037: 64 miles, 35,000 feet

on fearfulness

Flight Path, June 2024

Asleep on a flight the other day, with Oppenheimer of all things playing in my headphones, I wake up to the sound of “Oppy! Oppy!.” On my screen, a crowd cheers for the father of the atomic bomb after the success of the Trinity test. On my neighbor’s screen, the flight path shows us hovering over the Sinai, 64 miles from Gaza, 35,000 feet in the air. For a couple of minutes, I stare at the miniature plane gliding over the pixels of a neon green line, slowly turning away from the four white letters that remain, for a moment, absurdly close to the path while the standing ovation in my headphones thunders on.

On the tiny screens of this motorized steel bird cruising through the clouds, a sinister metaphor brings together a 76 year-old protracted —and now accelerated—genocide, and the fictionalized depiction of a perceived hero anointed by Empire in the midst of another similar genocide tearing through Europe over eighty years ago. The storylines merge into a chimera …