Listen
up, all you grassroots conservatives, those whom Grover Norquist
calls the "leave
us alone" coalition. You don't want D.C.'s taxes, its
welfare, its gun control, its schools, its regulations, in short,
its endless meddling in your affairs. Why do you think anyone
else does? For just a moment, avert your eyes from the flag
waving hypnotically before them, and imagine trading circumstances
with an Iraqi,
Afghan,
or Okinawan.
This is how empire looks through your new specs: a gang of armed
foreigners on your street, cruising
for hookers, pawing your daughters, shooting your sons,
and generally lording their might over you. You in the NRA
shirt – you wouldn't be firing back? Hey, Mr. Christian
Coalition – you wouldn't be plotting against the infidels?
Empathy
alone should make real conservatives loathe empire and its concomitant,
war. It doesn't take a bleeding heart to do the basic calisthenics
of moral reasoning, to consider events from another's perspective.
You don't need Noam
Chomsky to explain how pissed you would be if foreign soldiers
stole
your wallet or your car, or forced
you to disarm during a crime wave. You don't need Michael
Moore to paint you the horror of watching
your child bleed to death from an invader's bullet. To recognize
the humanity in others is natural. Of course, social engineers
hate human nature, and war is just social engineering in camouflage.
(Hence the bureaucrats' proclivity for metaphorical
wars on poverty, drugs, etc.) The Pentagon spurs us on to
mass murder by alleging that our gut deceives us. As I
wrote back in March,
Doing
violence to anonymous foes requires a firm sense of the enemy's
otherness. Killing an acquaintance is easy enough, in a sense,
because one can catalogue specific grievances against him or
her. Killing an unknown schmuck in the same position as oneself
is another matter.
Hell,
he's got opposable thumbs, seems to speak some sort of language,
and he didn't do anything to me. I'm tempted to let him live.
Despite
the state's best efforts to stamp it out, human nature persists,
which is why our welfare-warfare empire boasts so much counterfeit
empathy. Bill Clinton, that geyser of kitsch, won two elections
by "feeling our pain," a physiological impossibility.
Oddly, his Uri
Geller-esque sensitivity did not extend to Branch
Davidians, cancer
patients, Sudanese,
and Serbs.
When George W. Bush slobbers on and on about "compassion,"
he apparently means running record
deficits, not sparing innocent lives. How much more of this
nonsense can Americans – especially conservatives, who pride themselves
on their resistance to flimflam – take? In addition to hardening
our hearts, perpetual war must make us stupid, a suspicion backed
by new evidence every day.
Do
you "leave us aloners" really want to strike a blow
against big government? Think of foreigners as human beings.
Empire drives empathy out of circulation, but the reverse is
also true.
