Sane-Washing

 I was listening to a podcast on my walk home this afternoon, on which a group of scholars and commentators were providing a thoughtful "political and legal analysis" of Trump's recent "proposal" to bulldoze Gaza, permanently deport its entire civilian population, and redevelop it as a beachfront resort.

"Maybe it's a bargaining position," they suggested. "It's outside-the-box thinking that is already forcing some changes in the region," they said. "Transferism has always been closer to mainstream Israeli foreign policy thinking than many people suggest," they offered. 

"I mean, look at it this way," they went on, "—if, say, half a million Palestinians were resettled voluntarily, say in some Western European nation..." (but of course, none of them would agree to that; and that's not what Trump said. He said he would forcibly evict Palestinians and never allow them to come home.) 

In other words, they kept somehow finding ways to normalize and relativize what Trump had said. They kept trying to make out that he had proposed anything other than what he actually had proposed. They kept trying to "sane-wash" him, in short (as a friend of mine once called it). 

I felt physically staggered, after a half hour or so of listening to this, by a sudden feeling of physical revulsion. I was reminded, listening to them dissect so calmly and blandly the thought of forcibly deporting 2 million people from their homes, of something Harold Pinter once said. 

In a Paris Review interview from 1966—back during Pinter's ostensibly "apolitical" phase—he nonetheless offered a surprisingly incisive piece of social commentary. When asked what he thought of the Vietnam War, he offered: 

"The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame-thrower, and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess this action from a political point of view."

Neither Pinter nor I should be misconstrued as literally endorsing violence against radio commentators or podcast hosts. But I think we can all see his point. The idea of committing an ethnic cleansing of Gaza—or any other place on the planet—is not something to be dispassionately analyzed.

There is no way to see Trump's proposal to raze the few remaining structures in Gaza to the ground, permanently exile its people, and build some gaudy casino in their place as belonging on some sort of normal human ideological continuum. It's "outside-the-box," alright—outside of sanity. 

Stripped of all the sane-washing that commentators of all political stripes seem inclined to perform on Trump's ideas, his actual foreign policy plans are as follows: annex Canada, start a war with our NATO ally Denmark, invade Panama, and commit an ethnic cleansing in Gaza. 

These are not rational proposals or defensible "bargaining positions." They are "foreign policy" on the same mental level as the narrator of Randy Newman's satirical 1972 song, "Political Science": "Let's drop the big one—see what happens." 

(Newman's narrator even suggests at one point that in a depopulated Australia someday, the U.S. government might build an "all-American amusement park." Trump's plan to turn an ethnically-cleansed Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East" is not far off.)

We're talking here about a foreign policy at the mental and moral level of my middle school classmate, who—in the wake of September 11—declared: "I say, we nuke Afghanistan, and turn it into a landfill." That's the type of idea Trump has. In short, he is a genocidal madman. 

Trump may also be a demented idiot whose attention span and grasp on reality are so weak that none of these horrifying ideas will ever come to fruition. So I too think an actual U.S. invasion and occupation of Gaza is unlikely, for that reason. 

But let's not pretend there's some defensible rationality at the core of this, or some salvageable plan that can be subjected to rigorous political analysis. There is no room for soft-bottomed commentators to "assess" Trump's plan "from a political point of view"—to Pinter's point. 

All there is, is the raving insanity of a deranged demagogue. May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I ever forget that. May someone burst through the TV and burn my balls off, if I ever start to talk about Trump's genocidal proposals with anything but the horror and black mockery they deserve.