It’s hard to get your head round all this violent language, but I guess it’s always been there.
The tired suits at the tired old Security Council chamber at the United Nations in New York, personally removed from both violence and violent language, finally agree that there should be a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, after thousands have died and a whole country, Lebanon, that has seen nothing but this kind of regular disintegration since the days of the Crusaders, has been taken apart once again.
Meanwhile, down there on the ground, back in the Middle East, the soldiers are instructed to retreat to their previous positions, not exactly laying down their arms, but briefly stopping shooting at each other. Each side sneers at the other’s failure to win the war. Hizbullah and Israel, short of a number of irreplacable casualties, are exactly where they were before the whole thing went up in flames a month before.
They trade sound bites in the language of violence. An Israeli sergeant describes the last hours of being able to hunt down a Hizbullah unit. ”They were standing 50 metres away from us, so we shot them,” he says, smiling triumphantly. ”Then they were able to go back to their positions and we were able to go back to our positions.”
Lebanese civilians returning to their blasted farms and villages are just as defiant. ”Hizbullah put up a good fight against Israel for us,” they say, surveying their destroyed surroundings with pride. ”Until next time.”
And there will certainly be a next time. It’s just a question of when.
A beautiful young woman in a veil, returning to the rubble, smiles up at the dangling devastation of concrete and iron that used to be an apartment block where she might once have lived and sighs at how beautiful it all is.
Signs of war become signs of a life survived. As Robert Duvall said in his role as an American warrior officer in Francis Ford Coppola’s transposition of Heart of Darkness to the dark soul of America’s apocalyptic debacle in Vietnam: ”I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
So it’s all destined to come around again. Neither side admits defeat and neither one can claim a decisive victory. The dying, acrid smoke of battle, the stench of rotting corpses gradually being cleared away in southern Lebanon, is a victory in itself. The soldier lights up a cigarette and smiles into the camera, as if he is a film star.
In the same hour, we see Bill Clinton talking about how proud he is to be part of the legendary Baby Boomer generation. I was scratching my head, trying to remember who the hell the Baby Boomers were anyway.
Clinton and his nemesis, George Dubya Bush III or whatever, both turn 60 this year. Both so-called Baby Boomers. Both hardly babies anymore. Both a bother to the rest of the world and their wives (take that as you will). How can you still be proud of what you’re not?
So, having scratched my head raw, the answer finally came. The Baby Boomers was a name given to the generation of children born in the wake of so-called World War II — so-called because it sucked almost the whole of the human planet’s energy into its meaningless, destructive maw of napalm and rocket fire and opened the way to further wars of that kind to come.
People who survived that war were so relieved at being alive that they made like rabbits and produced a new wave of children to supposedly re-populate the world. They never stopped to ask themselves whether these new children would become Hitlers, Churchills, Kaundas, Pol Pots, Nkrumahs, Verwoerds, or indeed, Clintons and Dubyas, sent to torment us all.
And so, from the safety of the Security Council chamber in New York, those who claim to represent us are proud to say that we have never turned back since. (The UN, of course, being one of the more successful products of the Baby Boom in its own right — more successful because, by its very nature, it is self-regenerating — the true sign of a scientifically successful new species, whether it is good for the broader planet or not.)
There is another kind of baby boom that is interesting to examine in this context. My friend Albie, who bounces back and forth between home and exile and can’t seem to make his mind up about which one he prefers (for reasons I completely sympathise with), reminds me that his generation, my generation, the generation that was boomed into the world by the post-World War II Baby Boomers once they had their feet securely on the ground — we are responsible for another kind of baby boom.
He puts it quite chillingly. ”June 16 1976 wasn’t just about learning Afrikaans in schools,” he says. ”The way we saw it, the Boers were trying to eliminate us. So we reacted by making love and making babies, even while we were making war, and not even thinking about how many children we were making in the process. We just made children. We were not about to be eliminated, whatever the cost.”
We have our own problems as a result down here. Aids is one of them. An expanding and unusable population, becoming younger every day, is another.
And so you look back at the Middle East and you think: ”Where is it all going?” One generation after another bred to hate each other, prepared to go to war.
And in the meantime, the towns and villages and fields of Lebanon and Israel laid to waste. And the fresh, handsome young women and men smiling up into their devastated surroundings and saying: ”It’s beautiful!”