Good and Evil

In discussing the Iraq situation with a friend recently, I commented that America, in my opinion, was on the brink of moral collapse. (Why be reasonable when one can be dramatic.)

I felt afterward that I owed my friend an explanation of the insidious, unstated philosophy - or more simply put, the attitude - that I personally believe lies behind our current foreign policy, an attitude slowly taking hold of the American mind and endangering us all.

I was immediately reminded of Nietzsche, that acid-tongued lover of aphorism, who famously warned: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

"How could George Bush answer Nietzsche?" I wondered. With all that has happened, all that has been disproved (WMD, an al-Qaeda connection) and proved (torture, the use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel - aka chemical - weapon), how could our Commander in Chief justify this war? But he's George Bush, so you just know he'd try. Then it came to me:

When we torture and kill we do it for the right reasons. We are good. When they torture and kill they do it for the wrong reasons. They are evil.

I suppose a morally bankrupt individual - a chancre of a man, a malignant tumor in human form - could argue that there is a tissue thin difference between the two and that the former is preferable, but then you'd have to be...well, you'd have to be the President of the United States, or the Vice President of the United States, or the Attorney General of the United States, or the Secretary of Defense. That's what we have come to. That is our position, the final justification for this immoral misadventure measured in human lives. When we kill we do it for the right reasons. We are good. It has about as much chance of succeeding as a moral distinction as the Germans did of reaching Paris during the Battle of the Bulge. (That's a double entendre, for you non-war buffs.)

So my merry thoughts were raging when I came upon Harold Pinter's recent lecture accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature (a prize richly deserved, I might add, with all the authority of a dusty BA in Drama backing me up) and he wiped the floor with my one liner. The theme he descants upon is the same - that of moral distinctions that aren't, particularly ones that happen to favor the US - but he is far more eloquent and far more angry than I - as you might expect from a man who is dying.

Conventional wisdom states that those on the brink of extinction find, at long last, their way to the truth and the courage to speak it without fear of consequences. And there are always consequences. As the Turkish proverb says, Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages. No doubt a certain gun-loving law professor from Tennessee and a certain paranoid, fawning babydaddy from the upper Midwest are even now preparing to attack this ailing genius, but since they have yet to volunteer for the war on which our very existence hinges, according to them, they've not been issued rifles and can only fire digital blanks at their enemies.

Here is what Pinter had to say. Read it and weep.