poshnost

Sometimes there is a happy confluence of truth that together point to a much greater truth than the sum of their parts.

On Sunday night I tweeted this:

The media was wrong when they said Israel bombed the Al Ahli Hospital.

They were wrong for repeating the Gaza health ministry claim that Gaza deaths were "70% women and children."

They were wrong when they reported that 10,000 bodies were buried under the rubble.

They were wrong when they said the Gaza hospitals had no terrorists.

They were wrong when they repeated absurd claims that 186,000 Gazans had died.

They were wrong when they said Hamas was not stealing aid.

They were wrong for saying that Gaza was in the midst of a famine. 

They were wrong for repeating the "genocide" claims without rebuttal.

They were wrong for doubting everything the IDF said  and giving credence to everything Hamas said. 

They are wrong for not admitting that they have been consistently, constantly wrong about every aspect of the Gaza war. 

All of their mistakes have been in the same direction - accusing Jews of being inhumane monsters.

Why, exactly, should anyone believe the mainstream media about Israel, ever?

The Israel haters are in a tizzy, responding to my tweet with an amusing combination of strident denial, doubling down on the lies and explicit Jew-hatred.

Then I saw this brilliant article in Commentary by Irina Velitskaya:

Of all the untranslatable words in the Russian language, my favorite is пошлость— poshlost—representing a concept that is ubiquitous, albeit unacknowledged, in the modern Western world. It’s untranslatable because it can’t be summed up in a single word and stands instead for a great many interrelated concepts. But if, in an effort to understand it, one were to dissect poshlost, one would find inside it, wriggling like little worms, the words “smarmy,” “smug,” “superficial,” and “shabby.”

And yet, squirmy as this image is, that’s only half of what’s inside poshlost, because entangled with the first set of meanings is a second set: “self-importance,” “imaginary virtue,” “oblivious narcissism,” “belligerent weepiness,” and “preening self-regard.”

“It is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive,” as Vladimir Nabokov put it. It’s the mistaken belief, Nabokov continued, “that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.” A literary critic who wrote on Nabokov’s work described the word as “petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity.”

And what is the “acme of human happiness” for these self-satisfied vulgarians? In the contemporary Western context, and particularly among university students and the intelligentsia, it is the feeling that you are better, more virtuous, and more deeply human than most of the mean-spirited, seething, insensible masses around you.

Which brings us, of course, to the most repellent example of poshlost in the modern world: the thin veneer of ersatz humanitarianism and pathos that Western intellectuals splotch across the nakedly hateful reality of Islamist supremacist rhetoric and violence.

There are ....syrupy emoji assemblages that feature the Palestinian flag, accompanied by one or more of the following: a bright red heart, a white dove of peace, a rainbow, a unicorn, an LGBTQ+ flag, and, of course, a watermelon, often accompanied by a fundraising link for the families of Gaza (though said funds will likely never get further than a Hamas bank account in a place like Qatar, but hey, it’s the thought that counts!).

Often, there is a “land acknowledgment” in the bio—a reference to, for example, “Syilx Okanagan stolen land.” This is a confession that the poster lives on land conquered from its indigenous inhabitants; it’s deployed as a means of expiating guilt while preempting charges of hypocrisy. Needless to say, the poster has no intention of actually moving from the conquered land, thereby reinforcing the very hypocrisy he wishes to avoid. People post these acknowledgments of theft only because they are secure in the knowledge that the indigenous people on whose land they live will not rape them, burn them alive, or behead them. In their minds, the payment for this privilege is merely a nickel inserted into an imaginary vending machine that dispenses virtue.

This is a perfect description of many of the people responding with reflexive anger to my off-the-cuff tweet.

Put the two together and you see how the practitioners of poshlost react to any facts that threaten their self-righteous perch. 

Their efforts to climb to the peak of virtue involves consuming a great deal of lies. These lies are a web spun by the media. NGOs, academia and Palestinian socialists (usually traced back to the PFLP) who know the lingo and how to package the most illiberal, far-right wing Islamist terrorists as progressive heroes.

In general, exposure to these lies aren't what caused them to become poshlosters. Their own self-absorption takes care of that. The lies are supporting (and recruiting) material, whose effectiveness is entirely tied to being consumed by a crowd who desperately wants them to be true, to validate their conceit. 

Exposure to the truth - learning that the cause that they have spent so much emotional capital to support is illusory -  is their greatest fear. 

The poshlosters dwell in a castle in the clouds of sanctimony, built from the vapor of Washington Post reports, Amnesty International claims, and UN declarations. A bubble of denial shields them, its seeming solidity their only defense - until someone arrives with a pin.