No Words
Elise Stefanik's Political Theater and the Limits on American Speech
I once met a veteran aid worker in Cairo, an Egyptian woman in late middle age who had worked throughout the Middle East and Africa before a final posting in Afghanistan. Something about what she experienced there had broken her more than the other miseries she had witnessed. “I can’t write anymore,” she told me. Even in retirement, she said she could no longer turn her thoughts into coherently written words.
She never explained exactly why. Were there things she just couldn’t say or did it all stop making sense? The ability to bear witness to awful things is a primary qualification for social workers, religious counselors, nurses, doctors, cops, soldiers. And aid workers and journalists are additionally tasked to report what they see.
I’ve thought about that woman occasionally because, for a while, I too have felt unable to write. Part of the reason was a death in the family, not unexpected but transformative and confusing nonetheless. The other part had to do with the Israel Gaza war.
As my mother took her last breath, peacefully, with her children around her, a TV in the other room beamed reports about bodies piling up in Gaza, in clouds of smoke and under the scree of fighter jets. For different reasons I had no words for any of it - our mother’s last gasp and her stillness, so surreal after 95 years of life - or the real time video in the next room of dusty injured children looking for dead mommies and vice versa, while dazed men dug out limp corpses.
I have spent a career in the the white hot center of American media academics and entertainment, and since October 7, watched as editors writers and actors have been sacked for supporting a “ceasefire,” artists for speaking out have been defunded and de-platformed, college kids doxed and their organizations kicked off campus. Some of these incidents involved entities or individuals I’ve worked for, effectively signaling the topic is treacherous territory.
Having to privilege one’s livelihood against the certainty that future generations will rightly judge us for silence about, at the very least, paying the taxes that supply the weapons that are wiping out innocents, is to know the edge of a moral abyss. To be absolutely clear, by stating my horror at the civilian toll, I am not supporting Hamas attacking civilians, nor their atrocities, and I most certainly don’t support “genocide” against Jews.
The focus on limiting American speech ratcheted up in almost direct proportion to the visuals from Gaza. There is nothing like real time war video - proliferating and impossible to ignore from TikTok to mainstream TV 24/7 - to pierce our senses, to bring death home. Since October 7, the Israeli air force has dropped 22,000 guided and unguided U.S. supplied bombs on untold thousands of civilians who had the very bad luck of sleeping and eating in rooms deemed to be above or among “militants” or “terrorists.” At least 16,000 people are dead, and that does not include the orphaned or the maimed. Some 1.9 million people have been forced to flee their homes. Yet, anyone - from journalists to academics to the Secretary of State himself - who might be wondering how many children and families must die, or lose family members and home, for every one militant bent on destroying Israel and creating an Arab nation from “river to sea” has been on notice for weeks to withhold that question.
On Capitol Hill, the Israel-Gaze American speech war reached a new level, in a piece of political theater staged by House Republicans and starring New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Stefanik grilled three Ivy university presidents (all female, from MIT, Penn, Harvard) and their wiggly academic answers to a pretty straightforward question about whether they allowed students on campus to advocate “genocide” of the Jews became the story of the week. It didn't matter that protesting students - as far as has been reported - have not explicitly called for “genocide of the Jews.” Stefanik had worked her own way up to the G-word by equating the Palestinian intifada itself with genocide. The presidents were woefully unprepared and fell into the trap.
This political theater shifts media attention to outrage about words and away from outrage about deeds. How many Gaza civilians died, how many more are being maimed and orphaned and rendered sick, hungry and homeless in the days, hours and minutes while headlines are devoted to how one president (Penn) has already resigned and speculate on how others’ positions seem increasingly tenuous.
Three days after the Congressional hearing, the United States government vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the UN. The Biden administration is trying to have it both ways: allowing representatives - Harris, Blinken, Austin - to finally express disapproval about the civilian massacre underway, while at the UN vetoing a ceasefire resolution and at home devising a way to send 14,000 tank shells to Israel without Congressional approval.
According to the New York Time’s White House reporter Peter Baker, the Biden administration is afraid to openly criticize Israel’s conduct in Gaza for fear that it will lose whatever modicum of control it has over the situation. Baker said on the Times’ podcast The Daily that his sources believe the president will stand by for at least another month of the same - indiscriminate bombing apparently - before speaking out himself. How many more civilians die, starve, sicken, freeze?
Aid workers can’t tabulate the numbers. A source of mine at UNICEF says private American owners have barred access to satellites the organization would usually use to collect data on death, disease and destruction. On CBS Face The Nation this morning, Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the few members of Congress who consistently feels entitled to speak his mind, probably because as a socialist he doesn’t have to answer to donors or party leaders, urged Biden to “pressure” Israel. “You're talking about 1.9 million people displaced, going around without any water, food. Without any medical supplies. It is a humanitarian disaster. “
On the same program, Jante Soeripto, the President and CEO of Save The Children said humanitarian organizations are helpless to do anything to help the children and population of Gaza. The seven-day “humanitarian pause” was not enough to rebuild warehouses. She accused Israel of making a willful “choice” to withhold aid and basic necessities from civilians in Gaza. She added, “...humanitarian organizations like ours, we are really running out words to describe how bad it is.”
The individual loss in our family brought home to me the incomprehensibility of the number of dead civilians, some 16,000 and growing. There is nothing like death to reveal the inadequacy of words. As Catullus wrote in elegy to a beloved dead brother millennia ago, we “speak in vain” to their “silent ashes.”
Catullus 101
Borne through many nations and over many seas
I come to these wretched funeral rites, brother mine,
so that I might hand you over with a final tribute in death
and speak in vain to your silent ashes,
since fortune indeed has stolen you yourself away from me –
alas, my brother, cruelly snatched from me.
But now accept these gifts dripping with fraternal tears,
handed down by the ancient custom of our forefathers
as a sorrowful tribute in funeral rites,
and forevermore, brother, hail and farewell!
Translation by James Green