Eyeless on the Gaza Scrap

This morning, in response to a request from Bruce Charlton, I was brainstorming possible codewords for the current conflict in Philistia. (I'm the one who coined birdemic and peck, though not Fire Nation.) This is a tough one, because one of the parties in the conflict has a very long history of being nicknamed, and all of those nicknames are actually more likely than plain English to attract the attention of the hate police. An unusual degree of outside-the-boxness is called for, but it can't be so obscure that readers can't figure it out. So what are the options? The Garbanzos, as in hummus? (Sorry, Brits, garbanzo is just a superior word to chickpea.) Blues vs. Greens, as in the Byzantine chariot-race factions, a byword for pointless hostility?

One of the things that popped into my mind while brainstorming was Aldous Huxley's novel Eyeless in Gaza -- partly for the obvious reason, and partly because I've recently been watching old Beavis and Butt-Head sketches on YouTube. (I never really watched TV as a teenager, so it's all new to me.) I've never actually read Eyeless, but I do know that the main character's name is Anthony Beavis.

Then I suddenly remembered that shortly before the outbreak of hostilities -- 11 days before, to be precise -- I had randomly rewatched an old Onion News Network episode presenting "future news" in which the two factions, each reduced to a single person, were fighting over "the Gaza Scrap."

Here's a YouTube history screencap, showing that I watched this 2013 video on September 27, 2023:

I looked up the old Onion video for a kind of strange reason. I had thought of an exchange between the two newsreaders  Zesty Lewis and Vitamin Daniels, in which Lewis says, "How it do, Vitamin?" and he replies, "What it is, Zesty!" -- and my purpose in watching the video was to check whether she says "How it do" or "How it go." It's do, in case you were wondering.

Watching this reference to fighting in Philistia -- explicitly framed as future news -- just days before it became current news was an odd coincidence. It reminds me of how I began a post with a definition of the word corvid just months before the birdemic started.

The Onion "future news" video is very much in the spirit of the 2006 movie Idiocracy -- by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head -- which in turn drew inspiration from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

The title of Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley's book about a man named Beavis, is taken from Milton's Samson Agonistes, which is based on the biblical Book of Judges.

The possibility of the current conflict going nuclear is often referred to as the "Samson Option."

Update: The codewords have dropped, pilfered from Frank Herbert. The war zone is Arrakis, the indigenes are Fremen, and the settlers are Choam. (These are Bruce's ideas, unrelated to my recent Freeman syncs.)