Highway Twenty-Nine: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“It’s in the air, mate. Anger, cruelty, bitter rage. We’re taking it in with every breath, like some colourless, odourless, poisonous gas. But where’s it coming from? Whose making it? And how the hell do we turn it off? Because it’s killing us?”

THE TEA TOWEL, the glistening pint glass, and the hands holding both, fell still. Hannah’s attention was fixed on the table in the corner, and the rising volume of the quarrel that had just erupted. Two old mates, pub regulars, looked ready to trade blows. Not good.

Suddenly, both men were on their feet.

Hannah strode towards them.

“Laurie! Les! What the hell?”

But Laurie was already threading his way through the tables, making for the door. His face set hard in the rigor of wrath. Les watched him go.

“Don’t just stand there you old fool – go after him! You guys have been mates since before I was born. Get out there and set this right.”

Les scowled, gulping down what was left of his ale.

“I’ve had it with that right-wing prick,” he hissed, reaching for his cap. “Had it up to here!”

“No you haven’t, Les”, said Hannah softly. “I know how much you two look forward to your bouts of political jousting. So don’t you try and tell me this is about politics. Get out there and find out what’s really upsetting the two of you. Go on!”

Les’s shoulders slumped. He sniffed. “Alright, alright. Just bring us out another couple of ales, will you.” The ageing Boomer breathed deep and followed his friend out onto the wet wooden deck.

Laurie was standing at the rail, staring blankly into a landscape made indistinct by autumnal rain. The day’s palette of sombre greys, thin blues, and deep greens, matched the men’s now flattened emotions.

“Sorry, mate.” Les stood woodenly at Laurie’s side, his eyes locked, like his friend’s, on the middle-distance – a blurred composition of hills and trees. “That was uncalled for. I don’t know why I said it. It isn’t true.”

Laurie nodded imperceptibly. “Apology accepted, old friend, but unnecessary. I’d been needling you all afternoon.”

“Yeah.” Les’s voice was without rancour.

“It’s in the air, mate. Anger, cruelty, bitter rage. We’re taking it in with every breath, like some colourless, odourless, poisonous gas. But where’s it coming from? Whose making it? And how the hell do we turn it off? Because it’s killing us?”

“You don’t blame the Internet?”

“Of course I blame the bloody Internet! Everybody blames the bloody Internet! But that’s too easy – isn’t it? Sure, it carries our rage far and wide – but does it make our rage?”

Les turned to take the glasses of ale that Hannah had carried out to them on a tray. Acknowledging her approving expression with a wan smile.

“Some say that it does, by using algorithms, whatever they are. They reckon social media software somehow reads our emotional state and amplifies it. Apparently, a rarked-up audience is more profitable to these tech billionaires than a placid one.”

Laurie shook his head.

“How can that be true, Les? Every ruler throughout history has preferred placid subjects to angry ones.”

“Maybe. But, it’s also true that those in charge would rather have the masses at each other’s throats than clamouring for their heads. Maybe the anger and division encouraged by social media is a feature – not a bug?”

“Perhaps. But I think the rage was there long before the Internet. Long before social media. Long before smartphones.” He paused. “You’re a big fan of Bruce Springsteen, right?”

“Huge fan.”

“Do you recall his song ‘Highway 29’, about a pair of doomed lovers, and a bank robbery that goes horribly wrong? That second-to-last verse, when the guy says something like: ‘I told myself it was something in her. But I knew it was something in me. Something that had been coming for a long, long time. Something that was with me now on Highway 29’.”

“Yeah, I do. It’s off ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ – one of his best albums.”

“Yes, that’s right, and I agree, one of his best. And you know, Les, when I look at our country today, I think about those words. We are all so keen to put the blame on those who are travelling with us. Those who aren’t responsible for our crimes. But we’re wrong to do that. Because what’s emerging now has been working its way out of us for a long, long, time.”

Laurie sighed, and put down his glass.

“Les, I’ve got an awful feeling we’re on Highway 29.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 May 2025.

Making Deserts.

Berlin 1945/Gaza 2025
“They make a desert, and they call it peace.”
 - Tacitus 56-117CE

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER doesn’t leave those demanding it very much in the way of wiggle-room. When President Franklin Roosevelt announced to the world that the Allied Powers would accept nothing less than the Axis Powers’ (Germany, Italy, Japan) unconditional surrender, he took the man sitting next to him, Winston Churchill, by surprise. Though the official history of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 insists otherwise, the journalists present were pretty sure that Roosevelt had caught Churchill on the hop. Ever the wily imperial politician, Great Britain’s wartime prime-minister was a great believer in wiggle-room. Now there was none.

Roosevelt had very good reasons for his decision to eliminate the possibility of compromise. The most important of these was the absolute necessity of convincing the Soviets, then fighting for their lives, that there was no possibility of the USA and/or Great Britain negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis.

The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, whose paranoia was legendary, was fearful that Churchill, a convinced imperialist and passionate anti-communist, might prevail upon Roosevelt to transform the war into an anti-Soviet crusade. There can be little doubt that the thought, at least, had crossed Churchill’s mind.

No Wiggle Room: Franklin Roosevelt tells Winston Churchill, and the world, that the Allies’ war aim is Unconditional Surrender. 

Unconditional Surrender was Roosevelt’s way of reassuring Stalin that his fears were groundless. It was also intended to prevent his Soviet allies, whose backs had been against the wall since June 1941, from themselves negotiating a separate peace with Nazi Germany.

Beneath all this calculation, however, Roosevelt’s demand for Unconditional Surrender reflected his bedrock conviction that the evils of Nazism were too dreadful to be seated at any negotiating table. They could not be set aside in the interests of peace, because Nazism was the antithesis of peace. To end the war, Adolf Hitler and his creed had to be extirpated entirely. Nazi Germany’s surrender to the forces of civilisation had to be unconditional.

But, evil has a way of corrupting even the most noble of intentions – and the demand that it surrender unconditionally to the forces of righteousness is no exception.

When your enemy realises that there is no wiggle-room, the temptation to go on fighting to the bitter end is very hard to resist.

Equally hard to resist, on your own side, is the temptation to increase dramatically the level of punishment inflicted upon the enemy. If their stubborn refusal to acknowledge defeat persists, and the conflict is needlessly prolonged, then a steady escalation in the violence and destruction unleashed upon them is not only deemed morally justifiable, but also morally necessary.

Suddenly, the civilised distinction between combatants and non-combatants: soldiers and civilians; begins to blur. The commitment to waging Total War pronounced by one side, inevitably calls forth an answering commitment from the other.

Everybody and everything is to be considered a target. The sooner the enemy’s critical infrastructure, now deemed to include the houses – and the bodies – of their citizens, is reduced to rubble and torn flesh, the sooner peace will come.

This terrifying, though hardly novel, mode of thought was well understood by the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote of his own great city-state: “They make a desert, and they call it peace.” In Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allies’ quest for unconditional surrender would create deserts of its own.

And the making of deserts, if not peace, continues.

In response to the evil of 7 October 2023, Israel demanded the unconditional surrender of Hamas, and the release of all the hostages taken on that dreadful day by its pitiless foe. Hamas was defiant. God loves martyrs, and Hamas has plenty to give him.

Eighty years after the end of the Second World War in Europe, the world watches in despair as those who set forth in righteous wrath to secure the unconditional surrender of evil, have ensnared themselves in the same remorseless escalation of violence and destruction that captured our fathers and grandfathers.

The focus over recent days has been on the grainy images of universal celebration. [The 80th anniversary of VE Day. - C.T.] More difficult to watch are the images of ruined German cities, and how closely they resemble the images of ruined Gaza. Like the Romans and the Allied Powers, the Israelis are determined to bring forth the flower of peace from the desert they are making.

But, surely, the evil whose unconditional surrender Israel should be seeking, is the evil of not knowing when to stop.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 May 2025.