Writers, Stop It

If you shoot and kill Jewish people on a beach, The Guardian newspaper will refer to you in headlines as a “quiet bricklayer”.

Many people are rightly angry at this. They see it for what it is, a deliberate move away from reality into a quaint simulation wrapped like a urine-soaked blanket around a shivering, demented reality.

A radical Islamic terrorist is not described as such; no, here he is reduced to the ‘quiet bricklayer’. He is compressed into a sickly sweet parody of a Studio Ghibli character. His murderous rage is replaced in the reader’s mind by a delicate consideration of the brickwork, an academic interest in butterflies and flowers.

This twisting of reality is a disgusting disrespect to the people gunned down by the terrorist, but the newspaper doesn’t seem to have thought about that in the editor’s room before running the article.

You can imagine this ‘quiet bricklayer’ holding a trowel instead of a rifle, gently placing artisan bricks in a warm garden somewhere, smiling at fluffy bees, whilst in the real world, bricks with ‘Free Palestine’ scrawled on them are hurled through the windows of Kosher eateries.

One thing I will never understand about some members of the ‘Free Palestine’ crowd is their magical belief that bakers in Massachusetts are quantum entangled with cartoon warlords in Israel, or that these bakers at the very least have a direct phone line to Israel, and the requisite social capital to call up and say “Hey, dude, stop shooting back at Hamas, it really hurts their feelings.”

Jordan Peterson said, “You can do an awful lot by writing down what happened to you and thinking it through,” and he is right.

When you actually write out the reality of a thing, you see how ridiculous it is. Another method is through even more writing.

Consider, for example, the police delivering hard news to the families, but being forced to use Newspaper language (perhaps we shall call this Newspeak). An officer might stifle her words at the front door and softly say, “I am sorry, but your son has been killed by a quiet bricklayer.”

If they had to deliver the news via TikTok, it would be, “I am sorry, your son has been involuntarily deleted by a quiet bricklayer.”

The point of my writing these passages of dialogue is to draw more attention to the reality-hating absurdity of the headline.

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Difficult as it is to admit it, I am not too confident that this writing is a deliberate softening of evil. I’ve been writing for a long time, and I think I know the kind of people who would write like this. There are soppy types among writers, people who want to turn everything into some syrupy ‘free verse’ about flowers and mundanity.

Perhaps they should have been depressing poets, or depressing novelists, but somewhere along the line they were ushered into careers as journalists, and now must eke out flowery prose wherever they find fertile soil, even if it means romanticising the supposedly quaint lives of terrorists in the moments before mass murder.

Because that’s how this reads.

Rather than doing actual, cold, reality-based journalism, modern writers now see every evil thing as a creative writing task, as a prompt. It does not matter how many people die, because they are so removed from reality that violence may as well be an academic concept, an abstract, something which (with no small amount of irony) the very same violent people they are writing about likely don’t have the capacity to comprehend.

The new writers intellectualize cruelty to the degree that they become psychopathically distant from it, which results in headlines like this.

It is the same mechanism I saw at work when TikTok authors were debating the assassination of Charlie Kirk using the same terminology they use for debating whether Clare (the novel’s protagonist) should mount the werewolf or the vampire first.

These people are fundamentally not plugged into the real world.

We need to drop the poetics and describe reality truthfully, otherwise we cannot tackle anything.

Language is not merely how we communicate; it is so potent, so omnipresent that it defines how we experience reality. It reshapes reality.

So, to soften and twist and sharpen and pull and push and inflate and stretch new meanings over the world does literally obfuscate reality. It suffocates the world.

It does literally stop us from processing things as efficiently and as accurately as we should be doing.

Pictured, Ariel Bibas (kidnapped Oct 7 2023, and later strangled to death by Hamas) and dog Tonto (shot to death Oct 7 2023 by Hamas). Modern newspapers might consider the effects of calling mass murderers quiet bricklayers.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.