Defunding UNRWA: From Containment to Destruction / Laura Robson

We are all Waco. The nefariousness and misplaced priorities of government actions have eroded the people’s trust to the extent that doomsday paranoia begins to make sense as a viable possibility.

When I say we are all Waco I really mean just me. And by Waco I mean the Branch Davidians specifically. Is it Branch Davidians or Banch Dravidians? It’s Davidians because of David Koresh, right? Or just because David? And it’s branch because … banch isn’t a word. 

Koresh is supposed to be from Old Persian, meaning “forward-looking” or some such nonsense. Why Old Persian I wonder? Oh, because Cyrus in Old Persian was Koresh. Those Old Persians pronounced things in inebriated fashion. “What’s ‘at guy’s name, Cyrus, Kyrush, Koresh. He was a regular musheeyugh, for letting the people of Ishrael rebuild their besh ha migdash.”

When I say I’m like the Bench Dravidians, I don’t mean I’m a cult, following a charismatic leader who marries ten-year-old girls. And I don’t mean I’m amassing weapons in preparation for the final war of Holiness against Evil, Heaven against Hell.  

What I think I mean is, the corporate, military, and government three-headed hellhound has set my teeth on edge. It seems to be fulfilling all my most paranoid doomsday fantasies. Sure, I may follow questionable lines of reasoning, pickle my own turnips, operate in a clandestine economy, and practice unsanctioned sex, but why would you come to me with war machines and enough ordnance to wipe out thirty My Lai villages unless you truly were the prophesied Beast of Destruction? Why massacre 82 children and other innocents and quasi-innocents unless you were hellbent on stamping out a godly message from godly people? 

I know, the metaphor is still too blurred with my own identity to make sense. Let me see if I can compartmentalize. I mean, I really need to. I’m not an apocalyptic messianic Christian, though I sometimes like to pretend I am. 

I inhale from a few different quarters of the information atmosphere lately the idea that the greater the power and wealth disparity between the few at the top and the vast majority in the relatively normal world, the greater the likelihood for paranoid conspiracies to develop among the people, or the greater the likelihood the people can be... read more

Everybody’s got their advice for living a good life. Some wisely keep it to themselves. Some, despite espousing tenets of the philosophy of Stoicism, simply cannot keep their mouths shut. Someone recently posted this from Marcus Aurelius:

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today

will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like

this because they cannot tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good,

and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature

related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and

possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can

implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were

born to live and work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper

and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn

your back on him: these are obstructions.”

Those words pissed me off. Here’s what you should do when you wake up in the morning, Marcus: empty your bladder and move your bowels, that is how to start your day. Then, and only then, or maybe after a cup of coffee, you can prepare to meet all the benighted folks who don’t know the beauty and ugliness you have seen. Then you can vow you are in no way afraid of them and make your protestations that they are family to you, protestations that are undermined by your obvious sense of superiority.

The Stoic philosophers are an aggravating bunch. Their motto seems to be, “Never complain, never explain,” which I have joked is the passive/aggressive’s creed. Toxic masculinity is the lens through which they evaluate human behavior. To them, strength is the ability to withstand suffering. It is the code of the ox. It is the way of the beast of burden. Nothing wrong with being a perfect ox, if you value the values of an anthropomorphic ox mentality. But why would you assume others should value the same thing? How would a society of oxen be desirable?

“Know thyself” is a familiar motto, yet the Stoics don’t seem to know themselves to be judgmental, passive aggressive, and tacitly smug.

The same someone blind copied an email to all of us, I assume, couldn’t really say, being blind and all, that contained the advice of music... read more

A stairway rises from the floor. One step up. Two steps up, three, and so on. Then, at the ninth step, an abrupt end. A final step, only eight steps shy of the second floor. The pedestrian stands on the inadequate final step, some five feet off the ground, neither fully on the first floor, yet unable to attain the second.

What manner of half-assed structure is this? the abortive pedestrian asks. Did the architect fail to calculate the number the steps in the flight of stairs correctly? Did the building contractor run out of lumber at this point? The unfinished stairway is just complete enough for a person to fall from, but insufficient to use for ascending entirely from one floor to another.

Picture it, the incomplete stairway, standing on its own in a museum gallery or a sculpture garden, for it is in fact a work of art. It is an avant-garde stairway, refusing to answer the pedestrian’s desire, not out of spite, but from the simple instinct to be itself. It owes you no explanation, no more than it owes you its utility. It owes you nothing. It exists in defiance of humanity’s petty needs.

Does it not remind us of the words of Texas politician, Tim Boyd, who resigned as mayor of Colorado City, Texas after the weeklong deadly power outage two years ago. In response to frustrated constituents complaining about freezing to death, Boyd wrote: “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” A government and a utility service defying the people’s calls for something in exchange for their tax dollars? That’s called avant-garde government. [You can hear or read about that fiasco in my essay from March 4, 2021, here: “The Quiet Part Out Loud.”]

Are these not the hallmarks of a new aesthetic in the official philosophy of problem solving? Another municipal analog was last week’s record storm and flooding in South Florida. Broward County, where Fort Lauderdale is located, got over two feet of rain. This could be due to the trend of global atmospheric warming. Warmer air can hold more moisture, a commonly understood cause for storms dumping unusually destructive amounts of rain.

Whatever the reason for the massive amounts of water, they’re doing something about it in Broward County. The most rainfall in a single day Fort Lauderdale’s streets are built to manage right now is... read more