I try hard not to think about things, to turn my back on what is happening, cover my head and hope for the best. I can see this is what many young people do and I feel sorry for them. They know matters are just too bad to face. I live my suburban life, I grow my vegetables, I go shopping, I try to read books which are not going to upset me, and most of all I only get my news from Television New Zealand.
There is simply nothing better than TVNZ news to keep me coddled and insulated from reality. Coalition of evil? Gaza? They simply do not exist. An attractive middle class Iranian woman is shot dead by an agent of a repressive regime. Axis of evil. TVNZ shows it over more than one evening. (And only 7 minutes of international news per evening) A Palestinian woman is shot dead on her own land by an agent of a repressive regime. It never happened.
Then I go and blow it. I look something up on the internet and discover what I fear: wickedness is continuing out there. The Israelis turn away a ship destined for Gaza with medicine and toys. No government of the coalition of evil does a thing or says a word. (Not TVNZ news either) Having performed a revised 2009 version of Guernica in front of the world it is business as usual for Israel. The wickedness and the evil of the civilisation I live in, a civilisation of pre-emptive strikes against civilian populations, fills me with disgust and shame.
The United States is so wedded to its own good opinion that it will dismantle its domestic base in order to pursue global power. Having driven the Muslim world into resistance it already begins to blame that world for the consequences. The U.S. is driven by fear and sentimentality, and both lead to insanity.
And Israel seems perfectly happy to be the match for global conflagration. Is this because the traumatised child grown up is going to take it out on all of us? Or is it because Israel is too full of people with a shameless ethnic superiority which they will insist upon until the bitter end?
Perhaps it is a mixture of both. Israel has been practicing both for decades against the
Palestinians with malicious spitefulness ........................................................................... forgive me, it is nearly time for me to go back to sleep for a while. I need some hack television journalism, to hear the sweet inanities of Simon Dallow and Wendy Petrie, to listen to the inconsequential splutter of Mark Sainsbury, and to wallow in the earnest emptiness of sports news ..................................................
