this was going to be about Chappell Roan
2024 has more than any other year been the year for most Americans of apathetic detachment. Donald Trump got shot in the head last month, kind of, and nobody really talks about it. It feels trite and stupid to write about anything that isn't Gaza, it feels trite and stupid to write about anything while Gaza is burned. You know what's funny is that every time I try to give a shit about writing I can't help but think about Gaza. It feels like I forget about it, or push it back, but it always resurfaces. Always there but never really. It's far off. I can self-flagellate all I want about it but it doesn't matter what I say or think about it. I can't do anything about it. Earlier this year Aaron Bushnell self-immolated and what's crazy is when you google "protestor who set himself on fire" he doesn't even pop up at first. I had to google that because I forgot his name. Isn't that fucked up? I feel like I shouldn't even be admitting that here. In April of 2024, just five months ago from writing this, Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in solidarity with the Palestinian people who are being killed in the thousands by the Israeli government, and I continue giving the American government my own money, so that they can give it to Israel, so that they can bomb and kill children.
If you think too long about it, suddenly every clock-in at work, every e-mail, every conference call, every deadline looks like a crater. A crater where there was a park or a hospital or a school. A crater where there was an office building. A crater where people got together and ate food and talked about what they wanted from their life. A crater where a couple, in love, shared their first kiss, or had their last fight. That's what we get as American tax-payers. We don't get health care, we don't get student debt relief, we don't get functioning roads, we deal in the import and export of suffering. How anyone can live with that knowledge is beyond me. But I do it anyways. I go to work and I live the same day every day, and I get sick occasionally, and I have fun most of the time, and I worry about my bills so I don't die, or worse, face collection calls.
I've been reading a lot of Zizek lately (shocker) and I want to talk about this idea of poetry and genocide. "The Poetic Torture-House of Language" is one of Zizek's many pieces exploring this relationship, and it serves as a great introduction to the idea of just how important language is to ideology. I'm not gonna get into ideology here, it's just too big of a topic to cover but I am interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis and its relation to ideology. I think in times like these, when hundreds of thousands of people have died because of us, ideology is incredibly important to making sure that we stay in line. I don't know if it's escapable except in extreme acts of protest. Make of that what you will. In the age of posting, we have all become poets. Not only is our writing complacent to genocide, it is in fact, necessary for us to write in order for this genocide to continue. Because when we stop writing and we start acting, the genocide stops. The number of Americans who are capable of such a selfless act is miniscule. Social media has made us all artists, writers, poets, consumers, and as such has completely defanged us. We are all bark and no bite. It is precisely because we can bark that we cannot bite.
Almost all of the pop music that has come out in the last year has been undeniably narcissistic, the self-help machine has been overclocked. If you are too busy exploiting yourself, you cannot help anybody else. Some of the biggest cultural points in this year were obsessed with this idea. Take a look at the Drake-Kendrick feud, which revolved around this idea of who was the better person, and used victims of sexual assault as the punchline, with no real disempowerment of predators, no true questioning of the systems that exist to enable such men to act, just jokes. Take a look at "Brat Summer", an album who's entire premise was self-obsessed introspection that culminated in the self-help neocon candidate to end all neocons. Even in pointing this out, in contributing to the endless diarrhea of discourse, I am no better.
I feel like I am the villain in this story. I don't know what the right answer is but I don't think waxing poetically about the tragedy of Gaza is worth much, because Gaza is not a tragedy in the usual sense. What's happening in Gaza is deliberate and calculated. What should be understood more than anything is that we are Gaza. The Palestinians are victims of a system that requires their blood to oil its gears. True liberation begins with Palestine because the destabilization of the Middle East is necessary for American neoliberalism. A stable and unified Arab world means it will be time for the United States to answer a phone that has been left on the hook for a very long time. We must stand with them because we are not the United States, we must look in the mirror and see Palestine or else we will drown.