Thread the needle
“Say you have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?”
– Annie Dillard
A note to begin: I sometimes worry about writing about this situation in any kind of analytical way. I emphatically believe that the most acute attention should be focused on the very center of suffering: the relentless onslaught on Palestinians trapped in Gaza, now corralled into even more dense confinement like Rafah, the opportunism by Israeli extremists in the West Bank to ruthlessly pillage land and homes from Palestinians, the hostages suffering in Hamas captivity, the peace activists on all sides that want an end to this violence, everyone living in daily terror amidst this escalation of war.
And yet, it is present with me every day in unshakeable ways and what I fear is that dominant culture is actually further exacerbating this very suffering through the hype-machine dynamic of sensationalized activism. The most authentic writing I can offer right now is about this. So here is part three of this series, with parts one and two here for reference.
To lift this topic up is to delicately thread the needle. My intention here is not to deflect or to distract, it is always always to add to what feels like desperately missed nuance.
Have you heard about him?
The man they call Jihadi Depp? Tim-Houthi Chalamet? The “hot Houthi pirate” who exploded on TikTok for filming himself on a dinghy blocking a cargo ship attempting to transit through the 150 year-old global trade corridor that is the Suez Canal via the Red Sea? That viral video is just one glimpse into three months of Houthi bombardment in the canal so intense it officially expanded the Israel/Gaza conflict into Yemen and forced shipping companies from all over the world to reroute by thousands of miles (and outrageous amounts of carbon emissions) to round the Cape of Good Hope instead. The Houthis claim solidarity with the Palestinian people and perhaps that’s legitimate on an individual level – it’s not my place to arbitrate anyone’s personal feelings, especially men I don’t know – but geopolitically speaking, it is Hamas that holds Houthi loyalties. This is their true brother in arms, birthed and nurtured and funded by the same proud patriarch: the Islamic Republic.
The internet fan-girlies went wild for Jihadi Depp, the same way the masses melted over Bin-Laden’s “Letter to the American people” – a stunning sensation in this upside-down world of impossible hypocrisies spiking a surge of TikTok conversions to Islam.
Overnight influencers for Islam. Overnight activists for terrorism.
Israel’s government is indefensible, but why that drives people to heart-pounding hysteria for the oppressive regime hiding on the other side of the coin they won’t flip is not simply agonizing, it is dangerous.
It’s ironic that as the Houthis block the Suez Canal’s geographical shortcut, popular culture is feverishly building ideological ones. The internet hype-machine is desperate to make it make sense, fit it into a neat little picture: the West is bad (Israel, US, UK, Europe), the East is good (which now means defending the IRI).
If we reduce the world to western/white settler-colonialism as the answer to every problem, we simply need to divide the world into “oppressor” and “oppressed”, “settler” and “native”. With logic like this, we can reinforce unstable solidarities between your high school volleyball coach and a Houthi “rebel” on TikTok and we’ll sail right through it.
The gap between biased evidence and myopic conclusions is getting smaller, as complexity is meme-ified, as terrorists are tokenized, as the very people at the heart of this suffering are silenced. Future selves will forever be haunted by this ignorance, this literal ignore-ance, of the reality that the East has its own agenda. What I mean is: if the internet is demanding Hamas and the Houthis free Palestine, they’re not listening to Palestinians, nor are they listening to Yemenis. While Palestinians are risking their lives with breathtaking courage to protest Hamas in the middle of a war that has killed 28,000+ Palestinians, while 377,000 people have been killed in Yemen under an endless war under Houthi control, they are not listening to Palestinians nor Yemenis. Iranians are being silenced as the IRI executes an innocent person every few hours who participated in the Women Life Freedom protests, while the world looks away, or worse, celebrates the regime conducting this slaughter. Iran, letting millions of people starve and die from Gaza to Yemen to Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iran itself, while their rulers are plump, feeding their own greed while their people are starving, quick to dismiss their suffering as martyrdom on the journey toward a larger Jihad. Yes, of course this is all exacerbated by the West’s constant destabilizing invasions and interferences and its own greedy aims, but Iran’s terror is not immunized by the illusion of impunity so generously proffered by people who want the easiest answer, by your old Facebook friend from college who’s eager to earn likes for sharing the latest viral meme.
The spiders weaving in my mind are surfacing something for me as I contemplate the propaganda-saturated crazy-making distortions of this time. I still remember the gape of my jaw, the churn of my belly, as I watched the opening scene of this film.
It remains, to me, one of the most brilliant directorial decisions I’ve ever witnessed because up until this moment, after decades of education and transferred ancestral experiences of what it was like, what it felt like, I didn’t truly get it until I saw this. Hitler was loved. Adored. Obsessed over. He was sensational and extraordinary to those impossibly massive crowds of fans.
And he still is. It’s not the same as it was, but if you look at the faces of those people who show up at rallies with swastikas, those people possessed by the maniacal manipulation of Hitler as God, Hitler as Savior, Hitler as Truth, you see it just as potently in their eyes in 2024 as you did in 1937 as we can see in this footage in Jojo Rabbit. I felt the same energy, though obviously it’s not equivalent, watching the west respond to Bin Laden’s letter.
There are few things that make my blood burn as badly as witnessing such a massive swell of people cheer for the death of integrity, the collapse of nuance, the rejection of appropriate critique. Growing ideological manipulation meets eroding moral integrity.
Settler-colonialism wasn’t invented by the UK or the US or Israel. But that doesn’t mean ping-ponging back to the other side, it means placing our attention equally on both regimes is essential to carving a third path. Why is it so hard to hold that neither the West nor the East is ruled by desirable regimes, let alone survivable ones?
All of this to support a woke-narrative that satisfies the blood-lusting appetite of oppressor versus oppressed, like watching a soccer match or a football game? To reinforce the comfort of a convenient plotline instead of tangling with the layers that would actually lead to collective liberation, free from all of these sociopaths?
“Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit, as everyone else does.”
Annie Dillard
I don’t know what to do in this landscape of profane irresponsibility where anyone can say anything with absolutely zero accountability to truth. This is partly why I am so passionate about culture that the course that dwells in the very the heart of my world is called Cultivating Culture (the website is overdue for a refresh to evolve language that was written a few years ago). Culture tells us how to live.
What is the culture we’re inhabiting? Is it one of mob hysteria of ferocious righteousness or is it one of coherent humility toward the thriving of all life?
Right now, I’m observing nervously, looking for people who see what I see, and amplifying the voices of those working toward authentic, legitimate solidarities of peace toward collective liberation. As explored in parts 1 and 2 of this series, I believe in engaging on these issues with the dignity that can actually lead to desirable outcomes like peaceful coexistence on shared ancestral lands, which demands we do not collapse history or truth to get there. I’ll pause here for now, and we’ll see if a 4th emerges.
The quotes in this piece are from Annie Dillard’s exquisite essay “This is the Life”. It was written in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it doesn’t talk about those events remotely. Instead it offers a mind-widening exploration of cultural relativism, the ephemeral nature of all human endeavors, and that our values are simply and profoundly the reflection of our own narrow field of perception.
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