Zombie

beware the slow blade

The center doesn’t hold and everything bleeds together. The slow kill is the most painful, the most intimate. The social fabric unravels on a touch screen. Fascism comes wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross. But which flag. And whose god. The yankee stripes or the Jewish star. The rebel rag of the confederacy or the swords of Hamas. The red black green of Palestine or the white flag of surrender. What kind of American are you anyway. Were you born proper on this patch of dirt or the salted earth of elsewhere. Did you pass civilized through the switchback queue of customs at JFK or did your pregnant mother slog through the muddy purgatory of Darien Gap to birth you on our home turf. The land we acquired from the local heathen in our own dark past. Are you here on a student visa. Are you paying a hundred grand out of pocket for one year of privileged learning. Or are you one of the walking dead on financial aid. Are you legal.

Do you seek asylum.

The first time I heard of the nation of Israel was in an episcopal church Sunday school classroom in Mississippi. Book of Exodus. Pharaoh let my people go. Now scroll back through fog of life and war to my earliest snapshot memories of world conflict and they all feature the chosen people versus the followers of the final prophet. The black September murders of eleven Israeli athletes in Munich. The hooded hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. Jimmy Carter somber and defeated. The US marine barracks smoldering in Beirut. The kids in Gaza throwing rocks at an Israeli tank on their way to school. The global fatwa thrown down against Salman Rushdie, for writing a book.

Kill the infidels wherever you find them and so on.

For such a tiny country Israel takes up an inordinate chunk of real estate in the collective consciousness, for good reason. Public school kids in America are taught more about the evils of the nazi holocaust than about our own sins. The average fifth grader knows what happened at Auschwitz but is clueless about Wounded Knee. Every president in my lifetime has been unflinching in their support of Israel. The only democracy in the region yada yada plus the unspoken consensus that jews in America are generally accepted as white. Or dark white with an asterisk, depending on the audience and venue. Anyway growing up here it was never questioned. Israel is our little brother colonially speaking. They are roughly a hundred years behind us on the pioneer timeline. The manifest destiny go west young man shit our forebears sold us as a positive back in the day to distract us from the idea we were stealing Texas from Mexico or ethnically cleansing uhh relocating the Cherokee and Seminole nations to Oklahoma for their own good has been repackaged for purposes. The chosen people may not realize it yet but this slaughter in Gaza could well be Israel’s trail of tears.

They will have to live with it but the shame will belong to us all.

The notion of a modern theocratic Judeo ethno majority state ought to make all of us uneasy because how exactly do you maintain that majority without being a tiny bit fascist. Look at the majority muslim states. If a woman can be beaten to death by morality police while in custody for exposing her hair in public, and more women may be killed or locked up for protesting that murder, that is not a free society and most of us rightly condemn Iran for such Orwellian nazi shit. And while I agree it should not be lost on the free Palestine protesters that Hamas and Hezbollah and everyone who wants to erase Israel are backed by Iran and they might want to connect various dots to other dots and recalibrate some of their utopian rhetoric, the videos out there of american jews wrapped in the Israeli flag spitting on american student protesters and wishing rape and murder on them are grotesque.

The beauty and horror of Herbert’s slow blade is the intimacy.

Nitpicking the definition of genocide is a waste of time. Likewise the nuances of jihad are a black hole. There is no nuance to the core beliefs of fundamentalist christian zionists either. Meanwhile pointing to the atrocities in Syria or Myanmar or wherever is white noise because we don’t care when muslims kill other muslims. But I never much questioned Israel’s right to exist. Israel does exist and has done in one shape or another since the Old Testament days. There are only 15 million jews on the planet and they have been fucked over since the beginning and they deserve a home to call their own. Likewise the nation of Palestine exists in the minds of more than a billion people and is therefore as real as Idaho. The people of Idaho may want to secede from Oregon or whatever but they sleep safe at night. The people of Palestine haven’t felt safe for three generations. Even as a nihilistic punk teenager I could see the problem with the Palestinians is they are a country trapped inside another country. They have no freedom of movement, no agency. They have no voice. They don’t control their borders. If there’s a wall around Gaza guarded by IDF snipers then it might feel like an open air prison. I remember a relatively civilized argument about this with one of my Jewish classmates in college that ended with her calling me a gentile.

Shut up you fucking gentile there’s no such place as Palestine.

I have been equally pro Palestine and pro Israel most of my adult life and so far most of my Jewish loved ones have forgiven me for it. Not to get mired in the geopolitics of the whole business but it seems clear the longterm goal is to reduce the strip to a stone age wasteland and drive the surviving refugees into an Egyptian purgatory buffer zone then let Blackrock and Haliburton build some sort of zionist Dubai in its place and the American government right or left is going to let them do it. But regarding the free Palestine student encampments I am of two minds. My gut response is to say yeah give ‘em hell. Down with the man. These are kids most of them. Their hearts are still pure. They just want to stop the bombing of Gaza. They want their university to stop investing in the war machine. They want to stop the killing of children. They do sound like idiots if you stick a microphone in their faces but their demonstrations are tame and nonviolent by any rubric. Not to mention most of them spent a healthy chunk of high school under lockdown and it left them a little extra neurodivergent. And like most of the active duty IDF soldiers, the student protesters are most of them gen Z. They barely remember the hurt locker days of suicide bombings. They just see little kids being pulled from rubble on their phones and don’t like it. Dismissing them as antisemitic marxist snowflake provocateurs and self-loathing Jews is just lazy and ignorant and probably dangerous.

Where you going with that axe Eugene.

The images of riot police busting up the free Palestine camps are troubling to be sure and stink of overkill but stop and think. Revisit the past for a minute. The scenes at Columbia are nothing compared to the treatment of the occupy kids in NYC or the Standing Rock first nation pipeline resisters or the BLM protesters in Lafayette Square. And they are a cool foot massage compared to Kent State or the LA riots after Rodney King. On the other hand there were no South African sympathizers coming out to terrorize apartheid protesters at Berkeley in 1989. Free assembly and dissent are endangered prospects in this country. The police will continue to drift to the martial law side of protect and serve especially if the free Palestine protests take to the streets. Violent crackdowns will be the norm going forward. I also understand that some of us especially our new yorker brethren are maybe still a bit fucked up by 9.11 and for them the sight of American protesters wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags is akin to seeing NYU students in 2001 coming out in favor of the Taliban. That this association is largely false or incongruous is irrelevant. This is the post truth world. If they feel it then it’s true.

From the river to the sea and never again, they cut both ways.

For me the most unsettling videos out there by far are from the UCLA night of reckoning where a pro Israel aka zionist mob delivered a thuggish redneck beatdown to the free Palestine kids who were effectively boxed in by their own encampment while the LA cops stood by and watched. Bearing witness. Kind of a dumb miracle nobody was killed that night. It’s only a matter of time before somebody starts shooting at one of these shit shows. Think about it. If you were a young brooding wannabe Travis Bickle or Timothy McVeigh what would you do on a hot Saturday night with a death to the great satan march down the block. American mass shooters are our own suicide bombers, if you hadn’t noticed. And the Texas governor just pardoned a legit white supremacist for executing a BLM protester on the streets of Austin in the sun with a thousand witnesses.

Now shut your eyes and go to your ice cave.

Imagine the mad max convulsions coming our way in 2039 or so when the white american christians lose their demographic majority voice in this country. It will be miles past ugly and far bloodier than anything we’ve seen yet, if we let it be. Drill down to the bone for the core lessons to take from both sides. If you chant death to America on American streets and glory to the 10.7 martyrs you are starting a fire you may not be ready to navigate. I will defend your free speech right to burn an American flag all day but mind your manners. Burn your own sacred objects not your neighbor’s. If you try to pull old glory down from its pole and replace it with Palestinian colors you are begging for local mayhem. If you mask your face and wear the perceived traditional garb of terrorists, the cops will treat you like terrorists. On the other hand. If you treat your own young people like enemy combatants, they may start behaving like insurgents.

Martyr.

Heretic.

Zionist.

Nazi.

Infidel.

Zombie.

Son of man.

Beware the slow blade, it comes from within.

everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. -rene magritte