Frivolous people, Non-Frivolous Time

There was a time, and it was not long ago, when you could sit down and write a column a few days in advance with a better than even chance that events would not overtake it.

Reporters would even write “ever-green” columns and stories, to keep in the queue for events such as the sudden cancellation of a full-page ad or the illness of the columnist. The ever-green piece could be dropped in and all would be well.

It usually worked out, but not always. Once, while working for a thrice-weekly newspaper in Florida, I took pictures for and wrote a nice picture page about a man in his 80s who, though blind, took great delight in catching fish in the numerous canals near his home in western Broward County. It was deemed ever-green and held for when it was needed. The need did not arise for a long time.

When it finally did run, the outraged phone calls began. The contented fisherman had gone to that big fishing hole in the sky, and not recently, either, but weeks ago. “Blind Angler Goes to Where the Action Is” was a headline that didn’t work out well. Unaware of all this, the large newspaper chain that owned my paper so liked the story that months later they gave it an award, which was publicized, so we got the pleasure of calming angry bereaved relatives yet again. Today there would probably be lawsuits.

And today it would be a mistake to write an ever-green column about anything but the blandest of pablum. The green part wilts quickly now. It’s hard to keep the greenness in stories even for a few hours. This week is a good example.

I sat down yesterday to write a little something about the welcome death, in Damascus, Syria, of one Fuad Shukur. He was a very bad man. He was a member of the Jihad Council of Hezbollah. The U.S. had a $5 million bounty out for him as a result of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 240 Americans.

His immediate offense was the continuing attacks on Israel, including the weekend rocket attack on a civilian soccer field in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights (the “occupied” Golan Heights to BBC and CNN) which killed a dozen children playing soccer. The major media interrupted their nonstop condemnation of Israel long enough to run little stories with headlines like “Fears of Escalation after Rocket from Lebanon Hits Soccer Field.”

Fuad Shukur’s death was, therefore, 41 years too late — more than that, really. His arraignment at the Court of Eternal Judgment was expedited by a bomb from an Israeli jet.

This was big news, made bigger by U.S. opposition to it. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan advised the Israelis not to blow up anybody in Beirut. In their defense, it is not clear who their current boss is, the notoriously risk-averse Joe “Bugout” Biden (remember, he argued against taking out Osama bin Laden) or the notoriously knowledge-averse Kamala Harris, replacement star of “America’s Got Politics.”

It was a huge story, one that in saner times would have inspired dancing in the streets — including American streets. The usual suspects — BBC and CNN, most loudly — were soiling their undergarments as they hollered “Escalation! Escalation!” (The word has become so fraught that one imagines the Otis elevator and escalator company is reconsidering renaming its popular product “magic stairs” or something.) But it was soon pushed off the front page — we should call it something else, there being so few front pages anymore — by an even bigger story.

Yesterday, Hamas bigbeard Ishmail Haniyeh was in Tehran, Iran, attending the installation of a new Iran president; the old president, amateur aeronautical experimenter Ebrahim Raisi, died in May while breaking new ground, literally, during his studies into flying helicopters through mountains. Following the festivities, Haniyeh retired to his comfortable quarters at a building that houses visiting Islamic terrorist dignitaries when — “lookee there!” he might have said — a rocket flew through the window and blew him up. Then another flew in the window and blew him up some more, though it is unlikely that he noticed.

This was exceptionally good news. For me, it was time to clear the screen and start over. (For CNN and BBC, it was the third set of underwear since they left home.)

Twice in the space of 12 hours, Israel had taken out bad guys in the capitals of neighboring unfriendly governments. Lebanon (practical motto, “the Belgium of the Mideast”) is accustomed to other countries carrying out their wars on its territory. But Iran is a whole other thing.

As late as last week a good friend of mine who follows such things said it was impossible for Israel to attack Iran because Israeli aircraft don’t have sufficient range. I disagreed. I wish we had made a bet.

The usual clowns, in stained britches, were going on about escalation. Fox News Channel, which now pretty much filters its coverage through a “Trump reacts,” lens, like the enjoyable “Hitler reacts” YouTube video memes, put its actual excellent reporters in secondary roles, except for the hour between 6 and 7 p.m. Eastern time.

And as is usual, none of them got the point of the thing.

Which is that those cranky bearded medieval goons in Tehran, who enjoy hanging girls for the crime of being raped were, like my friend, sure Iran was out of Israel’s reach. Now they know they aren’t. Earlier in the day, all the high mullah-mucks from many unfriendly countries were together in one room, along with the now-late Haniyeh, and Israel could have solved many of the world’s problems by striking then and there. The message from Israel: It is only through the kindness of our hearts and the fact that the day was already busy that there are not people with magnifying glasses right now trying to separate your parts from those of everyone else there. Whether, and for how long, you live is up to us. We know where you are, we can get you if we want, and you live at our pleasure.

The disassembly of some Hamas monkey who needed it does pale in comparison with the contents of that little message. We have learned from Iran over the years that it is governed by cowards. Their response to being slapped down is like that of a child: a defiant, face-saving but modest shaking of the fist while on their way to sit in the corner. Even the almost-always-wrong NPR couldn’t escape that fact. Iran’s response will be further weakened, armed as they are with the knowledge that they can be squashed like bugs, with high precision, if Israel decides their buzz has become too annoying.

That new version of this column was almost done this morning when word began to circulate that one Hajj Habib Zadeh, a commander in the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, had shuffled off his mortal head diaper courtesy of someone in Damascus, Syria. Now, at 6 p.m., this remains unconfirmed and may not be true. Would the column need to be written yet again? Maybe, if it does get confirmed, because it would mean that Israel had in less than 36 hours shown that it could dispatch bad guys in three foreign capitals.

Yet in one sense it doesn’t matter, even if the report proves inaccurate. That’s because everyone knew it was possible. The Mideast has become a very unsafe place for terrorists in the last day and a half. One imagines the miserable Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, wishes he hadn’t blustered about invading Israel a few days ago.

You have probably heard about little of this. It has been a busy few days for reporters, in a busy week at the end of a busy month. It is hard work documenting the stupidities of Donald J. Trump and his even worse Mini Me, J.D. Vance (who currently couldn’t get re-elected in his home state). It is even harder work ignoring and twisting facts and previous positions in an effort to make Kamala Harris seem less a moron. So the click-obsessed wretches of the media can be if not forgiven at least understood for missing, or getting wrong, the enormous stories of the last few days, which include the uproar over the stolen election — this one was really stolen — in Venezuela. Ideally, this would all be covered, by people who understand and can explain why this is important. But our retail media do not themselves understand why any of this is important. They could learn, but it is far easier and more soothing to the ego (and more likely to be approved by the news consultants) for them to experiment with new hairstyles instead.

I can’t fix that. With the flood of misinformation, disinformation, and the general news media ignorance, all I can do is pile sandbags where I am, and long for the day a War on Stupidity is declared.

And hope that during the couple of hours between my writing this and it being published there is no enormous breaking news.