Everything You Hold Worthwhile
The light is good in the photograph. That is the first thing a person registers, before the horror arrives.
Spring light over southern Poland, the kind that warms the back of the neck and makes everyone look healthy, and a young woman has found the best of it. She reclines on the rail with her head tipped back and her face to the sun. Sunglasses. One knee up. A red flannel open over black. It is, there is no other word for it, a sexy pose. A man squats on the ties in front of her with a phone, working the angle, the way men have always squatted in front of women they are trying to make beautiful.
Behind them, down the long straightaway of iron, stands the gate.
The watchtower. The brick arch. The mouth the trains came through. This is Auschwitz-Birkenau, the German death factory in occupied Poland where the Nazis murdered more than a million people, most of them Jews. They were carried in over these exact rails, and most were smoke before nightfall. The woman is lying on the throat that fed the largest grave on earth, and she is catching some sun.
She is not a monster. She is a tourist on a nice day who found good light and used it, the way anyone would at a beach or a fountain. She did not invent the reflex that put her body in the frame. It came pre-installed, a digital sixth sense. Social media had been wiring it into a few billion people since before she was old enough to drive, a machine that lives on attention, teaching that every place is a set and the self is a thing to be promoted. The reflex does not stop to ask what the background is. It was never built to ask.
Somebody designed the engine that way. On purpose.
And she is giving it what it feeds on. The photograph is not for her, it is for the algorithm. It feeds the computation, which takes her face and her pose and the death camp behind her and adds them to the copy of her it has been building since she was a girl, a second self made of numbers that will go on telling her story to strangers long after she has climbed off the rail and forgotten she was ever here.
The memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau has been pleading about this for years. The museum keeps an account that asks visitors, patiently and without much hope, to stop balancing on the rails and grinning under the gate. At one point it had to put in writing what used to need no stating: that there are “better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam” than the rails that ran to the gas chambers.
An institution built to remember the murdered now runs an etiquette desk for the living, because the instinct that once made the etiquette unnecessary is no longer in the people who come through the gate.
And the tourists are the least of it. The reflex to fall silent before something larger than yourself has been draining out of democracy itself, top to bottom. A people that once knew, without being told, when to take the hat off and lower the voice now has to be reminded by a sign at the gate. The hollowing the museum fights on its rails goes the length of the culture.
By the spring of 1918 the First World War was almost four years old, and it had already fed a generation into the ground. The fighting had taught whole nations what massed artillery and poison gas did to a human body. On the first morning of the Somme, two years earlier, the British lost nearly twenty thousand men killed, most of them in the opening hour, walking at a deliberate pace into machine-gun fire. The German army had torn a hole in the Allied line across Picardy, the flat farm country of northern France, and was driving hard for Paris, and the Allies were close to losing the war outright.
The force sent to plug the gap was American, the first army the country had ever shipped across an ocean to fight, and the general who commanded all of it was John J. Pershing. He was the most battle-tested general the country had, fresh off a year chasing Pancho Villa across northern Mexico. President Wilson had handed him the whole of the American war effort, every soldier the country shipped to France, and through a year of relentless pressure he had refused to let those men be fed piecemeal into the British and French lines. They would fight as one American army, under their own flag.
Everything hung on whether the Americans could reach the line before it gave way. From a headquarters behind the front he put his voice on a record for the people at home, the ones who had never seen a trench and were being asked to keep pouring their sons into one. Pershing did not write like a man hedging.
Three thousand miles from home, an American army is fighting for you. Everything you hold worthwhile is at stake. Only the hardest blows can win against the enemy we are fighting. Invoking the spirit of our forefathers, the army asks your unshrinking support, to the end that the high ideals for which America stands may endure upon the earth.
That is a general telling farmers and shopkeepers that the things they loved, and everything their country meant, could be taken, and would be, unless somebody stood in the doorway of history with a gun and leadership. He led with the objective. He knew those at home needed a story, not an order. Before he asked the country for a single life he told it what the lives were for, the high ideals America claimed to stand for, then as now.
My father came through the gate at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the one in the photograph, the rails the girl is lying across to catch the sun. He came in 1944, a Hungarian Jew on one of the trains, when they ran at capacity and the spring light over Poland fell on a different kind of crowd. What waited at the end of the tracks was a ramp where a man with a glove sorted worth from worthlessness.
He survived Auschwitz, barely. His sister did not. The glove had waved her off the day the train arrived, deemed worthless before the platform cleared. They tattooed 119708 on his arm. After seven months, it was his turn.
Selected for gassing, he was in a column of twelve hundred bound for a farmhouse outside the fence, converted into a gas chamber, when the SS guards stopped them. An armaments factory nearby needed fifty workers, and they picked the fifty by who could do the most push-ups. He was one of them.
By the war’s end the Germans had moved him west to Dachau, and that is where the 45th Infantry Division, the Thunderbirds, found him, in the spring of 1945.
When it was over he put on the uniform of the army that had come through the wire for him. He spent more than twenty-five years serving in the United States Army infantry. A tour in Korea, three in Vietnam. He joined as a private who spoke no English and rose to command a battalion, retiring a lieutenant colonel. It was the closest thing he had to a way of saying thank you to the Americans who crossed an ocean to take the hardest blows for a man they would never meet.
My dad is buried at Arlington now, under a white stone in a long white row — on ground that means what it says.
America turns two hundred fifty on Saturday. The bunting is up. The birthday even has a brand, America250, with corporate sponsors and a task force to run it. A secretary of war is selling a trillion-and-a-half-dollar arsenal, the means of destruction, as the cure for what ails us, and out past Hormuz the Navy is counting tankers in the dark.
Meanwhile, there is a war half-fought in that water, adrift. The most powerful military on earth cannot subdue a weaker competitor that does a better job managing itself as an adaptive system.
Iran, a regime that has for decades vowed to wipe Israel off the map and called the camps a myth, took the worst that American firepower could deliver. Almost four months of Epic Fury has changed nothing that mattered, and Tehran is climbing out of the rubble holding more than it went in with. The United States has signed a vague memo that, as it stands, hands Tehran its oil money back, leaves its missiles and its proxies in place, cuts Israel out of the room, and turns the strait from open water into a new economy Tehran gets to run.
A nuclear Iran is a real danger, the way a nuclear North Korea is, a regime sworn to erase its neighbor reaching for a weapon no one can take back once it has it. The strategic failure is not that we struck Iran. Sometimes the hardest blows are the right blows, and such a regime has earned a few. The failure is that there was no strategy at all. We mistook the means for the end, the destruction for the objective. We never asked the only question that decides a war once the shooting stops: to therefore do what? Demolition is not strategy.
Technical potential was the whole of the plan, and there was no plan for the morning after, because in the American Way of War, there rarely is.
Gideon Rose, who wrote How Wars End, clocked the speed of the strategic collapse in Foreign Affairs: Trump took two months to “race through all five years of the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy,” first strike to scrambled exit. Iran is ending where Vietnam ended, and Afghanistan, in a deal that quiets the guns and answers nothing. We went in to take a weapon from Iran and came out having handed it a better one. The bomb we meant to stop is still coming, passed to the next administration like a bill. The weapon we delivered instead is the strait, a chokehold on a fifth of the world’s oil that Tehran can tighten for money or for leverage with one drone that costs less than a car.
Last Tuesday, in the capital of capitalism, the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, a socialist mayor six months into his first term backed a slate of insurgents, and they swept the Democratic primaries, every one of them run on cutting off the Jewish state.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who was seven years old on 9/11, living in Florida, unseated a five-term incumbent in Harlem. Asked to condemn Hamas after the October 7 massacre, she would not. She wants American money out of foreign wars and once tweeted that she had wiped her hand on the American flag for lack of a napkin. Her win follows the template Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez set in 2018: a primary few people vote in, a seat no Republican can take, so it goes to whoever is best at giving the algorithm what it wants. Six in ten Democrats now tell pollsters their sympathies sit with the Palestinians.
New York City is not the whole of it. A democratic socialist runs Seattle. A few weeks ago, in Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, where the Democratic primary is the election, a socialist won it. The capital that sent Pershing to the line in 1918 and the divisions that broke open the camps in 1945, then spent the half-century after fighting socialism abroad, will now be run by one at home.
The movement cresting in these American cities is the one that wants Israel abandoned. The President opened the war calling the men in Tehran terrible people who wanted to practice evil, and is closing it calling them strong people, smart people. The right is bargaining Israel away for oil money and the left is shedding it as an embarrassment, and the result is the same. Eighty years after the gate, from both ends at once, the country is deciding that the survival of the Jewish state is not among the things it holds worthwhile.
None of this cancels what has been done to Gaza. Whole districts flattened, a people starved and driven from whatever was left standing. The suffering is real and vast, fueled by an ideological savagery on both sides. The grievance under it is old and ordinary: a home, a border, a life without fear.
Two peoples have wanted the same land since long before either had a flag, and no war has ever settled it. None will.
What keeps it going is not the weapons but the conviction that the other has no right to be there, one that feeds on itself, every wound the reason for the next. No missile reaches that. You can level a city and the loop keeps running. What would resolve it is the one move neither side will make: a new origin story for the ground, one written together, that does not require the other to vanish. To hold both is the rarest thing now: to take in the ruin of Gaza and defend the Jewish state in the same breath.
Pershing’s question still hangs in the air, only now it cuts inward. He asked whether we would defend everything we hold worthwhile. The harder question at two hundred fifty is whether we still hold anything worthwhile, whether the country can still say what the good is the way Pershing could, or whether we have only the topline and the face tipped to the sun.
You can build the most exquisite war machine in the history of force — and it buys you little if the people under its umbrella feel nothing standing on the rails to a mass grave.
There is a video Mark Zuckerberg posted of himself on the Fourth of July five years ago. It shows him on a hydrofoil, an American flag in one hand, gliding across a private lake. The flag is a prop, the lake a stage, real things used as performance objects, the whole of it content for the algorithm, the froth it runs on. It has always bothered me. This is the bravado of a man who owns the machine, the swagger of a young general who has never seen a war. This is not leadership. It is not even courage — only the self turned all the way up.
Happy birthday, America. At two hundred fifty, a shared story has stopped holding us together, giving way to an epic enervation, the will to say what anything is for draining out of the country. The dollar still promises E pluribus unum, out of many, one. It all runs the other way now, ex uno plures, out of one, many. The republic has a surplus of geniuses with a board and a feed and a shortage of people willing to put the self second and lead for a common good, to pick up the weight and hold to what is worthwhile.
An old world is ending faster than anyone can ready themselves for what comes next. The country meets the moment with the flag in one hand and infinite technical potential in the other, and no story for either.
The future is not fixed. It is chosen, and it can be chosen again. Reclaiming any of it begins with a question for leadership: Who do we choose to be?
/ jgs
John G. Singer is the founder and Executive Director of Blue Spoon and the author of When Burning Man Comes to Washington: A Field Manual for Riding Chaos. Hardcore Zen is published weekly on Substack.