When Words Did the Talking

Back When Words Did the Talking

Apropos of nothing particular (or everything, specifically), I’ve been ruminating a lot on the aftermath of war lately.

Yeah, we all want this f-ing war to be over.

Not before our hostages are back home alive and Hamas is utterly annihilated without any compromises or cease-fires (AMEN!).

Soldiers are dying every day, life is going on as scheduled, but not without orphans and widows, funerals, anxiety about Gaza, anxiety about the North.

Lots of movies and shows to keep the kids off the news cycle (but also geography games - YESSS [nerd alert]).

This thing is likely go on for months, although we’re praying for it to be days.

And we haven’t touched the Hizballah f-ers yet or what they’re capable of doing here up North, even remotely.

Too much kind-gloving and sacrificing our young men and women for people that openly hate us and want us dead (yes, the civilians, just as much as the abominable terrorists themselves), in my view.

But that’s neither here, nor there.

Thoughts drift to the future, inevitably.

So as I was saying, the aftermath of war...

Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I think about social science and cultural shifts, not just the seismic political shift that everyone knows is coming here after the war is done.

Out of nowhere, I thought last night about whether or not wars result in more boys in the 12-24 months after it’s over.

I don’t know, maybe it’s because there’s more value in higher testosterone in and after a war, given its, ya know, importance in driving young men to the front to kill the enemy.

And if you think about Western culture these days, it’s basically glorifying the feminine in every (ehem) conceivable way, demonizing the masculine.

G-d forbid, a man micro-agresses someone by being, er, a man in his element.

G-d forbid, a boy acts in any way disrespectfully.

Look, I’m not a Man-Bible-kind of guy, none of that shit.

I was raised by a single mother and have two girls, so pretty solidly a feminist from the start (with all the waves baked in, LOL).

But as the vast majority of Israeli men, a war brings out all sorts of feelings and plans that a man without military service didn’t know was in him.

I mean, speaking quite frankly, sitting in a concrete box, posting on social media is about the least manly sort of activity one can do during a war.

Don’t get me wrong, the war on social media is just as important to our efforts as Israelis and Jews.

But still, those of us not already on the front or otherwise in the Reserves are feeling something between guilt, rage and inchoate desire to go kill some terrorists.

Ain’t nothing wrong with that, not the least bit.

In my case, I didn’t serve in the army and at 40, it’s basically impossible to enlist or volunteer.

I would know, I’ve tried through several channels. The IDF told me 28 is the cut-off age, full stop.

Some say it’s an option to volunteer for the Border Patrol, apparently. We’ll see what transpires.

There’s the Hasbara effort I’m volunteering for, but again, that’s keyboard warrior stuff, at best. Important, but still office work.

Back to the concrete (as opposed to pill) box, it is, for now.

On the cultural front, there’s full-blast resilience trumpeted everywhere, lots of rah-rah, and much noise in the background from the retooled Opposition.

Still relatively unified, thankfully. But never quite sitting still.

Thoughts go also to the past.

How our leadership (Bibi, specifically) empowered Hamas and let it flower on purpose.

How our intelligence services blithely ignored plentiful red-flag reports about unusual Hamas training from the Gaza observation posts for months, and for years before that, routinely ignoring and downgrading simple tactical intelligence.

Over-reliance on tech.

Inability by leadership of every stripe and persuasion to find ANY common ground with other Israelis and Jews.

We’ve long degraded ourselves from basics.

With truly horrendous results.

I mean, truly basic things like common sense, using our actual (rather than electronic) senses, understanding that holding a music festival 5 km from Gaza is just ASKING to be attacked.

It’s not the time for blame, I know.

The problem is much bigger.

It’s not an Israel thing, but a Western civilization thing.

For at least 20-25 years, since the advent of social networks and ubiquitous internet and then smartphones, we haven’t just drifted away from training our senses and deep reading and introspection and checking facts and nature to everything virtual, imagined, faked, misinformed.

Perhaps even the Luddites and classicists and archaeologists among us.

Practically no one can resist the pull of a smartphone, except an observant Jews on Sabbath, with few exceptions.

Practically no one can much resist the newsfeed and instant gratification of Youtube and his respective echo chamber.

Who can even focus on something for more than a few seconds, a minute or two, at most, other than some silly video or other face-grabbing entertainment?

It goes much deeper than that, though.

Escapism and confirmation bias are nothing much new, even if the algorithms driving both are especially well-refined, these days, and getting better each moment.

What has happened in our culture is…

A shift away from the power of words.

I don’t mean war slogans and intifada chants.

I mean simple, unadorned, un-stylized language.

Poetry, prose.

I mean, listen to Dylan or Cohen for an hour.

Really listen, deeply.

Read some Hemingway (I’m on For Whom The Bell Tolls, as I mentioned last time) before bed.

You feel how powerful each word is.

Not because of the music or the publisher.

Because of the actual message carried by the words.

I mean, look at how powerfully Pilar describes to Robert Jordan what he must do to truly smell death, the death that a man carries before he dies.

Rather distasteful stuff, in 4 parts.

“the brass on a ship in danger of sinking, the taste of the kiss of an old woman who has drunk the blood of a slaughtered bull, dead flowers in the trash, and dirty water from a brothel.”

I mean, imagine writing like this, these days…

You’d be accused of poorly imitating the real thing.

You would be cancelled for being a macho, misogynistic sh-t.

You would feel like shit.

And the culture would pile on you from there.

Why is that, you ask?

Because the power of language that is not marketing, sloganeering, legalese or management dogma is largely… zero.

Sure, people are publishing books in record numbers.

But the numbers might just be inversely correlated with quality.

There’s no attention span to read deeply, with few exceptions on a few campuses.

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Housekeeping note:

Wanna buy me coffee for some hard-hitting thoughts?

Go for it here. Much appreciated!. 

Oh, and tell all your friends, too 🙂 

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There’s a sense that the culture is decayed.

I mean, think of how practically all new popular music and film and fiction is focus-grouped and data analyzed to death, before it’s even born.

Practically nothing is left to chance.

Everything is hopelessly derivative.

OR… the few movies, great music and books of fiction that emerge these days…

Are either made by reflexively self-unaware, reflexively liberal artists that have genuinely struggled, but perhaps not enough with the outside world’s complexity, or if they have, they’ve still stolen or borrowed too heavily from the classics.

When was the last time you heard good music playing anywhere, outside of 80s anthems and 90s stuff pre-packaged for Millennials?

Yeah, me neither.

This is, in part, what keeps me from writing fiction.

Sure, war and work and business and family obligations do, as well.

But at heart, I know it’s because the value of each substantive word has been debased.

Our culture cares much more about the style or channel through which words are delivered (social media, newsfeeds, pre-curated channels), rather than the words themselves.

Everything’s a(n inchoate) “revolution” or “disruption” or other noise-making, hand-waving exercise.

The pockets of intellectuals around the world who actually value the substantive word is small and perhaps decreasing.

Digital natives have a harder and harder time… picking up a f-ing physical book, never mind making any damn sense from the past.

And frankly, if you have ChatGPT to dig up and summarize and present neatly all the information you previously had to dig for, check out at the library or bookstore, actually read (!!), WHY would anyone value any original source information, any longer?

I mean, unless you’re some weirdo retrophile or actually care to dig deeper into the facts.

Crotchety old man, get off your stump (ha!).

But I digress.

Look, war sweeps away all sorts of illusions, delusions and accumulated nonsense.

With a harsh and unwavering hand.

We’re all long overdue for a house-cleaning.

At least, I can speak for myself.

I don’t know if we’re going to swing back toward a more macho-driven world (and all the shit this carries, which we know well).

I don’t know if this means we stop trusting machines to inform and defend us.

I don’t know if we go back to the basics of raw human relationships, without smartphones glued to our faces.

Maybe these elements won’t change that much (or not enough).

But we know for sure, many changes are already happening.

Pick up a gun.

Or sharpen your words into weapons.

Sitting on the sidelines ain’t an option, any longer.

Report from the front, my friends.

Stay safe and well.

There’s no telling how long this rough ride will last…