Diary of Mechanical Benediction

When I was a child, the world felt vast enough to resist you. Things didn’t always work because you needed them to, and sometimes they refused. I caught the tail end of this with occasional cars needing coaxed back to life with a metal crank. I’d watch disgruntled men—middle-aged, I suppose, though at that time ancient—puff and swear as they cranked the engine over. A mechanical benediction before the joy. If it didn’t catch, you were stranded. “A moment between heaven and earth,” as Li Bai once wrote.

On the week Keir Starmer visited Beijing, I had the same problem with the TV. Some time ago I bought an inexpensive Chinese one, because it had 4K. It worked well—until it didn’t. We had joked, harmlessly enough, about the secret camera inside, quietly logging our steady diet of news, documentaries, European cinema, the odd comedy, and more news. The joke relied on distance.

Despite my reading a lot of Chinese poetry—not just Li Bai but also Du Fu—the specific problem was that it took an age to start, just like one of those old cars. The backlight must be failing. Meanwhile, the recent news was making it resemble a tropical fish tank about to explode. Every so often a bright orange fish would leap clear of the glass, flapping in front of us with its fake aches and pains. Horror is the genre everyone is producing. “The nation shattered, rivers and mountains remain,” Du Fu tried to remind us. Many days it feels like the rivers have been monetised too.

But I’ve needed the TV, when not reading and writing and watching on my phone. Needed it, even as I resent the need. Other than the leading stories, we are told of rising water-related violence almost doubling globally, and severe flooding in southern Africa—killing over 100 people, displacing hundreds of thousands more. Everything arriving at once, flattened into equivalence by the feed.

It feels just as real at the beleaguered United Nations since Tom Fletcher took up his humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator role. The same companies shaping these feeds are the ones deciding which of our sentences travel. On Gaza, in May last year, Fletcher was already warning, “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.” The weekend before last, the HQ of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in East Jerusalem was set alight. At least 32 people have been killed since in a wave of air strikes on Saturday in Gaza.

Separately, over a hundred more children have died in the tent city that once was Gaza since the ceasefire, and thousands more buildings have been destroyed. The fact Israel has found the remains of the final hostage should mean the re-opening of the Rafah crossing, which had been stalled. Stalled is a gentle word for what happens to people when crossings don’t open.

Fletcher’s overview feels more real than Trump’s over-trumpeted “Board of Peace.” Grand squabbles and billionaire self-improvement projects are nothing as compared to the needs of terrified children. A child’s dream is not a glassy high-rise with fast limousines sliding to a halt outside shining revolving doors anyway. That would be obscene. We have to believe a child in Gaza wants most of all a mother and father alive. “Before learning sorrow, a child knows spring,” as Du Fu wished it to be. Spring feels very far away.

At the same time, Trump’s “Board of Peace” feels more like one of those mythical baths where they say you can wash yourself in the waters of the gods and re-emerge replenished and rinsed with power. The dirt doesn’t disappear; it just moves downstream. Even the logo with its very own built-in map has the US—6,000 miles away—dead centre. Any peace that requires such a logo, a launch strategy, and a billionaire guarantor is already preparing its excuses. “Drunk on power, mistaking dreams for dawn,” as Li Bai wrote.

Fletcher had already argued that such private and multi-agency delivery ambitions undermine what experienced hands know well as crucially impartial humanitarian principles. Impartiality, like patience, is harder to sell than spectacle.

In the middle of this, my daughter runs downstairs to say there is a fight outside. We peer into the night with the lights off to avoid being seen. We join my son at another window. In the tall grass, a man suddenly attacks another from behind. What takes longer for us to realise is that this is an impromptu movie set. The relief arrives faster than it should.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re missing a great trick. Maybe all solutions are in some basket somewhere, waiting to be unpacked. More often, I suspect the basket exists only in speeches. Maybe true leadership is the ability to know which contents in the basket to go for—or who to unpack them with. Maybe we just need more people whose ideas can dance like poetry in a room full of swords. A soft voice cuts deeper than steel.

Maybe the world doesn’t need a brand new engine, just more people willing to stand patiently, amidst more “violence” that is not real, with more sleeves rolled up, turning the old crank of peace—once, twice—until something catches. And maybe the hardest part is not knowing whether it ever will.

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