Did we do this?

The dreadful weight of shame

I’m really not sure what to say. I mean, what do you want me to say? What is there to say? What do you mean ‘what about?’? About anything, pretty much.

I could lament the fate of Charlie Kirk, who died so young with so much of his life ahead of him. Even though he’d spent a goodly portion of it before his demise in precisely wishing on others the kind of demise he suffered himself. Or at least opining that that kind of demise is no big deal. So, can I say that the demise of Charlie Kirk was no big deal? The president was pretty cut up about his demise, so clearly it wasn’t no big deal. But was it a big deal, then? Are things that are a big deal for the president a big deal for the president’s people? I suppose that depends on who the president is, if not who his people are; if not whether they’re his people, and not someone else’s, which a lot of his people seem to be these days. A guy got shot dead for whatever reason he got shot dead for, and it’s a big deal; eleven guys in a boat in the Caribbean Sea get kinetically dismembered and that’s treated like a shot across the bows. For everyone else, obviously, but not for the 11 guys who got dismembered, and have probably been eaten by sharks by now. Do you think their body parts will wash up on a beach in Key West one day, and locals will need to undergo post-traumatic stress syndrome counselling to help them recover from the shock? At least we know where Charlie Kirk’s remains are. I think we do, at least.

On the other hand, I could say that Charlie Kirk got everything he deserved, and that would no more endear me to the leftists who really wanted Charlie Kirk off the face of the planet, nor the leftists who are genuinely honest when they say the last thing they wanted on this Earth was for Charlie Kirk to be despatched from its face, or the right-wingers who’ll be baying for my blood if they ever read these intimate thoughts of mine on not knowing what to say about Charlie Kirk’s fate. In the absence of a politically correct thing to say about the death of Charlie Kirk, the bottom line is just to say nothing about Charlie Kirk. Maybe, like Michael Finnigan, whose whiskers the wind blew in again, so that he had to begin again, we can simply say, “Poor old Charlie Kirk”, even if it doesn’t rhyme.

I wonder if anyone outside Israel will ever utter the words “Poor old Benjamin Netanyahu”, which also doesn’t rhyme in the rhyme of Michael Finnigan, but which sounds gracious and generous and sympathetic and empathetic, while also sounding like you’re taking the Mickey. Because no one outside Israel is saying that. I’m pretty sure, anyway. Not those exact words. I’m not all that sure whether anyone in Israel is saying them either. I mean, people do feel moved to say “Poor old Volodymyr Zelenskyy” and there are good grounds for even saying “Poor old Donald Trump”, since the depletion of his mental faculties, such as some allege it to exist, can hardly be lain at his door as being his fault (although the vast array of criminal acts that Donald Trump is said, if not proved, to have been guilty of may be regarded by some, less-charitable souls than myself, as warranting total exclusion of the words “poor old …” in conjunction with the U.S. president’s name. This one, I mean.) I don’t think I’ll ever really be travelling to the United States again before I pop my clogs, but I wouldn’t like to think that these statements disqualify me from entry at some port of … entry into … America; but it’s of course possible that they could nonetheless disqualify me from entry into some port of … entry elsewhere than America, depending on who’s monitoring this channel. And why. El Salvador, for instance.

Now comes the really tricky one. The one that no one knows what to say about … About which no one knows what to say (I think that’s better). I mean, for two years nearly, very, very few people of any influence have known what to say about it, so they’ve generally convened in the somewhat peculiar stance of saying “tut” and then supplying armaments to the people about whom they’re tutting, whilst all the people who haven’t got a single thing to say about what this tutting is about are marching the length and breadth of cities and bridges and public squares to try to get the people with influence to do a bit more than just tutting. Without a great deal of effect. I mean, everyone talks these days about Sisyphean tasks, which means more or less pushing and heaving a great big stone up a hill only to get so far and then it rolls back down again, so you have to hurtle after it and start heaving it back up the hill (how the hell do you even stop it as you leg it, after a huge, rolling boulder?) But Gaza isn’t a Sisyphean task: it’s a boulder that simply won’t move. Not uphill, anyway, just downhill. It’s being pushed downhill by the IDF, or some people are saying IGF now, and I’m really not sure what that stands for. I could guess, but I don’t know for sure.

I live in Belgium and we have a thing here called freedom of expression. It’s set down in our constitution (article 19). So, as long as I’m careful about the consequences of what I say, I can say what I want. Trouble is—I’m not sure what to say. Certainly not so’s someone, somewhere isn’t going to be offended. And that’s why I’m really not sure what to say.

The Irish know what to say, and the leftists know what to say, and the Jews know what to say, because they always say the same thing. We all always say the same thing, and yet none of us knows what to say.

Because it’s all already been said, and nothing’s been done.

Shame. On us. On them. I’m not sure what to say, but I feel the dreadful weight of shame. As if I should say something. Something like: Did we do this?

Image: Gaza, with thanks to the Japan Times.