Present Tense is The Swaddle Team's stream of consciousness response to the world's madness.

Hey, god/universe/void: If you're listening, we named this weekly recap series "Present Tense" because it's a pun about being anxious right now. It is not a challenge. Please stop. Since launching its first installment in May, we have had to rewrite these pieces as new things happen three times – once to talk about the Indo-Pak almost-war, once to talk about the stampede at the cricket stadium, and again to talk about the plane crash. We are sweating while putting together this week's recap – respectfully, dead god/universe/void, enough.

Coming to this week then. We still have some leftover Sabrina Carpenter discourse – is her album cover derogatory or subversive? Is it kink-shaming to hate it or woman-traitoring to love it? Our position is currently somewhere near the Kim-there's-people-dying end of the spectrum.

Because here's what also went down this week: Israel launched "pre-emptive" missile strikes at Iran, Iran launched some right back, the papers are telling us Iran has nuclear weapons, Iran is posting dank memes on X, America's President has ordered Tehran to evacuate, and people in Lebanon are getting married and throwing raves underneath the fireworks.

Type Iran or Israel into any search engine right now and witness the impossible challenge of figuring out which piece of news is from which day of the week. Every day there is a new launch, a new bomb, a new civilian target, a new military target, a new world leader pledging support to one side, another world leader who has begun sending weapons to the aforementioned side. But one piece of news stands out amid the rest: the Pentagon pizza tracker is diligently indicating WW3. Even America's military might clocks in overtime during a recession.

Speaking of recessions, what comes first – the recession or the civilizational war? We are not yet in a recession, reports say, but we may soon be heading into one. Which means the war came first. According to Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" thesis, catastrophic events often provide a means for governments to impose unpopular economic policies. Sometimes the events are unpredictable, like hurricane Katrina. Sometimes they might be engineered, like the dictatorship in Cuba, which was most definitely not installed by the CIA. These events became testing grounds for neoliberal reforms like cutting social welfare, privatizing public services, slashing healthcare, etc. Such "shock" events are in fact convenient, because populations are vulnerable and have no capacity to resist, ask questions, or change the government during such a time.

With there being little else to grab our attention, we have now entered the gallows humour phase of this paralysing global situation (our favourite is the "Party Rock Anthem" chorus set to world leaders pressing nuclear buttons). Between all the memes and apathy, however, we have officially become the first generation to have live-streamed a genocide in real time. And the world's major powers have responded in exactly – and this has been confirmed by mathematics – zero ways to stop it. They are, in fact, shipping more killing equipment to prolong the slaughter. And the culture industry continues to produce album covers for us to discuss. An appendix that societal evolution hasn't gotten rid of yet. Are we ready for this much whiplash on the brain yet? Seems a bit much, no?

And so we have arrived at the logical destination of all this: laughing. Two or so years ago, laughing would have been considered an inappropriate response. But it's less the sadistic kind of laughter and more the break-with-reality kind of laughter – if we can do nothing else to feel safe and remain alive in a somewhat peaceful world, we will absolutely, positively laugh. Laughing at world leaders is the only form of power we realistically have over them, when everything else is gone. Because, dude, can we live a little? We have people to meet, places to go, texts to reply to, drunk calls to make, jobs to start, jobs to quit, and the Goa trip group chat is just about to reach a consensus on the dates. The memes are so appallingly funny because they are absolutely right.

They were so sure that the second world war was the "war to end all wars," nuclear pinky promise. In 2023, we even had a blockbuster movie about the guy who made the nuclear bomb, and we had lively debates about his ethical morality. Today, the countries with the nuclear bombs have decided that actually, nuclear bombs aren't really deterring anything. They have discovered that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is, at the end of the day, just words. Just an idea. Their solution to this is, of course, more war with other bombs.

If we come out of this on the other side, we might just discover that everything is an idea: diplomacy, economics, politics, sovereignty, the nation state, borders. If they were to unravel the meaning of peace, we could, in theory, unravel the meaning of war and who gets to decide to wage one.