A Phone That Never Rings

Marco Rubio said the US remains “open to diplomacy” with Iran on Sunday. It’s the ninth consecutive night of American strikes. Somewhere a diplomat is holding a phone that never rings and calling that an open door.

I’ve been watching this phrase drift through the headlines for two weeks now, showing up dutifully after every fresh round of bombing like a ritual incantation nobody expects to work but everyone’s obligated to perform. Iran says it’s “received proposals from mediators” and “remains committed to diplomacy” too, on the same day its forces hit a US base near Aqaba and Kuwait shoots down Iranian drones, so both sides keep saying the word without doing the thing it describes. Orwell had a name for this: language surviving the death of its meaning, kept on out of habit.

Trump, for his part, framed last night’s strikes as being “in honour” of the three American soldiers killed this week. Sit with that rhetoric for a second. Further military action recast as a memorial gesture, so the war becomes its own justification for continuing, grief converted directly into more of the thing that produced the grief.

Against all that, a small good thing. China’s top literary prize this year went to Wang Jibing, a food delivery rider who writes in whatever’s left of the evening after racing an app’s timer all day. I don’t know his work yet. I just like that it exists, unbothered, while everyone with a podium keeps talking about a diplomacy nobody’s practicing.