4/9/2024 0 Comments Terminal city ricochet quotes![]() Quite the opposite: I could not possibly have greater faith in our army, and I thank God for our soldiers every day. Now, don’t get me wrong: this is absolutely not to say I have lost faith in our army. It requires a monumental effort to manufacture an optimistic front. I do not believe everything will be okay. I am in the challenging position of having to maintain a chipper front for my three young children while a) finding some language with which to explain the war to them b) pretending everything is normal and c) pretending everything will eventually be okay. Can you conceive of this? It is close it is personal. The sanctified name of the murdered boy was invoked under the chupah (the wedding canopy). The wedding of our friend’s daughter coincided with the shiva (the mourning period). One of the three teenaged boys snatched and murdered by Palestinian terrorists on their way home from school earlier this summer was the nephew of a friend of ours. A close school friend of my 11-year-old son does not know his uncle because he was shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist, and this same child’s first cousin just came back from Gaza with grave head injuries. Heavily armed men have already come up out of the ground inside our territory - disguised in IDF uniforms, a further nauseating touch - and have engaged and killed our soldiers, 18- and 19- and 20-year-olds who died preventing vastly greater carnage within the kibbutzim. Nothing about any of this is theoretical. Not only are our people meant to be mown down in large numbers, but we are also intended to be dragged down, alive, into the darkness. Consider the reality of that for a moment. The soldiers braving and destroying these tunnels are discovering not only vast supplies of machine guns and ammunition and grenades, but also stores of handcuffs and tranquilizers. That’s the network of tunnels, as vast and complex as a subway system, dug under the very ground on which Israelis walk. Most of the horrors of this go-round are sadly familiar, but there is a new development this time around that has kicked all of this into a whole new realm of nightmare. Now superimpose the rest of our reality onto that physical world: the air raid sirens, the whisking of the kids into the shelter, the daily funerals of the young heroes who put their bodies between our children and the monsters, the fathers’ knees buckling while they try to choke out the Kaddish over their fallen sons, the hollow-eyed mothers, the sobbing children, the tableaux of soldiers weeping on each other’s shoulders as they bury their dead. Anyone who has visited Israel can tell you this is a thoroughly first-world environment. On the surface, our world is strikingly similar to the world you live in. I need you to understand our reality here. It might be a little unseemly, I guess, but I can’t resist reaching out to you - not in the spirit of geopolitical analysis and the plucky fisking of media talking points, but out of an increasingly desperate need simply to communicate, to send a flare out to a part of the world that’s still relatively normal. We are alone out here, more and more so every day, and I’m finding our isolation harder and harder to tolerate. So why am I back, you ask? Well, I’ll be honest. I think that ship might have sailed, at least for the time being. I’ve always tried to maintain some baseline standard of composure when discussing the lunatic hell of this endless war. I haven’t been able to get into the cool, dispassionate head I need to be in to present you with any kind of cogent analysis. For weeks, I’ve been unable to write anything (a first for me during Israel’s crises). Terminal.XviD-CG.Troy asked me some time ago to contribute some perspective on the current situation here in Israel, where I’ve been living for the past 13 years. Alex Stevens is hurled into this bedlam where he finds himself pitted against the maniacal Ross Gilmore, Mayor of Terminal City, and the evil Bruce Coddle, agent of Gilmore’s Social Peace Enforcement Unit. Welcome to Terminal City, a decaying world where the citizens wallow amidst a mind-boggling profusion of discarded consumer goods a ruthless world where television is exploited to its fullest to sell yet more needless junk to eager consumers a bewildering land where the unreal is real and the real, unreal. One of the great punk films anywhere (let alone canada), starring Jello Biafra (of Dead Kennedys fame) and never commercially released, soundtrack on alternative tentacles (with a nomeansno song!) Actually this movie kind of reminds me of Max Headrrom.
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