Chasing Godzilla
Plus, reminiscing about Babylon 5.
When someone is in the throes of a heroin addiction, that person is said to be “chasing the dragon.”
This colorful phrase hints at the elusive and illusory nature of the quest, to capture something that seems extraordinarily real but in reality cannot never be subdued because it doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy.
“Chasing the dragon” refers to a user clamoring to recapture the very first time they felt the effects of their drug of choice, the experience of which is akin to bliss. They seek to recreate that, but it’s never as good as the first time. Despite receiving diminishing returns and, as time goes along, even pain and setbacks, the user is determined to relive that fleeting experience.
Godzilla is a type of dragon. Hear me out.
Godzilla is a radioactive lizard grown to gigantic proportions, a mirror of humanity’s technological hubris. It is a force of nature that wreaks havoc on objects of human progress: skyscrapers, communication towers, cars, trucks, people themselves. With a tail and a shriek, it is pure destruction. And, unlike King Kong, for whom the viewer might have some mammalian empathy, Godzilla is reptilian, cold, entirely unreachable in the emotional realm.
Godzilla pivots and inadvertently destroys entire highrises. It lifts its feet and, beneath, there is dust and the bodies of people.
For the last week, I have been watching news footage from when Israel’s incursion into Gaza began. DW News, a German outfit, had a couple of stories from late October where they utilized before and after videos of northern Gaza. To be clear, this was before any ground invasion. Israel was softening the ground to engender an easier path for their infantry.
Over the course of time, Israeli personalities, military and civilian alike, began to make comments about how there should be even more destruction. One news anchor from Channel 14, riffing extemporaneously, said that he couldn’t sleep unless more areas in Gaza were obliterated. He called for more! There should be more.
“War crimes? That's me. I don't care if I'm criticized -- I know they are collecting material. I can't get to sleep without watching homes in Gaza being destroyed. What can I do? More, more, more homes. More buildings. I don't want them to have anything to go back to.”
The leveling of entire neighborhoods with 500-, 1,000-, even 2,000-lb. bombs was not an uncommon occurrence. City blocks were cratered. Jabaliya refugee camp suffered such a strike back in October, and when CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer interviewed an Israeli official, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, the lieutenant colonel admitted that the bomb was dropped in the hopes of killing just one Hamas target. It wasn’t even clear the person was in the building at the time. Even Wolf Blitzer was stunned.
When government ministers are declaring what’s happening to be Nakba 2023; when three-quarters of all the housing stock in Gaza has been destroyed, the hospital system utterly decimated, universities dynamited to sheer implosion; when eighty percent of Khan Younis sits in ruins, resembling a moonscape —
— when the IDF orders remote bombings of “garbage targets,” flattening residences as in a video game; when bulldozers crack the ground, razing olive groves and village roads, as well as opening and covering up mass graves filled first with live people — when your society is doing this, your society may indeed be chasing Godzilla.
The Israelis want the destruction. They hunger for it. And, like the heroin aficionado noted heretofore, each fix satisfies less, so they need even more of it to get the same rise: more intensity, more heat, more items on fire, more starvation, more thirst. Destroy the whole city, Godzilla! Bring wrath — we like wrath.
Once the Israelis get addicted to destruction, what’s to stop them? There’s no natural limit. Human society exists everywhere. There are more buildings to bomb, more infrastructure to fracture and bones to grind. Once the appetite is whetted, what can satiate it? Much as someone entranced by his first thrill kill seeks to recreate it in serial fashion, societies that pursue annihilation for annihilation’s sake find that only more will do. They mistake violence for victory.
There’s another instance of pop culture that speaks to what is happening in Gaza. Back in the ‘90s, there was a science-fiction series called Babylon 5. It was a wide-ranging epic taking place against the backdrop of space, on a stationary base sporting a panoply of different alien races and cultures. It’s five seasons long, one of the best science fiction shows to grace the small screen.
One finds out very early on that there is a long-standing enmity between two of the cultures represented: that of the Centauri, a regal, Romanesque people, and the Narn, a hardscrabble yet noble warrior culture. One finds that the former had at one point enslaved the latter. And quite early, in the second season, after much intrigue, the ambassador of the Centauri finds himself aboard a dreadnought in a space fleet set to bombard the surface of the Narn homeworld.
The fleet’s equipped with mass drivers, essentially weapons that send perfectly spherical boulders through the planet’s atmosphere to pulverize whatever is beneath. This type of warfare is considered entirely barbaric.
Over the course of these last several months, this scene has recurred in my mind. I recalled vividly the visuals of the ships above the planet’s surface, the devastating simplicity of the attack — but, here, pay attention to the announcer in the background, the news anchor providing commentary on the consequences of the siege.
I remember watching this scene when it first aired, thinking that it was unrealistic, it was too complete, and for that a bit maudlin. What a difference thirty years makes. I just had to see it with new eyes.
And what was the memo to today's leaders? Something to this effect: "There is no equivalence between the Jewish state eliminating a terrorist threat and Hamas' barbaric attacks on innocent civilians. We stand with Israel." Chrystia Freeland in Canada said something like this, as did numerous other prominent politicians in western nations, despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.