Tag Archives: media

A Yacht Race

By Posted in death, Life Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment


The race had been in progress for the best part of three days. Two yachts crept down the Derwent River towards the finish line. Left behind were the brutal winds of the Start. Here there was scarcely a zephyr. The national broadcaster broke into the scheduled breakfast banalities to cover the final minutes of the race. In a race of 628 nautical miles, the giant yachts were separated by less than one-tenth of a nautical mile.

The Breakfast crew at the TV station were agog. The vision showed two yachts with their so tallmasts, black triangular sails reminiscent of wizard’s cloaks, creeping, overlapping each other, changing tack suddenly, stealing each other’s air, vying for minute advantage. You could not tell from the vision which yacht was leading. The young woman on the TV declared: I can’t tell who’s ahead! Neither could I.

It was clear to me, a mere dinghy sailor, the TV lady was all at sea. She would not know what a nautical mile was, nor the names of the sails, nor her port side from her starboard. She didn’t need to. She was engaged, she was excited and she conveyed the tension of the moment as well as her partiality. This was entertainment. She favoured the boat that had finished in second place twice. In short she cheered for the underdog precisely and solely because it was the underdog.

To cheer for the underdog is familiar to most Australians. An instinct for justice overtakes us. It’s an impulse both noble and immature. It loves the simple story. It has no time for nuance. Insteadthere is romance, a whiff of virtue.

It is this instinct for the underdog that animates the national broadcaster. This is evident in reporting many contests, both domestic and international.

At the moment there are contested narratives in the middle east. The broadcaster can’t quite resist the adolescent lure of the simple story. It sees David, it sees Goliath. It sees moral purity on one side and the opposite on the other side. And it what is clearly to be seen it chooses not to see.

In the course of the war in Gaza and Israel the broadcaster and its like-minded newspapers report the aweful suffering of Palestinian people, as they should. We see and we read and we feel. Our feelings include grief and shock and anger. What the reports seldom remind us is the fact of war both in Gaza and in Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to rocket non-military targets in Israel.

We see much reporting of the suffering in Gaza, some of the suffering in the West Bank, much, much less of the situation in Israel.

In the weeks since mid-October, I have not come across reportage such the following. Its author is a New Yorker named ShaulRobinson:

Israel, December 2023. Not a defeated country. Certainly not a country short on resolve or determination. Or even a country concerned that it might not get through this. But, for all that, this is a stunned country. A grieving country. A country in indescribable pain.

The daily losses of soldiers. The people you meet everywhere – ’ I have a son in Gaza’. The hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from their homes. The bereaved, the shattered communities, the shattered sense of security, of safety. The wounded (there are already thousands of profoundly wounded soldiers), the scarred. The families coping with husbands, fathers, children, in the Army for months….

We learned a long time ago to stop saying the words ‘unprecedented’ or ‘unbelievable’. The precedents in Jewish history for people doing this kind of monstrous violence, born of irrational, demonic hatred, are too many to count. And as for ‘unbelievable’ – well we should have believed it could happen, but nobody wanted to. 

… the most profound moments are with the individual encounters. We met the parents of three heroes – Rabbi Shmuel Slotki whose two sons Noam and Yishai Slotki died on the first day, rushing to defend Kibbutz Alumim, and Robert and Lisa Zenilman whose son Ari, who was born in to the LSS community, died in Gaza two weeks ago. 

We met parents and family members of hostages. We met people who had survived the attacks of October 7th, and relatives of people who did not survive. We met wounded soldiers, and soldiers on their way to battle. We met parents who do not sleep at night (in fact I do not think we met anyone who does sleep at night).  We met bereaved family members sitting by their loved ones’ graves in Har Herzl military cemetery.

…we found ourselves viewing the dozens of fresh graves of heroes of the IDF at Har Hertzl, and with one of the heads of Psychiatry, and one of the head Neurosurgeons at Icholov Hospital who have a caseload of trauma both physical and emotional that is beyond belief. And finally found ourselves an almost unbearable memorial to the Nova Music Festival, with burned out cars, piles of abandoned personal belongings, the bar, the stage, tents and camping chairs staged as a reconstruction of what had been.

That last visit, to the Nova memorial, filled me for the first time with Anger. Rage, at the injustice, the evil brutality of what those monsters did to those beautiful innocent young people, who came to dance. 

I reflected on the stories of Har Hertzl. Not just stories of tragic loss, but of Heroism. Of friends who saved the lives of friends, and strangers, and gave up their lives doing so. Stories that obligate us all to fight back with all our might. I reflected on the words of the Neurosurgeon who unhesitatingly stated ‘I am proud of what we are able to do here, the lives we are able to save through our work.’ 

And I reflected on the Nova Festival. We had met one of the organizers of the October 7th Festival, who recounted what happened on the day, and what has happened afterwards – a mass effort to counsel, hold, heal, protect the survivors, remember the murdered and dream of the future.’

Everywhere in the incredibly moving memorial you see the same four words. “We Will Dance Again’.

And on that note, we sang HaTikvah. Israel is the Land of Hope. And we are the People of Hope.

WE will dance again.

We WILL dance again.

We will DANCE again.

We will dance AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.

 

 

 

On the Passing of a Great Writer

By Posted in Books, Life, Literature Tagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

At the time of writing this, I have read scores of tributes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, all of them as tweets. In other words, I have read nothing so far in mature media, (an expression that identifies me as a culturally bewildered old fart).

Great writers will have their say in traditional media.
Thus far the twitterers. Now me.

I was intrigued as I read these tweets. They poured, a growing stream of tributes, pausing at intervals, I suppose, to gather electronic breath, then flowing again. The process seemed as alive, as dynamic, as the flowing of a swift rivulet that paused on reaching rocks, only to cascade over and around them and plunge downstream in a Gabriel Garcia Marquezswelling spate. I felt excited by the energy I witnessed. I felt I heard the whisperings of legion one-hundred-and-thirty-character authors, everyone of them sounding forty years younger, forty years more at home here than I. Their twittering grew and grew to a chorus.
The energy was mildly thrilling as it gathered strength. It could frighten me if (forget “if”; think ‘\’when!”) it becomes a mob. I remember, too well I remember the cries at Cronulla; the cries of the mob as Dreyfus is cashiered (“Death to the Jew!”).
But I digress. Or do I digress? Only if the medium is not the message.

And what did I hear, what sense as the tweeting reached crescendo?
I heard love. I heard grateful appreciation. Marquez became a beloved writer. And his writing was the antithesis of the tweet. Substantial, considered, it paced itself with the uneven gait of the human.

I was impressed by the way tweeters reached for language worthy. None found his writing “awesome”; no-one said Marquez was “amazing”. No-one buried him in dead language.
Instead they offered back beloved lines. I record the four most quoted in ascending order of popularity:

Fourth: The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

Third: Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

Second: Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will never make you cry.

First: What matters in life is not what happens to you but what your remember and how you remember it.

Of these the first three are switches planted onto the pages of Marquez’ writing that light up a remembered feeling, an emotion recognised by the grateful reader.
The lines on memory appear more elusive than allusive. Subtle, demanding a pause, requiring meditation, the memory quote speaks to all who are mortal of what might remain, of the immortal.

What is my own response to Garcia Marquez’ writing? People call it magic realism. I recognise something older. I hear the thrust of story in the bud, bursting into flower. I hear the pulsing of the “Thousand Nights and One Night”. I hear storytelling.