Missiles Flying
The past days have seen two types of flying missiles: actual and rhetorical. The actual missiles came from Iran launched at Israel; the rhetorical were launched by America’s two vice-presidential candidates, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. What was striking about both was that neither of these attacks landed forcefully or did much damage
That’s in sharp contrast to the hype surrounding these attacks, which painted the situation in the Middle East as a step towards “all-out war” and the debate as a vital moment in a tightly contested election. What these dual episodes should tell us, however, is that there is a vast difference between actual war, with all its murderous intent, and the divisions currently besetting Americans and American politics. The United States is roiling, for sure, but the Israel-Gaza-Lebanon-Yemen-Syria-Iran conflict is actually lethal and precarious. The problem is that the rhetoric about American politics is often indistinguishable from the way we describe the actual conflict in the Middle East.
Even there, the proportionality is lacking. Israel and the government of Iran are implacable enemies, but they can’t really fight a war; they can trade missiles and air strikes, which for now have purposefully avoided civilian areas; but they cannot launch land armies at each other, which makes a conventional war nearly impossible. They are trapped with the desire to fight a conclusive war and no way to do it.
American politics, however, is not lethal on this scale, though it has moments of potential lethality as the two recent assassination attempts showed. The rhetoric would suggest a coming apocalypse. Trump warns darkly of towns becoming “Third World hell-holes” if Kamala Harris wins, with the United States soon to be overrun by “terrorists.” Biden repeatedly couched the 2024 election as one that would determine the survival of democracy, and Harris has echoed those fears of a nation in rapid retreat should Trump win. And if you troll X or any corner of social media, the language is considerably darker and more hyperbolic.
And yet we have right now in the Middle East an example of actual carnage and destruction, of actual hate metastasizing into death and violence and destruction of communities. Even there, the carnage receives the global glare of attention somewhat disproportionately to other parts of the world that are unequivocally worse, much worse. What’s transpiring in Sudan, with the emptying out of Khartoum and 2 million people fleeing the civil war of rival factions and the displacement of another 8 million throughout the country, is on a significantly greater scale than anything going on now in the Middle East (though proportional to the population, the devastation in Gaza itself is up there). What happened in Syria after 2014 until 2020 was by most measures even worse than what is happening in Sudan now. The war in eastern Ukraine has already taken perhaps 200,000 lives and wounded far more.
But we use a limited set of words to describe these various conflicts, and the result is that when we do, and when people want to reach for strong words to emphasize what is unfolding, the stark differences collapse and blur together. Words like “hellhole” are used both to describe a bad city block and entire war-torn country; “perilous” can mean political confusion or imminent military attacks or the collapse of a government; “crisis” can refer to the sorry state of American politics or to the absence of a functioning state in Haiti.
Without a more subtle and nuanced lexicon, we are left with a limited vocabulary that compresses vastly different realities. What we need is the political equivalent of the dozens of words that the Inuit have for snow (no, that is not a myth; they really do). We need a range of ways to discuss gradations of problems. Without that, we tend to conflate bad thing in country X with bad thing in country Y, to the point where the substantial differences are collapsed. As a result, we lose perspective. The fissures in the United States today are real, but they aren’t the fissures that tore apart Syria in 2014 and led to a third of the country in exile and anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 dead. The missiles flying between Iran and Israel are perhaps a deadly harbinger, but for now, that “war” is nothing compared to what is going on in Sudan or Myanmar.
We also have the challenge that human emotions don’t differentiate between triggers. Fear is an emotion that is accompanied by a cocktail of bodily chemicals that cause the heart to race, blood vessels to contract, and breath to become shorter, with that rush of intense adrenaline. But fear is fear regardless of the cause, such that the fear of missiles flying overhead isn’t felt much differently in the body than the fear a socialite might feel upon breaking a nail just before a gala. They are both legitimate fears in the sense that they have negative consequences. But they aren’t equivalent harms. It takes human consciousness to be able to tell one’s body that some fears are more irrational or less significant than others.
So, we fail in how we discuss the problems of the world to maintain any perspective. Even the way we talk about the weather has fallen prey to that malady. On the one hand, we have Hurricane Helene, which deserves whatever extreme language we can use: “catastrophic,” “monstrous.” But then the same incentives that beset the social media world infect how we talk about impending weather, with each new storm forming a possible category whatever storm, the possibility of catastrophe always invoked to the point where it becomes hard to distinguish a genuinely threatening storm system from a merely normal one.
The vice-presidential debate, in spite of efforts to spin it as another nail in the civility coffin, was startlingly calm, substantive, and (gasp) respectful. Walz and Vance acknowledged each other as caring parents and genuine public servants who want the best for our country. They debated real issues without the attendant name-calling and Armageddon-days language. There was a surprising dearth of zingers and rehearsed gotcha lines. There were, in essence, few if any rhetorical missiles in an age where everything has become one. And the ones there were in that 2-hour joust did not land with much force or do much damage.
We need to find better ways of describing the world than through the relentless language of chaos and destruction, amped up by fervid prose and juiced by ever-more stringent verbs. This is partly a problem of words; it’s also a problem of sensibility and tone. Nothing happening in America politically is akin to the crises mentioned above elsewhere in the world. There is an actual, tangible and vital difference between real missiles and rhetorical ones, and if we fail to see that, we are lost. We can do better. We can take a deep breath and pause in the face of emotions that don’t distinguish between the real and the rhetorical. We can, and we must, or else reality becomes a hall of mirrors where we can’t tell the difference between a broken nail and a broken body.
Compelling contrasting situations, all based on fear, which leads to negative emotions.
So true. Thanks!