Existence and Subsistence

Once again that select club called the G8 is staging one of their frequent encounters in some delightful tourist destination. And, of course, a good number of people who feel quite righteously aggravated by their brand of aloofness and their inistence on meeting and discussing whatever they discuss in those meetings have taken to the streets nearby to shout their heads off hoping they notice that a growing number of people hate their guts! The message is mostly that the "concocting" of globalization is not going as planned...

The Right and Wrongs of Existence

First about Ontology. Pesky academics will tell you it is a thorny, abstract subject. Believe them not. Ontology is about Existence. Yours and mine, to be sure, but everyone and everything else also. Ontology is here and now. It is in the news. You don't believe me? Pick up the paper, yesterday's or today's. Read something. Read this, for example: ""Citizens of Lebanon, we are sorry for the pain caused to you, and the fact that you had to pick up and flee your homes, and also the casualties caused among innocents," Olmert said. "But we will not apologise to those who put a question mark on the right of Israel to exist," he added."

The right to exist. Israel's dictum and its bombs, its warfare rains on those who question its right to exist. This may seem odd since countries, which exist, don't seem to much care whether they have a right to, do they? There mere existence appears to be affirmation enough of that right. That is what a white, transparent ontology invariably concedes. What would mean for one to question the right of, say, Bolivia to exist? And would Bolivia's existence feel threatened by such question? Enough to invade some other country where the question is presumably posed and slaughter its population?

But Israel inhabits the Grey Ontology zone, where the very fact of its existence is the denial of its rightfullness! This is because Israel is not a State of Right but a State of Might and every assertion of its military power, against its neighbors, against its citizens, against its questioners, against its supporters even, is a further statement of the wrongfulness of its existence, of its being Israel!

The fact that Israel is the biggest threat to its own existence is now clear to everyone, most of all to those whose existence Israel has brought to an end in Lebanon and in Gaza over the past couple of weeks. For each one of those massacred civilians and militants is only a single sad measure of how many more, how infinitely many more Israel would have to massacre to impose its right to exist! How many Palestinians, how many Leabnese, how many Syrians and Iranians, how many Iraqis and Afganis, how many US Libertys, how many UN observers, how many Rachel Corries will it take to right this wrong existence? How many do you figure will it take to wipe out this question mark if every death, every invasion, every bomb, every prisioner, every assassination, every agression, asks it again?

Not much light, no such end of this tunnel.

They call it Grey Ontology up here at Harvard U. were it is becoming of subject of academic study. It is supposed to be the study of the contemporary form of existence (or lack there of), the single one which remains possible in a world of dim shadows and fading lights. You can't still take a course in Grey Ontology, so I am told. But you can surely follow the course it has been taken for a couple of decades, as the centuries tag team and the millenia replace each other. Yes, you've guessed it too. You have spotted this peculiar disease of the age whose symptoms, whose signs are themselves hard to come by, lost in transition, so to speak. You have heard about it for sure, this Endarkment that precipitates everything else, this see of shadows that fogs the moment. We all have. It is like that living breath of black smoke that runs amok through that annoying TV show 'Lost' scaring the wits out of those hapeless survivors. You have seen it too? Yes, TV is full of the Grey OnTVology. What else will sell these days?

It is time we talk, to blurb, to blog about it. And so I will. Greyer than grey will lead the way. Behold my formula!

Stay tuned. Stay grey (while I fire away!).