Golden Pager (Timing Is Everything)

It’s not very often you see an object that is clearly, factually evil. I’m most familiar with fictional evil, where the malign nature of an object is telegraphed by emanating stink lines, portentous music playing from offscreen, or a character’s shocked face as they gaze upon the haunted doll or cursed amulet. It turns out you don’t need the warbling theremin or the reverse shot of a terrified child to identify an evil thing. It’s actually very clear. You just look at your computer screen, and there it is—the so-called “golden pager” memorial trophy gifted by Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump back in February. As far as I know, there is only one photograph of this object in circulation. You’ve no doubt seen it. This image is doing a lot of work: simultaneously implicating viewers in a brutally risible in-joke, telegraphing a new phase in a threatening international relationship, and creating a kind of internet urban legend. With only a single picture and terrible image quality at that, I briefly considered whether it was even real. (Therapist: “The golden pager isn’t real and it can’t hurt you.”) But it is real. I can feel it from here.

The golden pager takes the form of a commemorative trophy, the kind you might commission for a bowling league or gift to a colleague as a retirement joke. The base is a glossy black slab, topped with a wooden wedge (or what I assume to be wood, and what I assume to be a wedge) onto which a gold-colored plaque with black lettering is attached. The text reads “To President Donald J. Trump, Our greatest friend and greatest ally. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” (to write this out is to become aware of the strange capitalization and punctuation). That’s not all. Mounted behind the plaque is a cross-section slice of tree trunk twice the diameter of the base, with a whorled and wavy live edge. Attached to the middle of the wooden slice is a gold-colored replica of a beeper or pager, material unknown. Text on the pager screen reads “PRESS WITH BOTH HANDS.”  The internet immediately diagnosed this golden pager trophy as a reference to the deadly Israeli “exploding pager” operation last September targeting Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, during which thousands of pagers detonated simultaneously, killing at least 37 and injuring thousands. It was a joke, one leader to another, with all the internet as witness.

a cross-cut slab of olive wood with a golden pager mounted to the front, on top of a wedge with an inscribed brass plate

 

The real life existence of the golden pager, and its gifting, was confirmed by Netanyahu’s office. The Prime Minister’s Office stated the trophy “symbolizes the Prime Minister’s decision that led to a turning point in the war and the starting point for breaking the will of the terrorist organization Hezbollah.” So: a symbol of power and domination, in the form of a businessman’s token. However, the golden pager is more than a simple, violent joke, and the trophy’s simple appearance belies the double-darkness at its evil center.[1] Through its piling up of elements (wood-pager-text) and its simultaneously over-wrought and under-baked form, the golden pager acts as a layered joke that is delivered simultaneously to Trump, to his and Netanyahu’s acolytes, and to the internet. The joke reverberates as it circulates online, performing a propaganda function that claims superiority over both Hezbollah and the people of Gaza. When the joke lands, explosively, it serves in part to clear the ground for a future where American imperialist fantasies can be made a reality at the expense of other people, lands, and lives.

 

The Killing Joke

 

The golden pager trophy is a joke in three parts. It arrives and lands the same way a joke might: first, the framing that signals to the audience what structure this joke will take; then the telling, or main content of the joke; and finally the punchline. To take effect, the joke must be in circulation. The same is true for the golden pager. Understanding this joke-ness helps diagnose both the political dimension of the object as well as the enjoyment it offers (to some). As Freud wrote in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, off-color jokes “make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way. They circumvent this obstacle and in that way draw pleasure from a source which the obstacle had made inaccessible.”[2] Generally, the “obstacle” is some kind of progressive repression of lust or violence. Social prohibitions are increasingly less powerful within the orbit of Trump, Netanhayu, and others in their extended cadre, and jokes and joking have played a part in this wearing-away of norms.

The pager joke takes the form of a trophy or award, a chunky and tactless object that a businessman might receive at a regional conference or award ceremony. It tells us how to receive the joke, and situates it within the frame of a business relationship—laughter among friends, a businessmen’s agreement, a tool for gladhanding and corporate reciprocity. The gold plaque with the salutation from Netanyahu to Trump evinces no particular attention to detail. It’s the kind of thing your local trophy shop or drop-shipping custom sign maker could whip up in a moment (base: brushed brass-look flexi-plate, lettering: laser-engraved black sans serif, proofreading: none). Far from diminishing the joke, the low-effort vibe improves it. It imbues a sense of non-PC old-school masculine backslappery to the whole affair, in keeping with the jovial but conniving tenor of Trump and Netanyahu’s relationship (or what we see of it).

The content or the telling of the pager joke has two main components, placed in dialogue with each other: the tree, and the pager. The pager is the center of attention and the center of the object. First, it is golden. Trump loves gold, as everyone knows. He’s Mister Gilt, Mister Midas, cluttering every corner with gold moldings, gold urns, gold putti. There is no reporting on whether the pager is real gold or just gold-colored, but its purpose—a playful nod to Trump’s gold obsession—is served either way. The pager form belies an overall impression of sloppy construction. It is an exact replica of the AR-924 beeper produced by Taiwanese company Gold Apollo (although the specific pagers used in the Israeli attack were manufactured in Budapest). The name, “Gold Apollo”—surely a coincidence, but a beautiful one. The slice of wood upon which the pager is mounted extends out radiantly, explosively from behind the device. The provenance of the wood is unclear, but its visual appearance has led most commentators to identify it as olive wood. “A felled ancient olive tree, which we assume is in reference to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian-grown olive trees that have been destroyed by Israeli settlers and soldiers,” stated the caption of a widely-circulated Instagram post. These two components—tree, pager—narrate a story of Israel’s military sophistication, its brute force, and ongoing settler-colonial expansion supported by American dollars and weaponry. The setup is complete.

Finally, the punchline. Lean in, read the words on the pager screen: “PRESS WITH BOTH HANDS.” The pager explodes, as does the joke. PRESS WITH BOTH HANDS affirms what had been previously reported as speculation—that the message sent to the Hezbollah pagers immediately before they detonated required two-step de-encryption to view, meaning users would need to press buttons simultaneously with both hands, maximizing the chance of debilitating injury—and turns it into a cruel punchline. The body that holds the pager—in many cases a Hezbollah member but in other cases a child—becomes the butt of the joke, the soft flesh wrecked by remote operated shrapnel. Who knows what Donald Trump thought when he read these words, but the punchline was well-received by its other intended audience. “Low key very funny” “Bibi might be cooking with this one :trollface:” “the most metal intelligence operation in history” “ngl that’s funny af” wrote commenters on r/Palestinian_Violence, a Zionist Reddit populated by anti-Palestinian shitposters.[3] “The joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible,” wrote Freud, emphasis his.[4] It turns out this source of pleasure is the maimed body of an Israeli political enemy. The punchline, then, is the trigger that overrides the usual social prohibitions and allows those who get it to laugh at the thought of a Lebanese man with his hand blown off, a historic olive grove flattened, a Palestinian child crushed under rubble.

The joke is brought to its climax by the punchline, but it isn’t truly activated until it is brought into circulation. Bibi bringing the trophy to Trump is the first layer of circulation. The joke here is at its weakest, mostly subsumed by the bluster and one-upmanship of the diplomatic meeting-form. The uncredited photographer who captured the image of the trophy (where? when?) and the clerk who uploaded it (who? And at whose request?) brought the joke into its central realm of circulation: the internet. It circulated on message boards, through sparsely-detailed news stories, and in social media posts. Anyone could lean in and read the words “PRESS WITH BOTH HANDS” and be shocked into laughter, or fruitlessly outraged. When the joke is in play you receive it either as a co-conspirator, laughing in awe at the ruthless verve of Mossad, or you recognize it as leveraged against you, and your failure to laugh makes you a humorless wokerati, a scolding HR lady, or worse—a Palestinian.

Along with the online circulation of the golden pager image, which functions as a kind of propaganda of the joke on behalf of Israel and its allies, a second and more literal form of circulation is enacted at the moment the punchline (the explosion) is triggered. PRESS WITH BOTH HANDS is a signal to the reader that prompts them to complete the circuit: pager-hand-body-hand-pager. The second hand grasps the pager, and the charge flows. This circuit encompasses not only the pager and the body, but also the entire supply chain and logistical system that supported the production of the boobie-trapped pagers, the network of surveillance and espionage that enabled the pagers to reach the hands and pockets of their targets, and the technological system that meant the thousands of pagers could be detonated at a designated time designed to be maximally devastating. Within this intimate but globe-spanning circuit there are multiple nested triggers. Inside the pager is the smallest of triggers, a fake component that likely contained a few grams of military high grade explosive. The pager itself is a trigger, armed remotely by a text message signal, and primed to explode (in Israel, reports the New York Times, intelligence officers referred to the pagers as “buttons” that could be pushed whenever the time was right). The person is also a trigger, activated by the text message beep but compelled by the entire network of power-logistics-sabotage-machinery into pressing the button and closing the deadly circuit.

The nested circuitry of explosives, electronics, bodies, logistics, and spycraft lend something of an air of sophisticated gimmickry to the whole pager enterprise (at least for those observing from a distance). As described by Sianne Ngai, the gimmick is a specifically capitalist aesthetic phenomenon that appears as “both a wonder and a trick,” claiming (and aiming) to save time and labor but appearing somehow to be “doing too much and yet also not enough.”[5] The elaborate set-up of the pager plot is offset by the ridiculous simplicity of the archaic device, itself with its push-buttons and tiny screen. Too much and too little at once. ”Being out of synch with “the times,” whether by hubristically advancing too far ahead … or lagging behind” is another feature of the gimmick, and certainly a feature of the pager.[6] Simultaneously old-fashioned and deviously contemporary, the pager was once commonplace but is now viewed as a 90s throwback, made relevant once again due to its reliability as a communication device in unstable disaster zones and weaponizable only because Hezbollah leaders had forbidden the use of cellphones due to concerns about surveillance. All of this overwrought complexity, the nested circuits and triggers, adds to the enjoyment of the joke (for those predisposed to enjoy it) and the sense that the whole setup is something of a Rube Goldberg machine—”at once excessively laborious but also strangely too easy.”[7] For a Western audience that identifies with Israel and Netanyahu and is primed to laugh at the visual gag of the golden pager, additional enjoyment comes from imagining the victims of the attack as hapless marks, unsophisticated users of old technology that can be tricked into activating a deadly booby trap. The deployment of the exploding pager gimmick thus reiterates “the power, technological superiority and cunning of Israel against its enemies” (per Netanyahu’s office’s characteristically modest statement).

Once the punchline is delivered and the dust has settled, we see that the joke has served its purpose: it has cleared the ground and set the stage for future action. Netanyahu and Trump weren’t meeting just to gloat over the memory of dead Lebanese men and children — they were strengthening an alliance and Trump was airing his proposal that the U.S. take over the Gaza strip (“and we will do a job with it too”), clearing its inhabitants who would be moved permanently to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” outside of Palestine. He doubled down on this plan, describing his vision for Gaza as “a new Riviera,” a vision that he later illustrated through a genocidal and instantly-notorious AI-generated video showing Gaza as a luxe resort destination replete with cruise ships, piles of cash, Elon Musk eating cheesy dip, and a gold balloon in the shape of Trump’s head (“No more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here” chants the voiceover). Again: a joke that operates to clear the ground for a political future that is less overtly ridiculous but equally devastating for the people of Gaza. Just kidding…but not really.

 

Masters of time and space

 

The evil force of the golden pager emanates from the proximity of the central components of its joke-form—the pager and the tree. Clearly, the pager-tree is intended as a lesson in military force, and a fuck-you to the Palestinian people and their allies. Specifically, the elements convey a story about Israel’s total mastery of time and space, set up through the juxtaposition of tree-time and pager-time, and illustrating its ability to wield one against the other in the interests of the Israeli state. In its totality, the pager-tree assemblage represents a form of domination from which nothing can escape and outside of which no alternate future is possible. It’s an abyss on purpose.

For many Palestinians, the olive tree is a symbol of their deep connection to the land and an image of resistance against occupation and displacement. In a popular interpretation of the patterns on the Palestinian keffiyeh, the wavy chevron lines are said to symbolize olive leaves. The olive is literally woven into Palestinian identity. Olive trees have been cultivated in the region for thousands of years, and olive production accounts for the majority of cultivated land in the Palestinian territories. The trees grow slowly and are nurtured over generations, acting as a focal point for cultural and agricultural life. “In the same way that the trees can survive and have deep roots in their land so, too, do the Palestinian people” says Sliman Mansour, a Palestinian painter whose work deals with themes of land, labor, and intifada. This is tree-time: the sense of continuity, care, and rootedness embodied in the wood of the olive grove. “I used to tell everyone that my trees have been my life companions” Gazan elder Ahlam Saqr told Al Jazeera in an interview. A temporality that is attached to place, unfolding over generations and attached to stories and practices.

Staring at a gnarly slab of olive wood, you understand why it came to carry such a heavy load of symbolism and cultural identity. A hard, dense wood, olive is known for its dramatic contrasting streaks and veins in swirling patterns, and is prone to burls and occlusions which exacerbate its wild patterning and wavy edge. A cross-section of pine or fir tends to be regular, with stacked concentric rings and even bark. A cross-section of olive is more like a nebula—wavy swirled rings, unpredictable form, an inkling of the cosmos lurking in the quotidian material. “Often, as I uncover more of the form, I encounter unexpected qualities, faults or voids in the wood”[8] said American sculptor J.B. Blunk, describing the experience of carving burled or gnarled woods like redwood or olive or bay laurel. “I enter into a relationship with the material I am using, and as in all relationships, there are opportunities for surprise.”[9] If you are oriented towards tree-time, you read stories into the wood, and lean on its forms to symbolize time-land-emergence-earth. As for myself, I am not a new materialist, but I am a Californian. I have laid my hand intently on the giant redwood burl carved by Blunk into a three-ton curving monolith-centerpiece-dining installation for Greens, San Francisco’s venerable vegetarian restaurant, hoping to receive some kind of blessed emanation from its cool dark density. At the very least, I was aware of being in the presence of a very old and non-evil object.

The inclusion of a live-edge slab of olive wood in the golden pager assemblage is a knowing gesture to tree-time, to elemental materiality (the ancient Greek word for wood or forest, hylē, was borrowed by Aristotle for his concept of “matter,” the underlying substance of all things)[10] and to the Palestinian cultural memory embedded in the wood of the olive grove. The pager-slab calls up this concatenation of history and matter in order to demonstrate the power of the Israeli state to utterly destroy it in a single explosive moment. Before and throughout the current attacks on Gaza, Israel has extended its “warlike” tactics into attacks on olive groves, and illegal settlers in the West Bank have burnt, vandalized and stolen olive trees as part of their attacks on Palestinian villagers. In Lebanon, olive-growing communities have also had their trees and residences decimated by intense Israeli bombing campaigns. The golden pager’s olive slab, a remnant from a felled tree, captures and varnishes the moment of disruption and puts it on display as a cruel joke. The explosion—the punchline of the joke—is used to symbolize the power of the Israeli military to control temporality, destroying tree-time and interrupting the continuity and sustainment of Palestinian lifeworlds.[11]

In contrast to tree-time (contiguous, emplaced, but subject to disruption) is the flexible and networked construction of pager-time. In the context of the assemblage, the golden pager is not only an object in itself, but representative of the entire web of logistics, production, and surveillance that was brought into play to execute the explosive attacks. As a device and a sculptural element, the pager (although anachronistic, and gimmicky in its anachronism) references the miraculous speed of wireless communication and just-in-time logistics. Messages are sent and received in an instant. Plans are orchestrated swiftly. Targets are selected and bombed with unprecedented speed, aided by AI targeting tools The Gospel and Lavender. Pager-time is the temporality of speed and rupture, globally distributed and instantaneous.

The globally networked circuits of production and distribution that enable the function of the pager-as-joke/pager-as-trigger represent a spatial corollary to pager-time’s temporal dominance. Reflecting a specifically capitalist form of spatial organization, the pager’s embeddedness in a nodal global network means that a trigger activated in an IDF war room can prompt hundreds of Lebanese men (and others) to pick up a pager device. Decisions made in a boardroom in Tel Aviv spur a Hungarian factory into action producing booby-trapped electrical components. Shipping networks move pagers, people, and explosives while communication networks move data and hide state secrets. The pager asserts that the “annihilation of space by time”’ (in Marx’s formulation) is a weapon to be wielded by those with the wealth, relationships, and power to control capital, against those who would resist their territorial expansion and attempts at total domination.

In its totality, the pager-tree assemblage tethers the hostile joke about the exploding pager (and its specific context of the attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon) to a broader narrative about Israel’s ability to—and might-given right to—explode and destroy what remains of Gaza’s people and infrastructure. The explosion is the mechanism that brings Israeli mastery of space and time to bear on both the ability of Hezbollah to function and the ability of Gazans to live a whole, uninterrupted life.

 

The good-enough image

 

Zooming out from the inner workings of the pager-tree, the principles of speed and discontinuity also shape the ways that the digital pager-tree image (and other images produced as part of the same system) functions as it loops through cycles of digital circulation. The crappy, tacky, joking-not-joking style of the golden pager trophy helps acclimate viewers to the zeitgeist of an emergent regime where “the Riviera of the Middle East” might begin to sound like policy rather than fantasy. The destruction of people, cultures, and practices in order to (explosively) clear the ground for settlement and property development doesn’t require buy-in from political constituents, but popular support is helpful in reducing dissent and mobilizing fans. In the Trump era, the kinds of images called to serve as accelerationist cultural onboarding tend to be less monumental, less declarative than the propaganda of earlier authoritarian movements. The AI-generated “Trump Gaza” video was heinously memorable but it didn’t need to be — it wasn’t made to be remembered a year from now. Its role (as with the joke) is to be in circulation, hit its punchline, and then cycle out.

The rapidity of this image cycle is enabled by tools like AI image generators, which allow images to be produced at speed and distributed at speed, quickly engaging with popular meme formats and art styles. The goofy gilt of the golden pager and the nightmare casino surrealism of the Trump Gaza video are undeniably a kind of kitsch, in the sense outlined by Clement Greenberg in his famous 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”: the trophy and video are part of popular art and literature, products of the industrial age, formally regressive, and vulnerable to sentiment and propaganda. Especially apposite to these fast-moving images are what Greenberg describes as the preconditions for kitsch:

…the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from the reservoir of accumulated experience.[12]

What is the image generator or large language model if not a machine for appropriating and recombining existing artisan culture? While generations of critics have derided Greenberg’s snobbery and disdain for pop culture, Dorothy Barenscott points out that in the context of our current predicament—eerily similar to Greenberg’s pre-World War II situation in its modes of public address and mobilization of cultural grievance—“Greenberg can often read today as more prescient than out-of-touch, guiding a new generation towards understanding the potency of Trump’s embrace of kitsch.”[13]

All that is required of the kitsch-adjacent political image is that it be good enough. Hito Steyerl described the “poor image,” produced through the vernacular image practices (pirating, copying, altering, degrading, distributing) of inhabitants of the backwaters of global digital networks as fast-moving and designed for circulation, in contrast to the high-quality images made by Hollywood and television studios, whose large file sizes and specific equipment needs rendered them slow dinosaurs in the age of the internet. The “good-enough” image isn’t usually “poor” in the sense the poor image is poor—degraded, glitched-out, deep-fried. It tends to be a medium-sized image, a jpg or png, perfect for a blog header or social media feature image (its natural home). The good-enough image’s content, however, tends towards the stupid, derivative, and recombinatory (all the better to endlessly cycle). Most people with a computer and an internet connection can churn out a good-enough image. And they do. Where the degraded crunchiness of the poor image encourages people to appropriate and remix it, the good-enough image disseminates itself by spurring others to create their own. “Cyberpunk Elon Musk striding through utopian Martian landscape.” “Steve Bannon wearing four unbuttoned shirts with a Trump 2028 t-shirt visible underneath, watercolor painting.” The political status of the poor image is ambivalent, feeding into “both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies” (one might say that the political status of Steyerl herself is somewhat less ambivalent, after she has repeatedly critiqued other artists for their pro-Palestinian statements and insisted on an obtuse and abhorrent both-sides-ism). The political status of the good-enough image is firmly aligned with the values embedded in the tools that produce it: speed, exploitation, aggregation, profit. 

In circulation, the propagandistic good-enough image moves with a troll-like lightness of touch that insists on being received as a joke while being deadly serious in intent. The tossed-off appearance of the good-enough digital image (whether a Ghibli-fied illustration of a shackled and weeping Dominican woman, an ASMR-style video of handcuffs clinking on a deportation flight, a parody movie poster starring Trump and Vince Vaughn) is all that is allowed—the appearance of trying very hard would kill the joke. The mechanisms of image creation—often the AI image generator that deskills the act of illustration or photography—are exemplary gimmicks, claiming to abbreviate work and time in a way that is both marvelous and untrustworthy. Valorization of the good-enough, gimmicky, deskilled image thus becomes an ideological imperative in a moment where fascism is on the move. Churning out images and disseminating them quickly supports the rapid production of a shared political sentiment and affective register, setting the stage for equally rapid programs of deportation and suppression of protest. In contrast, artisan production comes to be seen as too slow, too considered, insufficiently deferential to the demands of productivity.

 

Bringing it on home

 

As American spectators of and participants in the circulation of political images, the ruptures and deskilling we have experienced in recent decades have most often taken place at the level of ideology, employment, and cultural practices. One set of political sentiments (the multi-racial, multi-stakeholder hope agenda of the Obama era, perhaps) is disrupted and replaced by groyper-think and “American Dynamism,” aided by the rapid proliferation of racist memes and weaponized cry-laugh emojis. The work of skilled professionals from teachers to illustrators is made untenable, first through wage suppression and unreasonable productivity demands, and then through claims that this work must be transformed or “automated” by tech platforms and so-called AI. The more explosive ruptures—the city bombed to rubble, the political regime violently deposed—happen elsewhere, to others, witnessed by us through broadcast media images and social platforms.

In some elemental way, the real evil object of the golden pager performs the same function as the fictional evil object—it is a harbinger. Its appearance sets a narrative mechanism in motion, placing a curse on the recipient or viewer, letting us know that something is severely out of joint that must be resolved. In other words, the arrival of the evil object is never the end of the story. This is the point in the tale (or is it a joke) when the object returns. Back in 1945, another monumental, cursed, and severely tacky wooden object was gifted to a U.S. state representative by a Russian (well, Soviet) delegation as a “gesture of friendship”—a carved wooden seal with a covert listening device embedded. Later dubbed “The Thing,” this object came with an obvious sting in the tail. When Netanyahu presented the golden pager trophy to Trump, some commentators suggested that this could be “the new Thing”, and should be checked for bugs (it no doubt was). But the golden pager isn’t that kind of simple espionage story. Instead, the omen portended by the gift of the golden pager is inextricably tied to its physical form and mode of circulation: a piece of good-enough propaganda professing the domination of pager-time over tree-time, deposited in the heart of empire. If you listen closely (to history, at least), the arrival of the wooden object sounds less like the shock of the new and more like a return, a looping back, a boomerang.

Aimé Césaire described “a terrific boomerang effect” (un formidable choc en retour) by which twentieth-century fascism arrived on European shores.[14] It arrived not as an unprecedented novelty, but as a return of the techniques of repression and control previously used against subjects of the colonial empire, now brought home and deployed against Europe’s own subaltern. And now, as the circuit closes on this new murderous cycle, the imperial boomerang returns again. What was thrown outwards—a rampant and genocidal siege, sophisticated and indiscriminate military technologies, a purposeful and gleeful destruction—comes back in the form of the golden pager and the exploded tree. Departing as tragedy, returning as punchline. With it come the methods of repression and counter-insurgency that were trialed in the laboratories of Gaza and Israel (with America’s support and keen interest, as Israel has always been a testing ground for and extension of US imperialism) and which are now are turned to America’s own population in the form of kidnappings, deportation, and extrajudicial punishment.

What temporality is possible in the ongoing wake of this exploding boomerang? The social contracts and social programs that made life sustainable (if only just) for many communities in America are now suddenly dismantled, ruptured beyond recognition. So much for tree-time. Even the globally-distributed, technologically adroit pager-time networks through which American capitalists build their wealth and America’s armies and proxies assert contemporary military supremacy are under threat. The chronic instability they seeded elsewhere eventually comes home to roost: the tariffs are here and the internet is buckling under its own weight. At the same time, the abyssal reality—many thousands of Palestinians murdered and starving, their deaths aided and supported by the American state and many Americans—continues on the other end of the boomerang’s arc. Back to the joke, once again, it is clear that the punchline (the explosion triggered by PRESS WITH BOTH HANDS) implicates us too, bound up as we are in the circuit of pager-body-network-logistics-power. When the golden pager explodes, we are all in the blast zone.

 

 

 

 

[1] The term “double-darkness” is taken from Clement Greenburg, who writes that while Hitler and Stalin’s “personal philistinism” does not materially affect their regime’s cultural policies, their personal love of bad art adds a “brutality and double-darkness” to policies they would inevitably support anyway on ideological grounds.  Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 20.

[2] Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 101.

[3] All of the comments are responses in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestinian_Violence/comments/1ij6wqw/pm_netanyahus_gift_to_president_trump_golden/

Dingobabies (u/Dingobabies), “Low key very funny,” Reddit, February 6, 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestinian_Violence/comments/1ij6wqw/comment/mbc0csv/

khuramazda (u/khuramazda), “Bibi might be cooking with this one :trollface:,” Reddit, February 6, 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestinian_Violence/comments/1ij6wqw/comment/mbco60o/

MalPB2000 (u/MalPB2000), “The pager sabotage op is still the most metal intelligence operation in history,” Reddit, February 6, 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestinian_Violence/comments/1ij6wqw/comment/mbdww3o/

fearthejew (u/fearthejew), “ngl that’s funny af,” Reddit, February 6, 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestinian_Violence/comments/1ij6wqw/comment/mbdww3o/

[4] Freud, 103.

[5] Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 54.

[6] Ngai, 58.

[7] Ngai, 56.

[8] J.B. Blunk, “Work and Home: A Visit with JB Blunk,” Woodwork Magazine, October 1999.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Thank you to Cameron Tonkinwise for noting this connection.

[11] For an extended discussion of the interrelation of explosions, environmental racism, landscapes, and what remains, see Javier Arbona-Homar’s Explosivity: Following What Remains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025).

[12] Greenberg, 10.

[13]  Dorothy Barenscott, “Trumpism, NFTs, and the Cultural Politics of 21st-Century Kitsch,” Artforum, October 30, 2024, https://www.artforum.com/columns/dorothy-barenscott-trumpism-nfts-and-the-cultural-politics-of-21st-century-kitsch-1234721079/

[14] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36.