly obvious to everyone who visited London.  Funding for the sewerage system that Joseph Bazalgette built, which helped to rid London of cholera, was prompted by the “great stink” of 1858, when summer heat produced nauseous gases along the banks of the Thames, where untreated human and animal waste had been dumped for many years.  Today, we remember Myddelton and Bazalgette with gratitude: no-one in public life would seriously advocate dismantling the clean water supply system, nor would they allow unregulated private interests to jeopardise its integrity. 

Continue reading “Clean air”

Everyone needs a change of scenery now and again, and unlike Mark, I don’t have a second home in an idyllic Irish village. So, needing a few days of quiet and separation, I booked three nights at the Hotel on North in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Pittsfield is the largest city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. The area is known mostly for twee villages, upscale resorts, “cottages” built by the Gilded Age elite, and now, horribly overpriced liberal arts colleges and the fine arts accoutrements they bring with them to justify the tuition they charge their upper middle class (actually no, upper class and desperately aspirational upper middle class) families to get their degrees from Williams and Amhearst and Bard. But Pittsfield: no, it’s just Pittsfield. It is not Massachusetts, and they know it.

The ex-wife was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and we used to take a drive through its downtown whenever we visited where her parents then lived, Monroeville, and it was sort of like going from a gated community to the netherworld, getting worse as our marriage went along. In the late nineties, it was just a trip from suburbia to a crappy milltown; by the time we were getting close to splitting up, oxycontin was in full swing, and leaving Monroeville and doing the swing through McKeesport was negative poetry: we should have picked up Virgil somewhere on Route 130 to be our guide through perdition. The buildings kept getting more decrepit, even as the traffic stayed constant through downtown, and with the mills closed down, you had to imagine what the people walking across the street, sometimes sullen, sometimes friendly, were marching towards.

Pittsfield had that McKeesport feel to it, and it wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong. McKeesport today, I’m sure, is both struggling with East Coast bluesville opioid devastation, and also doing its best to attract the kind of middle class aspirational folks that have abandoned Manhattan and Brooklyn because of high rents. The midsized mill towns of New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and the like are all in their way renormalizing around the tertiary economy. Come here: the pot is legal, the upper floor loft space is cheap, your parents and grandparents and their disposable income is close enough to buy your bad artwork and probably very high quality foodstuffs. Come back, says McKeesport and Scranton. And post pandemic, the creatives come, out of the laziness that develops from trying to compete too long on the Lower East Side and the New Brooklyn. All good.

I went to Pittsfield because I had to do about 20 hours of online continuing education requirement for my odd gig economy job as senior employee of a mortgage servicing company. The absurdity of the entire situation every now and again give me pause, literally: I have to sit and breathe deeply, marvel at how a decent portion of my living wages are supported by a set of tasks which, if explained to an alien, would make no sense, to the point where I’d rather my job to be something like a civil engineer specializing in sewage systems. At least the value proposition would be obvious: at least the aliens would see clearly what I do to be of real, actual value. As it is, I’m particularly good at estimating the rate at which home owners will pay off their mortgages, and how that will affect the timing of certain cash flows which banks and investors like to trade. I’m good at other stuff too, but for the time being, not many people care about those other things. And the people who want to value the timing of mortgage payments are happy to give me quite a bit of money to tell them what I think.

Also I have some required licenses, which make my thoughts on the timing and value of said mortgage cash flows more valuable for the people I work for because I enable them to buy said cash flows in a highly regulated environment which requires people to be licensed. But I have to keep my licenses every year. And yes, this is rambling, because this was a week where I spent roughly 30 hours completing my annual compliance training, 20 hours of endless recorded redundancy which stretched into 30 hours of actual physical space-time consumed watching online train videos and answering meaningless quizzes designed to ensure I hadn’t simply set up a Linux bot to do this for me, and I wanted a place which was effectively a blank spot so I could conduct what was an effectively blank task in a blank spot.

But the problem is, no real place is blank. I should have gone to Dubai and stayed in a hotel suite, but because I have a dog, I had to go to a place which was dog friendly, and I made a bet that Pittsfield would be it. But it’s not. Pittsfleld is a real place, and the more I walked the dog around thd downtown for morning and late night walks, and found parks and places for the midday long walk, I realized more and more that Pittsfield is a real place. Not like Manhattan, or the West End of London (or alas, much of Shoreditch), but a real place. Don’t get me wrong, Pittsfield is a shitty place – it’s used up, GE having sold out to SUBIC which relocated its real staff to Houston; the General Dynamics plant being a hollow shell; the downtown being just where the county has decided to relocate its abandoned senior and drug addict population where they can be close to diabetes and overdose clinics – yeah, a shitty place, but it’s a place. It’s not globalized, it’s not Disney-fied: it’s its own place, no question about it.

And therefore, it’s not Massachusetts. Massachusetts has loud mouthed Red Sox fans, and bad traffic, three deckers close in to one another but set off the broad boulevards where you find bagels, and bad coffee, and pet grooming, and off-puttingly liberal bookstores. You can find that in Berkshire County, but not in Pittsfield, its largest city. There, you can find a mile long, 100 foot tall manufacturing building that is lying fallow because no one wants to manufacture electric turbines in western Massachusetts anymore (begging the question why anyone wanted to do there, ever, of course… but therein lies the point[:

(I’m going to invent a punctuation form here: [: is the way to break out of a parenthetical comment without having to go through the effort of closing out the nested thoughts explicitly}

Traveling through old New England, you’ll find ancient mills, built of brick or sometimes granite, which are limited in size and scope by the building materials available in the early 1800s, and therefore readily reusable by the mid twenty-first century economy of creatives and financials and crafts. But the mid-Atlantic – the endless shapes of mid 20th century industrial Connecticut and New York (think Rochester, not Brooklyn) and Pennsylvania and Ohio, extending in massive industrial blight from there – the mid-Atlantic isn’t friendly brick and granite: it’s massive steel framing, the kind of metal buildings which grew dark and black from absorbing the acid emissions from too-small smokestacks. These blackscapes are surrouded by paved parking lots and after-thought rail spur lines, the towns around them marked by too much parking, too many lots which used to be poorly thought out diners and used car lots and half-assed stores selling vinyl siding and bad furniture and Thom McCan shoes.

That’s Pittsfield. And oddly, it’s trying, desperately, to emerge from that mire, and become a decent town. It doesn’t have an overpriced liberal arts college; it’s off the Mass Pike by a good 15 miles; it has an oxycontin problem. It has nothing going for it, but it’s trying. It’s not relying on nostalgia from now-middle-aged undergraduates, and it seems to recognize that the nostalgia of its old milltown townies is a losing game.

But it has a couple of good bars, one run by a lesbian couple and another run by just a bog standard bearded Gen Y type. It has a lot of social services downtown which are desperately needed even as they aren’t an encouraging landscape for future tourism or service economy storefronts. It is, thankfully, not Concord, or Lexington, or god forbid Newton. It’s not Massachusetts.

I stayed there for four days, three nights, had great Korean food and a surprisingly good Neopolitan style pizza, hiked the circumference of an abandoned regional mall with the dog (who enjoyed it), passed seven states’ worth of continuing mortgage education requirements, chatted with a number of kidney dialysis patients waiting for treatment on a lovely afternoon, riffed with a nice bartender and tried (but failed) to create a good rye-based yet fruity cocktail, and left my car unlocked and no one broke into it.

It was not Massachusetts. I loved it.

When I was in my mid-teens, I watched a tv programme that presented a humorous view of suburban Britain, set around twenty-five years into the future. Two-and-half decades forward is an interesting time to speculate about, being close enough for most things to be roughly similar, but far enough ahead for some things to have changed significantly.  I recall that in the tv show there were some jokes about the improved taste of instant food and the widespread use of robot teachers at school, but neither of the two young people who were the focus of the programme had a mobile phone, which is perhaps the most visible lifestyle change that – in fact – occurred between the years when I was fifteen and forty.

One scene that has stayed with me, was a shot of the two teenagers walking down a street that was littered with rubbish, the sky busy with helicopters from which bundles of coloured papers were being thrown to the people below.  It was a time when bulk mail, as it was then called, had just started: in addition to letters, magazines, and the like, that were personally addressed to my parents – and, very occasionally, letters addressed to me – we would receive impersonal advertising material through our letterbox, usually promoting products for sale at a local store or supermarket.  These were delivered to every house in the street, sometimes with the mail and sometimes separately, as part of a blanket advertising campaign.  The tv show had imagined a vast increase in impersonal adverts, thrown directly into the streets from marketing vehicles in the air.  The idea seemed ludicrous, but at the same time a little worrying: surely, we would never allow bulk mail drops on this scale, creating vast amounts of unread and unwanted street litter.

Continue reading “Junk mail”

Driving around the countryside of Co Donegal, occasionally I will pass a temporary sign that says, Wake in Progress.  The quiet, winding lanes will be full of parked cars and vans, as the local community come to pay their respects at the former home of the departed.  The tradition of holding a wake – the time between death and burial, when friends and relatives sit and wait beside the corpse of the deceased, a period of reflection, a remembrance but also a celebration – has declined across much of Western Europe but remains commonplace in Ireland.  I imagine that today most wakes are decorous, but that has not always been the case.  There is a famous Irish song from the mid-nineteenth century about Tim Finnegan, who fell off a ladder when drunk, breaking his skull.  During the wake held at his house, an argument broke out, which turned into a fight, during which a bottle of whiskey was thrown, broke and spilled over his prostrate body, at which point he sprang back to life, saying: Thunderin’ blazes! You think I’m dead?   Excess whiskey was the cause of Tim’s apparent death and so too his return to life.

This paradox was, no doubt, why the song lyric appealed to James Joyce, who borrowed the revenant’s name for his final masterpiece: Finnegans Wake.  In this book, for some time known as Work in Progress, which takes the form of an extended series of philosophical reflections blended with multiple digressions, wordplay and jokes, there is repeated suggestion that what begins must end and what ends must begin again, that what rises will fall and that what falls will rise again, and that all of life is repetition and recycling.  Joyce spoke several languages and enjoyed inventing words that were combinations of elements from different tongues.  The name Finnegan can be decomposed into fin, the French for end, and egan a homonym for again in English: Finnegans means, therefore, to end again and again.  The word Wake might suggest the noun that means the ceremony of remembrance for the dead, or it might suggest the command that means wake up!  His title, therefore, combines ideas of both death and life.  These themes of circularity and continuity are emphasised throughout the text of the book, which starts and ends mid-sentence – the same sentence, Joyce claimed – and which is promiscuous with grammar as well as language, spelling, and narrative structure.  

Continue reading “Awake”