Saturday, July 11, 2015

Mediocrity

I can't write. My thoughts are scattered as my attention jumps from one story to another. I read into people's comments on social media to the n-th degree. I know - not even sure how - where they are coming from when they make a statement about some subject, and that's when I start to wrestle with ghosts. Start is probably the wrong word. My paralysis is because I am trying to reach the start point, the firm ground from which I can begin pointing out where everything started to go wrong. I read praise for a long serving foreign minister who has just passed away. The only discernible legacy I can make out is that "he was there". He didn't do much, but he was around to see stuff happen. So we clap for him because we don't know what politics is. The only thing we know is mediocrity, so we applaud it as an accomplishment.

On the same note we have the Pied Piper of the Middle East claiming that "the road to Jerusalem" passes through the towns and cities of Syria. Where do I start with that? I've spent the last hour typing and then deleting pages of nonsense on how wrong, how inconsistent, and how hypocritical that man's statements were. A liar celebrating a day which is a lie, for a cause which is dead, to a people who are merely animated husks. Why should that bother me? Who was I trying to reach? I can't honestly say.

We don't even realise that the Middle East is dead, that there existed before all this noise pollution a region that had a very different view of the world, of its place in it, and a hope for the future that the soldiers killed. We think we have inherited something, but in reality we are all squatters in the mansions of people long gone. We dress up with the clothes they left behind, dine in their halls, and pretend to understand the books in their libraries or the art on their walls, like children play-acting at being adults, but we don't get it. We have no idea.

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