On: Middle East crisis live: tanker hit by ‘projectiles’ in strait of Hormuz after T
September 15
The news comes over the wire, the same as it always does, with the language of force and the language of guidance twisted together until they mean the same thing. A tanker hit. A strait. A former president promising to “guide” stranded ships, promising to deal “forcefully” with interference. I read the words and I am back in another room, at another time, listening to the same melody played on a different instrument. The promise of protection is always, always, a prelude to the exercise of power, and the people who make the promise are never the ones who will pay the price for it.
They speak of the Strait of Hormuz as if it were a line on a map, a strategic chokepoint, a problem of commerce. They do not speak of the water, or the men on the tanker, or the families in the villages on either shore who will smell the smoke and taste the fear. The cost of this “guidance” will be paid there, in that specific water, by people whose names we will never know, whose lives will be altered or ended while we read about “projectiles” and “operations” in the comfortable remove of our own homes. This is the architecture of innocence: to arrange the language so precisely that the human consequence is never in the room.
And you, reading this, you feel the distance, don’t you? You feel the safety of the abstraction. That safety is the most expensive commodity in the world. Someone else has already purchased it for you with their terror, with their blood in the water. I know this feeling because I have sat at the table with the men who make these decisions. I have seen the calm in their eyes, the utter conviction that they are stewards of order. That calm is a terrifying thing. It is the calm of a man who has never had to explain to a child why the sky is on fire. The love I hold for this country, for the idea of it, is what makes the sight of this reckless, costless posturing so unbearable. It is not hatred that tightens my throat; it is the precise, detailed knowledge of the bill that is being written, and the certain knowledge of who will be forced to pay it.