Serves Us Right

One of the blights of American politics is the way it conceals considerations of utility and power behind a screen of ethics. Or, really, "ethics."

A case in point would be the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was undertaken in the interest of
a) obtaining a cheap and reliable supply of oil, or
b) creating an artificial island of (pro-American) democracy in the Arab Middle East, or
c) resolving the 43rd president's Oedipal entanglement with the 41st

but was presented to the American public as a moral gesture on a par with the entry into World War II.

Hence Senator John McCain's characterization of that war-- Iraq not WWII-- as "transcendent."

tran·scen·dent
Pronunciation: \-dənt\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin transcendent-, transcendens, present participle of transcendere
Date: 15th century
1 a: exceeding usual limits : surpassing b: extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience cin Kantian philosophy : being beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge
2: being beyond comprehension
3: transcending the universe or material existence — compare immanent 2
4: universally applicable or significant


The fact is that politics and ethics are two separate realms that occasionally overlap.

For the moment, I will not comment on the politics of the current presidential contest. If I start, it will take a dart from a trank-gun to shut me up.

I will talk about ethics.

From an ethical perspective, any political contest ought to be viewed in terms of its likely effects on suffering, the suffering it causes, the suffering it relieves.

At other times in American history, the ethical variations between the two competing candidates-- or between the policies which, if elected, they were likely to enact-- was fairly small. It is now great.

One of the candidates is committed to the continuing death of foreign civilians and American soldiers in a war he endorsed as "transcendent" but that most experts view as contingent to the real and unavoidable conflict with Islamic, or Islamically-inspired, terrorism. One of the war's earliest consequences was the introduction of religious terror into a country from which it had previously been absent. Prior to March 2003, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. This is not to say that Iraq was paradise. It was a hell with only one devil.

One of the candidates would continue giving carte blanche to an industry that has exploited American natural resources, manipulated the country's foreign policy, and degraded the global environment, the last to such an extent as to threaten the continuing existence of hundreds? -- thousands?-- of life forms and even of land masses.

One of the candidates endorses lowering taxes for the rich and raising them for the middle-class and working poor.

One wants to cut more strands of the social safety net, health care in particular.

One promotes expanding the reach of government into the private lives of American citizens. And into the bodies of American women. His justification for the latter would be to protect other, hypothetical, beings from suffering.

This is not the place to attempt to define suffering. I will simply give examples of it.




The suffering of a father who has seen his son killed while playing football in the street.

The suffering of a strong young man who comes home from a foreign war unable to sleep or hold a job or, really, do much of anything but crouch on the floor of his trailer, from where he can keep an eye on the doors and windows, and keep the TV on to drown out the clamor in his head. For this debility the VA gives him a small stipend and some pills that don't work.

The suffering of a naively devout young man who went to a foreign country to do unspecified "volunteer" work and shortly found himself seized by mercenaries, sold to an invading army, and then delivered, shackled and hooded, to a prison on the other side of the world on suspicion of being an "enemy combatant." Here he is deprived of sleep, occasionally beaten, and driven to such a state of despair that he has tried to kill himself. His captors call this "asymmetrical warfare."

The suffering of a $20-an-hour factory worker now forced to support three children as a $7.50-an-hour checker at a WalMart, the factory having closed. She lives in terror of falling ill because, of course, she has no health insurance.

The suffering of the faceless millions whose small plots will cease to support crops, from whose waters the fish will vanish, whose huts will be swept away by storms more savage than any in their memory or in the memories of the generations before them.