The vague war

This morning I was reading Powerless over a cup of coffee at a breakfast shop. A television screen across the room was playing the news with the sound off, but I was reading and didn't pay any attention to it.

I read this:

It's just a story I'm working on, What's it about, It's about... uh... and invisible war, What does that mean..., You really want to know, Yeah, Ok... so... one time we were having dinner and my dad always likes to watch the news... I wasn't paying attention and didn't even look...

This reminded me of my own situation -- that I, too, was in a room where the news was playing and was ignoring it -- and that prompted me to look up at the screen. It was showing what can only be described as generic war footage: closeups of rockets being launched, Uzis firing, etc., so close up that there were no people visible, let alone scenery, nothing that would indicate who was fighting or where. It might as well have been stock footage, and perhaps it was. Only after several seconds of this did a small Chinese caption appear in the corner of the screen naming a particular country. Then the scene cut to President Trump giving a speech, with a very large Chinese caption identifying him as "United States President Trump." I thought it was funny that this universally recognizable face merited such a prominent label, while vague images of the Platonic Idea of War did not.

I returned to my reading:

but then I started to notice the reporter was talking about the war, going on and on and on, except she never said anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what... it was always the rebels did this, the president reacted with that, the region suffered whatever, no names, no places, nothing... and then instead of raising my head to look I wanted to know how long she could keep it going without giving any details... and she never did... they moved on to other news... so that's the first scene, and the idea is that there's this vague war everyone is worried about all the time but nothing really changes in daily life, it's just this weird feeling...

The character in the novel could hear the news but not see it; I could see it but not hear it. In neither case was there "anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what." (I was reminded of my experience watching one of the Obama-Romney debates with my wife, whose unfamiliarity with American political euphemisms made much of it unintelligible. "Unless you knew already, you couldn't tell" what exactly was at issue in the heated argument over such vague concepts as "life" and "choice.")

Immediately after this, I read a bit from the Book of Mormon. Last time I'd read, I had been interrupted and had stopped in the middle of a chapter. Thus it happened that the first verse I read today were these:

Now there began to be a war upon all the face of the land, every man with his band fighting for that which he desired. And there were robbers, and in fine, all manner of wickedness upon all the face of the land. And it came to pass that Coriantumr was exceedingly angry . . . (Ether 13:25-27)

Again, a very vague description of a war. Where? "Upon all the face of the land." Who was fighting? "Every man with his band." The first name mentioned  after this is that of Coriantumr -- of whom, as mentioned in "Gilgamesh was an elven king" (February 2023), Bill Wright has proposed that Donald Trump is the modern reincarnation.

Maybe war is one of the rare cases where Plato was right and the Idea is more real than any concrete instance. Whatever the details, in the end it's just another tiresome visit from Ares, pest of mortals. Boys, it is all hell.

This made me think of a song one of my brothers used to sing when we were very young. There's a Mormon children's song that begins like this:

Every star is different,

And so is every child.

Some are bright and happy,

And some are meek and mild.

We often talked about what a strange comparison that was. Stars are not after all notable for their individual uniqueness. As viewed from Earth, they all look almost exactly the same. There are degrees of brightness, and slight differences in color, but in general we can identify a particular star only by its position relative to others in a constellation, not by any preceptible character of its own.

My brother's version of the song went like this:

Every star is different,

And so is every war.

Sometimes they use bazookas,

And sometimes they don't.