Irrationalizing

a critique of impure unreason, conducted accordingly

Listen to Jeff’s reading of the piece, recorded live on the This Is Hell! radio program and podcast:

A word to those still supporting Israel’s attacks on Gaza: the whole world is not antisemitic just because they’re against the continued massacre of the population of Gaza. The same way the whole world wasn’t anti-Christian just because they were against the USA massacring the population of Indochina.

At this point, after killing some 26,000 Gazans, the vast majority of them civilians including many thousands of children, and displacing or making orphans of just shy of 2 million of them – and continuing the destruction of life, habitations, and resources, and now officially spreading it to the West Bank – it approaches impossible for anyone with a mind capable of rational understanding to consider this tolerable.

Hey, yeah, some might not consider it genocide for one reason or another, yet still understand it’s too much. But for people to have rationalized it as “fine,” “appropriate,” “awful but necessary,” or “just peachy” means they have found the mysterious missing key to irrational rationalization. In light of the current circumstance, “rationalizing” is not an appropriate label. “Irrationalizing” is what it is.

Waiting for the drones

I don’t think people are really awake anymore. I had to take many people to task on Facebook over the weekend. And not for the genocide currently in progress in Gaza. Everything is out of kilter. One couple had gone to Detroit from the suburbs because The Lions were playing what turned out to be their last game of the season but, clinging, at the time, to the belief they might go to the Super Bowl, the city was festive. And this couple was smiling amidst it all, like, “Waiting for the drones!” Y’know, instead of fireworks we now have aerial robots doing synchronized ballet. But I found the phrase tone deaf. “Waiting for the drones,” sounds like a phrase used by people waiting to be attacked by missiles or bombs sent by Obama or presidents after him. People waiting for the drones are waiting to die.

But whatever makes you jolly!

Then none other than journalist Jim Naureckas was infatuated with the idea that Amelia Earhart looked like David Bowie when she looked much more like Michael Sarazzin in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Because he has lips. Bowie had no lips. Bowie’s mouth was famously just a slit in his facial skin mask.

Then someone opined that Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-spangled Banner” in prison. American Francis Scott Key was held for one day on an American ship (the ship itself under guard during the 25-hour British siege of Fort McHenry) while negotiating a prisoner release. He was there as an attorney, not a prisoner, and he didn't do the bulk of writing the lyrics till the next day, when he was in a hotel.

Then, none other than Detroit-born playwright Idris Goodwin entertained a discussion on his page about the barely listenable country cover of Tracy Chapman’s [stylistically iconoclastic, excellent, and original] song, “Fast Car,” in which there was much said that I disagreed with! At one point I had to resort to quoting the famous line from Zoolander, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.” But I did find out from that discussion that Luke Combs, the perpetrator of the cover, is kind of progressive in his general attitudes toward cultural symbols, particularly the Confederate flag. Just about everyone on there had irrational things to say, including me. All right, maybe especially me.

So, you see, it’s a new pandemic. Irrationalization.

Meanwhile, very rational atheists are still asserting that religion is the cause of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Talk about crazy pills. What it’s about is hurt, dispossessed people hurting other dispossessed people. If one tribe of Richard Dawkinses favored different shirts from those favored by another tribe of Richard Dawkinses – or, forget about the shirts, if two groups of Dawkinses wanted the same piece of land and, historically, each held pretty much equally reasonable claim to it, they could still rationalize war between each other. Religion doesn’t have to exist for the conflict to exist. Religion is just the shirts they wear.

Israelis and Palestinians don’t disagree on points of religious doctrine. They disagree about rights. They disagree about borders and movement. They disagree about historical claims and historical wrongs, and they disagree on that ultimate source of irrationality, Truth. Because even if arrived at empirically, or inductively, Truth is not portable from its location of origin. It doesn’t travel well from one person to another. And even when it can be transported long distances, it doesn’t persist. The last person at the end of the Chinese telephone game is left holding a disagreeably over-thawed and mildewed Salisbury steak. It’s not the solid thing someone had hoped to preserve.

I realize it’s bad for the branding of a radio show segment calling itself “The Moment of Truth” to question the epistemological stability of its ostensible raison d’être, or reason for existing, but there you have it. The reason is irrational.

But back to the mystery that many, many people solemnly remembering The Holocaust can look at the killing of going on 30,000 people as “necessary.” Didn’t the phrase, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,” ring lethally insane to civilized people at one time? Specifically to the people I considered myself to have an unspoken, or often even spoken, understanding with about the cruelty of the US war against Vietnam? Did not the exhortation to “Never Forget” the Holocaust resonate with anything other than the historic pain of those wearing a particular style of Dawkins shirt?

This is where I am marooned. No wonder we’re called “the left.” People make grand pronouncements about rights and compassion and equality and other noble principles, but in the end they leave those behind to pursue something entirely unrelated.

And I’m not saying the left is always right. There are many people calling for an end to war and occupation whose rationalizations for action I don’t respect. But I don’t care if, by careful observation and learning, I happen to come to a similar conclusion as a large group of fools. Just as those adhering to the violent strategy might understand that their leaders are awful and self-interested, but nevertheless tolerate the errant followers of those leaders who happened to land on the same side of history with them.

Once you’re trying to justify continued attacks on people of whom you’ve already killed 26,000 yet failed to achieve any of what you claim are your goals, you are either lying about your goals to the world or to yourself. Or both. And when we do violence based on lies to ourselves, we are left with nothing in our possession but spoiled Salisbury steak. Spoiled Salisbury steak all over our Dawkins jerseys.