Why does Gary come and lecture you on why some children need to see their mums burn to death for the good of humanity?
You may think Gary passionately believes Israel has the right to defend itself by blowing up apartment blocks with sleeping children, but that’s not why he does it. He does it because he needs something. It’s hard to get. We’ll soon find out what it is.
You only see an avatar and a mystifying handle. You don’t see Gary’s potbelly. You don’t see how tired Gary is. You can’t tell how detached Gary tries to look. How above it all. How unfazed by it all. Reddish nose from daily night caps. Usually muscatel. Sometimes old whiskey. Not mixed with cola, though he prefers it that way. He knows that’s primitive.
Most of all you can’t see Gary’s pain.
A lot of pain.
Pain that’s been there for so long that Gary himself doesn’t notice it’s there anymore.
His pain has become a certain kind of attitude, a behaviour.
Gary is not evil.
He has two kids that even though they are in their mid twenties he still supports financially.
He has a wife he’s never beaten. He also hasn’t had intercourse with her in the last 6,5 years. And he doesn’t want to remind himself of the last time they tried. When about halfway through she gave him a quick peck on the cheek, giggled to hide her shame and guilt and said: ‘I guess that ship has sailed.’
By that ship Gary assumes she meant the passion between them.
But there never had been any of that.
The most intense, most satisfying moment of Gary’s life happened in the late nineties. With a Portugese woman named Silvana. When he got to second base with her in dimly lit bar in the barro alto, not too far from the Fernando Pessoa statue. She’d given him a book with Pessoa’s poem. On the title page she had written: ‘His melancholy reminds me of yours. Whatever you carry inside you, you can show to me.’
He never did.
When the project for which his US company had sent him to Lisbon ended he returned to Michigan. They chatted over ICQ for a bit and email. It petered out. When he found her on Facebook eleven years later she was married to a Brazilian guy who trains horses. It stung. He asked her if she had married the Horse Whisperer. She never replied.
His wife looks nothing like Silvana, but she is practical, dependable, not a spendthrift and never does anything to embarrass him. At least not in public.
Why do we need to know all this?
Why can’t we know why Gary calls people idiot, retard, moron several times a week on a platform formerly known as Twitter?
Why do we need to know some rude guy on social media drinks one or two glasses of muscatel every night?
The muscatel he drinks because at first it made him feel close to Silvana in her absence. Now he drinks it cause he got used to the smell and the taste of it. And because special people consume special drinks.
And Gary feels special.
Secretly.
Gary is almost certain he’s brilliant.
He thinks he should have gone to MIT and not some unknown college.
He blames his parents for not getting into MIT.
That’s a pattern with Gary.
When something doesn’t go like he likes it to go he blames someone else than himself. Always.
If Israel burning children in tents doesn’t fit with what Gary think Israel stands for, then someone else is responsible for burning those children.
Since Gary knows he is brilliant and it’s only the dumb world that has failed to reward his brilliance he feels a glimmer of that brilliance when he can call other people idiots. Anonymously of course.
Gary is hypersensitive to being shamed.
His mum was a mean drunk and at times would make fun of Gary’s father. She would praise sophisticated men, local men and celebrities alike and then laugh haughtily and tell Gary: ‘Your farm raised father is a slob who never takes me anywhere.’
That’s just one wound that made Gary avoid any situation where someone could shame him. Especially women.
Another factor in Gary labeling people who empathize with Palestinian little girls trapped in cars with dead relatives and being shot at by big ass Israeli tanks is this:
Gary suffers, it’s often the same pain, his brilliance is never recognized. Not in school, not at home, not at his job. Not even by his three poker friends. Since Covid they don’t even meet anymore.
His children treat him like this somewhat adorable chubby block of grumpiness trying to hard to matter. They love him, but don’t respect him. His advice is always made fun of. His son has even said: ‘The only thing I trust you on is if you design a bridge. But now chatgpt can do that faster.’
Gary knew his son wasn’t even try to hurt him and exactly that hurt the most.
Gary sometimes wondered if when is never fully loved in childhood, love always eludes you.
His dad’s way of showing love to Gary was to build a bird’s house together. Dad would get upset at some point, start yelling and send Gary inside claiming he could focus better alone. Dad would finish the bird’s house and call Gary and his mum to come look at it. Which made Gary feel useless. Worse was when mum said: ‘He makes me live in a dump, but he will build a mansion for the birdies.’
The closest Gary’s dad ever got was on his death bed.
When he said Gary’s watch looked really good on him. That it showed a bit of class.
Gary beamed and said: ‘It’s a smartwatch.’
And dad said: ‘Today watches are smart and people are dumb.’
Gary with the smartwatch feels the irrepressible need to call people dumb online.
Since nobody has ever really empathized with Gary, he experiences it as a personal affront to have to empathize with injured children in Gaza. He hates that everyone now cares about those, but nobody ever cared about little Gary who had to witness the cold war between his parents, was never excellent at anything, except mathematics at times and one science project in school when he was 15 (which went largely unnoticed).
You know how you can tell Gary’s been vitally damaged?
He’s given up on effort.
No effort in Gary ever got him more than a fairly decent job, a respectable wife, a better home than his parents could afford and two kids who are ok, but always feel very far away, especially when they are in the same room as Gary.
So no, Gary is not going to read ten pro-Palestine books and ten pro-Israeli books, examine his own bias, contact people on both sides, try as hard as possible to reach some kind of fair verdict.
But he also can’t resist commenting anyway.
Since effort is suspect in Gary’s life he doesn’t want to spend too much energy on his comments.
He will share some graph he found somewhere showing how there are more Palestinians today than 20 years ago, so Israel can’t have any genocidal intent.
If anyone counters with graphs of their own he types ‘idiot.’
Gary doesn’t want to know. Gary already knows what counts:
Associating himself with Israel makes him feel connected to the most succesful people in the US. And success is what Gary respects. Palestinians he associates with the same loud people who want everything for free, like cancelling student debt.
Gary’s proof that he is brilliant is that he calls others idiots.
Accepting dead children also makes him feel supremely rational.
What could be more rational than accepting that sometimes to create a better world some children have to be separated from their arms and their legs, and their parents, and their homes.
It’s all for the greater good and it’s not Israel doing it. Hamas members sit in the cockpit of the Israeli F-35s and force the pilot’s hand. Well, you know, symbolically. I mean, they are terrorists after all.
In Gary’s world some guys with guns are terrorists and some guy, and especially pretty girls who look like Gary’s fantasy girls, can never be terrorists.
Gary’s aspirations in life have been defeated, but they are not dead and supporting Israel feels like some of Israel’s dominance, power, cunning intelligence will rub off on Gary.
In Gary’s fantasies he is exactly the kind of guy who could have engineered the pager attack on Hezbollah.
He is the one who could create an Iron Dome.
He is unrecognized success and brilliant goodness, just like, in Gary’s mind, Israel is unrecognized success and brilliant goodness.
In supporting Israel Gary supports little denied Gary.
And so almost every day Gary dumps some comment on a stranger. Sometimes the stranger foolishly takes the bait and reacts. As if anyone could ever change Gary’s mind.
Gary feels good. Finally someone is hit by something Gary did and said, though negatively. Gary has penetrated. And that is enough. He’s no longer interested now, so his off ramp is yelling ‘idiot’. Like dumping the used condom in the bin after the high has been had.
Gary only wants to make people who still love life bad.
Gary has kinda given up on life.
He’s still here. There is some hope left, not much.
And if you ask him why he is angry or annoyed he will say something like all those crazy lefties are turning the whole country upside down and are falling for Hamas propaganda.
He will not mention the 6,5 years dry spell.
Or the school reunions he dreads because he doesn’t shine there.
He will not say how every time the 25 year old colleague, a mesmerizing mix of Syrian-Korean roots and the most dazzling black curls Gary has ever seen walks past at work Gary feels as worthy as a small piece of cheap pizza stuck on the floor of a subway car.
And so Gary throws some cherry picked information online, calls whoever responds a retard and never realizes that this works exactly like the muscatel.
It gives him a vague hint of what he really needs:
intimacy so warm, so real, so safe, so sensual, so embracing of true Gary, his pain would finally go away.
And so the Palestinians come to stand for everything Gary loathes in himself and about the world and Israelis come to stand for everything what Gary knows he could have been, had the world not thwarted him and spit him out.
That Gary can mumble something about the Balfour declaration or can make the sweeping claim that Palestinians have been offered a state many times, but always choose war, doesn’t change any of that.
He doesn’t actually care about this issue.
Gary cares about soothing Gary’s pain.
And for that the pain of Palestinian children needs to be shrugged off, so Gary can piss off some folks Gary loathes and Gary gets to feel for a fleeting second that anything Gary says can have some kind of effect too.
Once you know Gary’s story, and there are so many Garys, you know you don’t owe Gary a senseless discussion because Gary got infinitely less from life than Gary did deserve when he was born.
Now, through his own actions, he deserves those good things less and less.
I dream of all pro-Palestinians holding hands and forming a circle round Gary and reminding him of every good thing Gary did.
Ubuntu.
Strangely that would be the first time Gary would feel the least bit of an opening to modify his opinions on Palestine-Israel.
A person is a person through other people.
Gary just ran into too few people who could have made Gary see bleeding Palestinian children on a cold hospital floor and feel called to do something to stop the ones throwing the bombs on them.