"Blind Date" addresses patriotism and honor, while "Another Evening," which features music by Wagner, Buddhist chants, and the earsplitting, demonic chords of an onstage hard-core band, explores the destructive and possibly redemptive power of catastrophe.
"We understand that we have a constructive power," said Nabhan Khraishi, the communications officer for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, "and on the other hand we have a destructive power that can be a catastrophe".
The reality of climate change has been borne out by so many catastrophes in recent decades – destructive hurricanes, floods, desertification, melting ice caps, rising sea levels – that it is no longer possible to ignore the impact on human populations.
The destructive power and frequency of natural catastrophes, such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, have seemingly increased during the past few years, and they cause substantial damage to urban communities.
Even a so-called conventional war in the Gulf would be ferociously destructive; a nuclear war would be sheer catastrophe.
No, to be reminded of Syria's nineteen months of hell — of torture and massacre and tanks in the streets and of cities bombarded, a seemingly inexorable slide from a season of fitful discontent into a generation of total war — is to be reassured that Sandy, however deadly, destructive, costly, and disruptive, is really not, as catastrophes go, so bad.
The hopeful lilt toward the end of Unclear Holocaust is that this catastrophe will become unmanageable, and this increasingly destructive strategy may spin out of control and destroy the world as we know it.
The event was a foreseeable catastrophe exacerbated by the populace's unawareness of the volcano's destructive history; geologists and other experts had warned authorities and media outlets about the danger over the weeks and days leading up to the eruption.
We should receive the terrible news with the dull horror we feel at school shootings, overdoses, traffic catastrophes: human life gone haywire, run off the rails, horribly destructive and, past some point, senseless.
Ecological catastrophes — which we can view continually and close-up, thanks to our 24/7 plugged-in world — become the meaningless intrusions of a blind, destructive rage.
