Genocide, Despair, and the Sickness Unto Kamala
The Bloody and Inevitable Results of our Refusal to Lift the Veil
I grew up in Orange County, home to Birchers and Minutemen and Mega Churches. I can say without exaggeration that I felt as out of place as a trans-rights activist in downtown Riyadh. I had a gay father who disappeared when I was about five or six, and Mom struggled, working as a cocktail waitress at night and getting supplemental welfare — the kind that no longer exists — to be able to pay for food. Later, she married a man with a good, steady job, but he turned out to be an abusive asshole and an alcoholic.
I dealt with the remnants of that experience and I’ve had especially horrible self-esteem issues for years. I saw shrinks, took meds. It took decades to get where I felt like I could say I was a healthy and content human being with a purpose.
Today, I read up on the latest from Gaza. Watching the Democratic Party put forth a candidate who has supported the slaughter from day one is not encouraging, to say the least. Just six days ago Harris doubled down on her unwavering support for Israel. The Democrats won’t do anything to address the horror that continues to unfold in the West Bank and Gaza. That being the case, we all have a duty to not become blase and let this story disappear from our nation’s political discourse, and eventually our political consciousness. That is, of course, the endgame of the propaganda blitz: to silence counternarratives and gin up support for terrible policies.
This brings us back to my roots, and let’s just say that what I lived through was insignificant, really, compared to the horrors that Palestinian children are dealing with. I am not trivializing anyone’s personal struggles. They’re real. Still, as the years pass, it’s getting harder not to look at my problems as anything more than bourgeois concerns about self-realization.
When I looked at Electronic Intifada today, I was reminded of how insignificant my trauma seems compared to the real deal. This is just one of the devastating accounts reported in the piece:
Omar, a 5-year-old, was rescued from under the rubble in February. He is the only surviving member of his family.
When he was brought to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, doctors decided that he required an arm and leg amputation.
As his parents have been killed, Omar’s aunt Maha is now taking care of him.
He keeps asking where his mom and dad are. Maha does not know what to tell him.
Omar has spoken about how he saw his sister Yasmin without a head following the attack on the family.
“He is only 5,” Maha said.
“What did Omar do to those soldiers? Why have they destroyed his life?”
This isn’t some rare occurrence, but a constant reality in Gaza, where thousands of stories just like Omar’s unfold minute by minute, hour by hour.
To date, 113 journalists have been killed, more than in any other armed conflict in history. That alone is sobering, and it’s a testament to the sophistication and effectiveness of the reactionary weaponry that empire and capital can and will employ in their crusade to silence any counternarrative. Since October 7th, over 39,000 Palestinians have been killed. 14,000 children have been murdered. Yes, murdered, ethnically cleansed, genocided, slaughtered — all those terms apply.
As Al Jazeera points out, Israel makes CNN reporters submit their pieces to Jerusalem censors who work under the shadow of the IDF.
And nobody cares to discuss it or even point it out — not George Clooney, not his bombshell trophy wife, not a single news anchor on network TV, not CNN, not MSNBC, not FOX, and especially not our dimwitted and predictable late-night comics, Colbert being the worst of the lot and the biggest sellout.
Celebrities who dare to question the Democratic Party tend to have short careers.
If genocide is not enough to sour Americans on global hegemony and empire, how about this: emissions from the war on Gaza have had a massive effect on the climate crisis. Even worse, the bombing of Nord Stream 2 stands as the world’s single largest climate disaster ever, releasing more methane into the atmosphere than any event in human history. This administration’s reckless and immoral chase for profit and global domination has ended up killing both the planet and people who (try to) live on it.
The Empire is a Death Machine.
Journalist Mohamad Elmasry asks why the Western media is still silent, pointing out that, “Israel has used its sway in the West to direct and control Western news narratives about the war.”
But we’ve known that — at least some of us have — since October of 2023, when the Israelis started their propaganda campaign by denying they bombed Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
Denial and cognitive dissonance are necessary when a people participate in Genocide.
Denial is also at the heart of despair, as is cognitive dissonance. Kierkegaard pointed out that there is no sickness worse than despair. What it amounts to is nothing less than a sickness unto death. The sickness is incredibly difficult to cure because as Kierkegaard points out, most people don’t realize they’re in despair. In the case of the American citizenry, they’re fine with a senile, genocidal president surrounded by nitwits like Harris and neocons like Victoria Nuland. We watch as the US unleashes hell on earth and we never once question our individual roles or our own personal responsibility for this tragedy. We say “schtum!” and then one day wake up and find our lives are meaningless and we have no idea why.
This is what proceeds from an uncontemplated life lived in the pursuit of filthy lucre; a life in which people reach for anything to distract them from the overpowering horror of the human experience and the fear of nothingness that looms beneath it. They fail in their ultimate duty as human beings, which is to impose meaning on life. To find a way to make this life worthwhile and live with its absurdity and horror, people need to pass through that trial. Looking at the terrifying cognitive dissonance in liberal circles leads me to believe they have failed that task.
This is the sickness unto Kamala.
This is what despair leads to: the accelerated death march of an Empire high on the fumes of its own exhaust, sputtering, choking, gasping for air so its ruling class can reach out and lay claim to whatever wealth or land or product or idea that they have yet to cannibalize.
A last gasp.
Earlier this morning, I looked over the transcript of a conversation between Matt Taibbi and Walter Krim. As they perused this week’s glut of nonsense, propaganda, and cringeworthy bullshit, I read about an abomination calling itself “White Dudes for Harris,” headed up by some clueless liberal named Ross Morales Rocketto, who’s on a mission to save centrism. “The center, such passion!” Good grief. First off, any white guy who cares about his job or his reputation will never join a movement with the words “White Dudes” in its name. They might as well join the Boogaloo Boys. It’s quite funny really, because this group is essentially one of those “I’m a guilty white prick” outfits that’s aimed at liberal self-flagellators who like to confess to woke women in online forums — men who like to be talked to as if they were kindergartners.
It’s a kink.
And for Christ’s sake, boys, Kamala Harris? A semi-literate grifter and social climber whose main claims to fame were sending the parents of truant children to jail and refusing to release non-violent offenders from overcrowded prisons? She supported this genocide from the beginning, and as the piece above illustrates, she still does.
The White Dudes for Harris perform an essential function for the Democrats. They present the party as unchanged, a force for progressive good, a tool for peace in the world, and the pride of the working class. Of course, this is something they’ve never been, really. Certainly not over the last three decades. But it hides reality and at the same time fills a need. It makes me think of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “real.” He’s talking about a primordial state of being removed from language and the symbolic world. This primordial real is a terrifying space that we are only truly able to experience as infants, before language cleaves us from that reality and makes experiencing the real an impossibility.
Looking at the Democratic Party, I feel the real creep up, the knowledge that we are violent biological beasts who must copulate and kill to survive. Language serves as a symbolic gatekeeper that glues this mess together and keeps us from falling into the darkness, from existing in the primal and chaotic state that is our natural condition.
The man with the gold makes the rules, and those rules extend to that language, which binds us all.
White Dudes for Harris does what every other Blue No Matter Who outfit does: it keeps you from looking at the head of the medusa. It wants to shape the symbolic realm we live in, shape how we think and conceive of ourselves as subjects in the modern world. In that realm, you need to know how language is used to influence your belief systems and your own sense of self, or else you’re at its mercy.
Most Americans, unfortunately, are far from possessing this kind of critical literacy.
We could never live in the world of the primordial real, nor would we want to, but we must acknowledge what we are, and that we are capable of the most monstrous and hideous violence and depravity. We must acknowledge the real that lives behind all the duplicitous rhetoric we see, which keeps this death machine churning.
Otherwise, we’ll all fall victim to the kind of despair I’m talking about and end up donating to sociopaths and voting for war criminals.
The Sickness unto Kamala, indeed.