Trees and Forests and Gazan Tunnels
If you notice that the trees
are lovely, but you cannot see
the forest, you will never seize
the moment when you ought to be
appreciating the united
glory of the whole ensemble.
By details don’t get too excited:
look beyond the joys you sample
for the pattern they’ve created,
waiting for the AHA! moment
when you realize, elated,
what the author of the show meant—
assuming there’s an author, clearly!—
putting all the trees together.
Finding an interpretation
will help you to determine whether
He (She?) deserves His reputation.
Coincidentally
the western forests
were by colonial Americans
regarded
as places which, because they
hid their enemies — native Americans —
should be destroyed,
foreshadowing
Gazan tunnels which
by the IDF have been
bombarded
because their genocidal enemies,
Hamas,
with their defensive shield, civilians,
are deployed.
Before becoming a radical anti-Zionist, Peter Beinart wrote in a review of Ian Buruma’s book “Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy in Three Continents” published in the NYT on 4/11/10:
“Reading Ian Buruma makes you feel parochial. In ‘Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents,’ he writes intimately about the relationship between politics and faith in Britain, the Netherlands, France, China, Japan and the United States. And beneath every cliché — about American religious fervor, French intolerance or Japanese godlessness — he uncovers ironies that wreak havoc with popular stereotypes. Buruma shows, for instance, that the trendy, anti-imperial multiculturalism favored in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom actually echoes those countries’ policies of colonial indirect rule, in which native cultures were segregated and preserved so they could be dominated more easily. He suggests that America’s militant Christianity and Europe’s militant secularism stem from parallel anxieties about the pace of cultural change. And he explains why the jihadist fanaticism taking root among some of Europe’s Muslim young is more European than Middle Eastern, more modern than traditional, more political than religious.”
A contrary view regarding forests was espoused by American colonists who conquered the west, whose hostility towards them is described in “How the West Was Really Won,” WSJ, 8/8/25, in which Peter Cozzens, reviewing The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West by Paul Andrew Hutton writes:
“In 1754, a 22-year-old newly promoted Lt. Col. George Washington led a ragtag band of militia through the wilds of western Pennsylvania on behalf of the British Crown. His assignment was to recruit Native American allies and search for French troops rumored to be lurking near the strategically vital Forks of the Ohio. Washington found the French, and in a skirmish he bested them and captured the ensign in command, who declared himself an emissary with a message for the British to abandon the contested country. Tanaghrisson, the leader of Washington’s Native American warriors, stepped forward. As a horrified Washington looked on, the chief sank his tomahawk into the ensign’s skull and then washed his hands in the man’s brains. ‘And thus,’ writes Paul Andrew Hutton, ‘with a single tomahawk blow, did Tanaghrisson incite the Seven Years’ War between France and England, as well as the forty-year conflict between the Americans and the Native tribes for possession of the Ohio Country.’”
Such random acts of violence often precipitated the conflicts with Native American peoples that would characterize America’s Western expansion. In his monumental “The Undiscovered Country,” Mr. Hutton presents the rich and complex story of the westering American frontier in exquisite detail, displaying a narrative power that propels the reader forward across seven generations of exploration, conquest and tragedy, from Washington’s bloody 1754 brush with the French to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Mr. Hutton, a professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico and the author of the superb “The Apache Wars” (2016), records not only the human cost but also the environmental damage that the westward movement wrought. Of the pioneers who despoiled the great forests east of the Mississippi River, the author writes thoughtfully, “adults viewed this forest as the enemy, and the child could not help but sense their anxiety.” It harbored wild beasts and marauding Native Americans. The forest “concealed them, sustained them, and nurtured them. Its destruction would mean their end as well. All pioneer families feverishly labored to fell the trees, to clear the land, to open the vista, to destroy that which they could not, or would not, understand.” It is a lament both for the environmental carnage and the Native Americans whose lives the destruction upended.