the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The media coverage following the death of Terry Venables makes me think of Noam Chomsky.

Clearly the death of Mr Venables must be a cause of pain and loss to those who knew him, and as writing as one who recently was recently bereaved, I can understand their loss. But the acres acres of newsprint devoted to him, the elevation of the mundane to something approaching quasi-sainthood, is as both irrelevant as it is instructive. The ink that was spilled was by those regurgitating second-hand memories, banal platitudes and anecdotes disguised as ephemera whose only objective was a word count. His entire life was devoted to kicking a ball about, first by himself and then telling others how to do it and he was only ever reasonably good at that. He wasn’t excellent. He was a journeyman at best.

But not according to the outpouring of wholly fatuous guff that his death engendered.

Hers where Chomsky comes in. In my my mid-twenties I read a lot his books and his observations about sports, most specifically the function it provides our society, seem to have been starkly illustrated by recent events. Simply put, he posits that sports acts as a diversion, drawing the populaces mental energies and attention way from anything that might be be more worthy of effort. It’s hard at first, but then it gets easier and after a while you end up with what all political elites fear, namely a well informed electorate.

But whereas in the 20th Century we had Goebells and ‘The Big Lie’, now we have what is laughing called ‘social’ media – which is anything but – which helps spawn the hate marches that have befouled our capital over recent weekends. Because they offer people a ready made explanation of who is suffering and who is causing the suffering, because it easily be expressed in a chant or placard and because alignment with those views doesn’t require much in the way of critical analysis, has therefore become the perfect embodiment of way this can work to the detriment of society.

Since the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen at the Munich Olympics and the subsequent hunting down and killing of those gunmen by Israel, no-one can have been in any doubt that the killing by terrorists of any Israeli citizen is considered by Israel to be an attack upon Israel itself and therefore treated as such. And Hamas can’t have been unaware of this. As this report from the BBC – under 3 minutes long and using Hamas’s own drone footage – points out, the attacks by Hamas on the 7th October were well coordinated, using as they did land, sea and air and as such required months, if not years of planning.

After all, people who can operate motorised hang-gliders need some training. A decoy missile attack of 2,000 missiles requires 2,000 missiles. Drones that flew over the Israeli border and then shot up their surveillance towers needed people to fly them…

The sheer scale of the logistics is simply staggering, dwarfed only the factthat at no stage when all of this planning was going on did no-one say ‘But hold on, do we really think there’ll be no response from Israel from this. That they won’t see this as act of such barbarity that can only be met with overwhelming military action. Oh, we know this ahead of time and are going to do it anyway? That we value Palestinian lives almost as less as we value Jewish lives.? Forgive me, I didn’t know that. Okay then, carry on.’

That’s why I thought of Terry Venables and Noam Chomsky, easy soundbites and lazy thinking, echo chamber politics and moral hypocrisy.