On: Israel says it has struck Iran after taking missile fire

October 26th

The morning papers arrived with the heavy, predictable thud of a tragedy that has forgotten its lines. It appears that Israel has finally returned the fire of Iran, a gesture of symmetry that the world calls justice and the poets call exhaustion. There is something profoundly tedious about the modern appetite for retaliation; it is the only form of conversation where both parties insist on having the last word, yet neither has anything new to say.

To strike back because one has been struck is not a policy; it is merely a lack of imagination. We are told this is a “measured response,” a phrase which suggests that destruction can be weighed out like tea at a grocer’s. But there is no such thing as a measured catastrophe. One might as well speak of a measured fall from grace or a moderately broken heart. The difficulty with an eye for an eye is that it eventually leaves the world not only blind, but remarkably dull.

The maps in the evening journals are splashed with red, as if the geography itself were blushing at the absurdity of it all. Governments always insist that these exchanges are necessary for peace, but peace is never the result of a perfectly balanced ledger of grievances. Peace is what happens when one side decides that the costume of the warrior has become too heavy to wear.

I find myself looking at the green carnation on my lapel and wondering why men prefer the smoke of the battery to the scent of the garden. They say they fight for the future, but they are merely obsessed with the past. A missile is simply a very expensive way of remembering an insult. How much more charming the world would be if we settled our disputes with epigrams instead of explosives. A well-placed insult lasts forever; a crater is eventually filled with weeds.