The Dog at Reese

            I told this story repeatedly — possibly obsessively — for years. I needed to shape it into art. Not necessarily good art, but art: a story, a narrative, a made thing outside of myself, outside of me, something I could then deal with as part of my Self.

            Apparently, though, I never wrote it up or put it on my computer or on line.

            I will now.

            For sure it was in the summer, probably of 1963 or 1964, and I was in my late teens. And for sure I was working a summer job in the Gastro-Intestinal Research Lab at Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center (“Reese,” now out of business). My official title was “Student,” and I was there, primarily, in theory, to work on a project to determine, “Would it be feasible to utilize strips of rat gut for the in vitro determination of the effects on stomach motility of various pharmaceuticals?” The answer was “No,” and my final report consisted of my writing out the question on a 3x5 or 4x6 notecard and gently telling my employers that if they’d done sufficient library research before assigning me the project they’d have known it’d been tried and never gotten to work — but guinea pig uterus would work. 

            Anyway, I had more time for the “Student” aspect of the job, which was primarily “To ask stupid questions.” I’d been represented to the precursors of a Human Resources department as someone who’d been trained in microbiology — which was true — but my boss knew I had switched over to a major in English. What he wanted was a young person from outside gastroenterology who’d ask intelligent but naïve questions and make him explain what they were doing. For thatI was definitely, and sometimes embarrassingly, qualified. 

            I also found a lot of time to read — much of research in the life sciences is waiting for timers to run out — and I helped doing whatever needed to be done.

            One morning what needed to be done included killing a dog who’d been the victim of an operation that went wrong. 

            I don’t know what the experiment was, but it involved a large incision in the dog’s rib cage, one that couldn’t be just sewn up. It had to be wired closed, and the wire had gotten kinked, which weakened it, which … — well, which resulted in the dog lying in our courtyard area with its ribcage open and in extreme distress.

            It was only years later that I learned the euphemism “put down” — one euphemism I approve of — and my memory is that I was asked to help kill the dog. Anyway, the more senior lab tech prepared the lethal injection, which consisted of a palm-full of Nembutal (pentobarbital) put into a large syringe and then adding water; and I went out into the courtyard, squatted down, and “popped the vein” on the dog’s left front leg. 

            And the other guy came out, injected the dog with enough barbiturate to quite literally kill a horse — and the dog didn’t die.

            Background 1: On the wall in each room of our lab was the code of ethics for dealing with experimental (nonhuman) animals, which stated that no animal was to be made or allowed to suffer more than or longer than necessary for the experiment.

            Background 2: Someone had put the wrong barbiturate in the Nembutal bottle. I don’t know what it was, but obviously it was something weaker, or maybe not a barbiturate at all.

            Background 3: For P.E. the preceding semester, I’d taken Personal Defense. I’m small and hardly excelled in the course, but one thing I was good at was what was called “the Japanese choke hold,” which undoubtedly has another name nowadays since the “Japanese” part may’ve been racist, and anyway it’s now the name of something pornographic (I didn’t click on the links that came up on a Google search). 

            Background 4: I grew up with dogs and very much like dogs and bond with dogs.

So I’m there still squatted down holding the leg of a dog trying desperately to breathe, and two thoughts go through my head simultaneously (although I must narrate them one after the other). I was an English major, already specializing in mostly-early drama, so I experienced this as a kind of Morality Play with the relatively good angel on one shoulder saying, so to speak — none of this was exactly in words — You canbreak this dog’s neck quickly and cleanly; therefore it is your duty to do so. And I started to straighten up — and then there was a very archaic voice saying, Yes. You’ve killed with a needle, but what does it feel like to kill with your hands?

            And about half-way up — I’m sure of this because my knees ached for the next few days — half-way up I froze and went into a kind of a fugue with the line from Murder in the Cathedral going through my mind, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: / 

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

            Eventually — I have no idea how long — the other lab tech came out with a different syringe, shook me, and we “put down” — killed — the dog.

            Two things.

            First, I understand better than most people that line in Murder in the Cathedraland what it means in the context of T. S. Eliot’s verse drama about martyrdom and what it can mean in a situation like mine with The Dog at Reese. This is good because it puts me in a strong position to say that in most other contexts, certainly most political contexts, Eliot’s line is beautifully-written bullshit. Far better generally is the idea in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together […].” People’s motivations are complex, and with most people, most of the time, if they’re doing the right thing, just accept that, sometimes with gratitude. 

            Second, however flawed and outdated Carl Jung’s analytical psychology may be, he’s on to something with the concept of the Shadow. I’ve met mine. And I have tried to make him mine: a part of me that on at least one occasion took charge to do a good deed. It was not a great good deed, but it was good and it was done by me, including the Shadow-me, using the strength of that archaic, dark voice. 

            And that’s pretty much it. That’s the story and most of what I’ve learned from it. 

Other results …? Well, for ecological and ethical reasons, in part, I don’t eat mammal meat; but also because of that dog and other dogs and — unmentioned by the Shadow-voice — the rats I killed to get the gut to make the strips to answer the question of my unnecessary project. (Although it would have saved the lives of many rats and guinea pigs if one rat gut could make many strips to test “various pharmaceuticals.”) Also, it helped radicalize me as they used to say in the late 1960s, although I didn’t see my position as all that radical. It was just, “Don’t kill complex organisms — humans especially (although that may be just sentimental) — unless you really, really have to.” Not, say, out of pride or greed or wrath or gluttony — for four of the old Seven Deadly Sins— or nationalist fervor or only following orders or because some part of you is sincerely, deadly curious, “What is it like to kill with your hands?”

            Well, and I — basically a good human being, as humans go — remember and appreciate the upshot of a great line from a so-so play, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together […].”

Honor: Shakespeare's Falstaff, Trump's Vocabulary

Well, ’tis no matter. Honor pricks me on.

Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on?

 How then? Can honor set to a leg? no. Or an arm? no.

Or take away the grief of a wound?

No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No.

What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”?

— Falstaff, before the Battle of Shrewsbury, 1 Henry IV 5.1.129-33

            In "The Pretty Complete Shakespeare Guide to Donald Trump," I list among the parallels to Trump Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff. I don't quote the line, but the primary parallel was summed up in Falstaff's reflection "Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!" (ˆ2 Henry IV 3.2.301-2) and how in both cases the "lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable" (1 Henry IV 2.4.212-14).

            A more subtle parallel came up around 4 and 5 May of 2017: dates I remember since the 4^th of May is the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, and 5 May is Cinco de Mayo, with a capital "C": a holiday in my part of the US as well as Battle of Puebla Day in Mexico. When asked about meeting with Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea, Mr. Trump responded, CNN reported, "If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it."

            I have no complaints with the idea of the President of the United States calling the long-standing bluff of the North Koreans and arranging a full-scale peace conference to end the Korean War, with some of the groundwork laid in a quick, properly chaperoned, private meeting between the US President and the supreme leader of the PRK. My interest here is Mr. Trump saying he'd be honored.

            I quote as a headnote Falstaff's self-"catechism" asking himself if he should risk life and limb in battle for "honor." He does fight, sort of, but not for honor; and some people might not like the conclusion that "honor" is just a word: air, breath, a symbol like a scutcheon — a coat of arms ("escutcheon") displayed at a funeral. Honor, at least for Falstaff, at least of the military variety, is what makes living men dead soldiers.

            Note, though, that in the Henry plays and elsewhere people, especially men-type people, act for honor, but only Falstaff asks what the word means. It's a good question. "Honor" can imply mere reputation or even more crassly the sort of "honor" one gets on the Monarch's "Honour's List" as it was back in the day of, say, Macbeth, when an "honor" could imply a title, plus land, money, and power. That's behind the exchange when Macbeth before the murder of King Duncan so very carefully sounds out Banquo's willingness to support … something, at some time. Neither Macbeth nor Shakespeare had the phrase "plausible deniability," but they understood the concept.  

MACBETHIf you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,It shall make honour for you.

BANQUO                                                 So I lose noneIn seeking to augment it, but still keepMy bosom franchised and allegiance clear,I shall be counsell'd. (Macbeth 2.1.25-29)

Macbeth suggests there'll be "honour" as in profit for Banquo if he goes along with some action by Macbeth in the future. Banquo responds with a reference to a more refined honor when he puts a condition on his cooperation. He'll cooperate so long as doing so would be honorable, with "honorable" as in ethical and patriotic.

            Falstaff is the philosopher of 1 Henry IV, and a great comedian, a master of words.

            "Honor," Falstaff says, pricks him on — as in pricking with a goad for cattle (cf. to "goad someone [on]). But what if honor figuratively pricks him off — checks him off the list of the living — when he "comes on," i.e., presses forward into battle. There's a joke here, and it's a tribute to Falstaff's verbal brilliance that it's on us, his audience. Nowadays, to dirty-minded adolescent boys and some girls, "prick me off" and "come on" sound … suggestive. Same suggestions back in Shakespeare's day, with "prick," which has and had the slang meaning of "penis" and "come," which has possibilities. The joke is that this isn't dirty, and a good actor could look at the audience and get across, "Oh, you nasty-minded people!"

*

            Like Falstaff, the theoretically Honorable Donald J. Trump bends reality — as he perceives it — to his will with words; unlike Sir John, Trump is careless with words and possibly often ignorant.

            Since Kim Jong Un commands a military with several thousand artillery tubes that can be brought to bear on Seoul, South Korea, it is well for American presidents to avoid insulting him. Such prudence, however, does not require sucking up, which would be the case if Mr. Trump really expressed his feelings in indicated he'd feel honored to meet with Kim.

            Significant here, for me anyway, is that Mr. Trump doesn't much care what the word "honored" means and that most of his supporters apparently don't care that he doesn't care.

            We are seeing I think a temporary culmination of a long-running trend.

            Back when I was teaching, every few semesters I'd return essays and write on the chalkboard in large letters, Words mean. And one semester I got some pushback on that assertion. A moderately cute couple of my students branded me a Literalist and one or other of the pair wrote and submitted a satiric attack on The Literalist as a type. This was in a course in expository writing (i.e., essays), and I'm pretty sure it was during the period I was starting out our work with examining "Sayings and Such": sayings, proverbs, coachly clichés — that sort of stuff. The first one was, "A stich in time saves nine," and I asked the students to explain what that meant and what you had to do to figure it out (finish the thought for one thing: "A stich in time saves nine stiches"). And then we'd move on to meatier matters like "No Pain, / No Gain." Is that true for weight training"? (I was taught "No"; my students were taught "Yes"; and a lot depends on what one means by "pain.") And for coached team sports, Pain for whom? Gain for whom? (I received a hell of an essay on that one from a student who finished a high school football game with his knees shot up with a cortisone and Xylocaine cocktail. At the end of the term, I confirmed with the student that the "I" of the essay was he and asked how he was doing. He replied, "I can walk, but I'm not playing football." His father punched out the coach, but the coach and trainer were otherwise unpunished.)

            Or what does it mean when a coach or principal or boss asks you to devote "110%" to the team or school or job? Obviously, the statement is figurative since s/he can't demand 110%, not with percentages only going up to 100. What percent are we talking about here — and why don't players and students or teachers or workers ask just what percentage is being demanded? My last question is mostly rhetorical. Part of the answer, though, is that they'd get in trouble for pointing out that an authority figure was bullshitting and/or demanding a blank check; and another part is that people don't even notice the bullshit or care much. People could say, "Okay, I realize that "110%" is a figure of speech, but what do you literally have in mind? Personally, I have other demands on me — legitimate demands — so I can give the team (school, job) maybe 20%."

            Few people say such things 'cause they want to avoid trouble, and over hundreds and thousands of unresisted utterances of such bullshit, it gets normalized and becomes unremarkable.

            More innocent is the sort of carelessness encapsulated in one of my oldest school memories. The pedantic old woman who taught my fourth grade class — fourth grade or thereabouts — complained about people's saying they "love ice cream." They wouldn't run back into a burning building to save Ice Cream, and they don't have a personal relationship with it, so she wondered why we couldn't just say we like ice cream. She was pedantic, overly fastidious, and right.

            Over hundreds and thousands of casual sloppy utterances, an important word like "love" gets a little trivialized and moves toward a heart-shape on Facebook.

*

            Other aspects of the hyperbole subset of bullshit were a problem for me writing recommendations. The Director of Film Studies told me I was screwing over students in saying that they were "competent, diligent, reliable, and bright." That was damning with faint praise. The graduate programs and grants and transfers our students applied for demanded brilliance and unique qualifications. I noted to the Director that if the applicants were as good as the screening committees apparently demanded, what the hell were they doing in our program much less why would they go to programs little better than ours? Applicants as good as the programs seemed to be demanding would do better than those programs.

            What I ended up doing was using my old terms but explaining them and, on occasion, giving where I was coming from.

                        Item 1: In response to something I said, the Chair of my department looked at me and replied, "Oh, come on, Rich; you've got a second-rate mind." To which I replied, "Yes, but I'm at a third-rate school." He didn't argue the point. If Cambridge and Chicago in their glory days, and Harvard and Stanford were or are first-rate; if the Big Ten school my boss and I attended was second-rate — then a school like Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) was third-rate.

                        Item 2: Probably in response to a self-deprecating remark I'd made, and quite likely after a couple or more gin-and-tonics, the great scholar of Medieval literature, Robert Kaske said to me, "No Rich; you're bright. (beat) Not brilliant, but bright." Kaske was brilliant; I was and generally still am, bright. I was and am also competent, professional, diligent, and dependable, and when I call an applicant those things it's significant praise. Brilliant is nice, but brilliant people aren't always diligent and dependable — or loyal to the people who gave them a break or their first job. Brilliant people can do better.

            With one candidate I really wanted to praise, I wrote that the person "is one of the most intelligent people I've met. He is not as bright as, say, Susan Sontag, Octavia Butler, Michael Harrington, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Senator Paul Douglas, but [s/he] is in their league and is among the brightest of the people who were my instructors, students, colleagues, and/or superiors in the hierarchies at the University of Illinois, Michael Reese Medical Center, Cornell University, and Miami University."

* *

We can be more careful with language, and one good thing Mr. Trump may accomplish is showing how important such care can be. Now that lesson may be taught if he makes some horrible verbal error and Kim Jong Un orders the bombardment of Seoul — but short of that, he can teach some valuable lessons on what not to do.

            "What is honor?" Well, it's not a meeting with a two-bit dictator.

Do Unto Others …

            It's an old, weak, and mildly blasphemous joke that "Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you" is bad advice for a literal-minded masochist. More seriously, one should balance this Golden Rule with the negative formulation —"That which hateful in your sight do not do to another" — and the trickier rule, "Do unto others as they'd be done by."

            What you like is not necessarily what I like; the way I want to be treated is not necessarily the way most people want to be treated.

            For sure, the way I want to be treated differs in some important ways from what seems to be the way most Americans want to be treated.

            Take risks, for a primary example.

            I am highly "risk-adverse," as the new jargon has it, and I'm conservative in handling money and in taking care of my health and not taking chances. Indeed, such aversion may be a weakness in my character.

            Still, I can do arithmetic, and I have my values; and, among other things, I highly value my time and convenience. Indeed, indeed, quite possibly I value my time and convenience to a degree that's makes for a flaw in my character (God knows my mother thought so).

            So I'll accept the argument that a number of people, especially people of the corporate variety — hey, the Supreme Court has said so — aren't always just covering their asses but sometimes really do want to give unto me the protection that they want for themselves and their families.

            Even when I don't want that protection. Even when I'm in the minority but far from alone in that attitude.

            The US Transportation Security Administration is an obvious case in point here, although I really should save it for last since this is the example most likely to piss readers off.

            What the hell.

            It would be a very bad thing for the United States to have another disaster such as the al-Qaeda attacks on New York City and Washington of 11 September 2001. It would be less awful but still a very a bad thing to have an airplane crash into a city neighborhood. To have an airplane blow up in the sky with just the crew and passengers killed, though — that's a horrible thing for those on board and their families and friends, but no immediate threat to the American Republic nor an intolerable loss to American society.

            As a method of transportation goes, air travel is very safe; riding in a car is far more dangerous (to say nothing of widely-accepted risks like obesity or smoking cigarettes). As risks of death go on Planet Earth, even in 2001, terrorism was and remains way down the list.

            I'd like a "Do the Arithmetic" line at the airport for people willing to show I.D., go through a metal detector set to detect guns, and get on a plane that's equipped (as they now are) with a heavy, lockable door on a cockpit: a cockpit itself equipped with a couple or three plastic urinal bottles for the cockpit crew. Oh, yeah — and part of the safety briefing includes, "Passengers should note that the rules have changed, and if someone tries to hijack the plane, fight them. If all of us can't overcome a few of them, the healthy adults among us deserve to die."

            Far less sensational, I want my sensitive information protected on the internet, but I bloody well want to get at it, especially when it really isn't all that sensitive. For example, my LoseIt account for a dieting program is so well protected on line that it's easier for me to access it with an iPhone than with an iMac. Are there really people out there trying to get my weight and exercise schedule? Are there people who will try to blackmail us fatties with our weird eating habits? Hell, the local newspaper used to publish my annual income — I worked for the State of Ohio — so I think I can stand it if someone learns my caloric intake.

            There can even be problems when people try to be sensitive to others' feelings.

            A downright saintly veterinarian came to his office in the middle of the night to take care of my injured cat, who'd probably been hit and dragged by a car. He tried to explain to me in euphemism what my options were, and I had to translate that into, "You want to know how much I'm willing to spend to save the cat rather than kill him?" He said that that was what he meant, and I named a figure, and he said he thought he could do that — and he went on to save the cat's life.

            The vet did unto me as he'd be done by, I suspect, and as most of his human clients wanted, but he ended up causing me additional pain when I had to do that translation.

            I'm from a family where we give bad news directly, and for me anyway, that's the kindest way to deliver bad news.

            So there are problems here.

            I'm sure the governor of the State of New York did what most New Yorkers wanted when he put the National Guard into New York State's airports when planes flew again in the fall of 2001. For me, though, seeing youngsters in uniforms with M-16s in the Buffalo airport didn't increase a sense of security. It reminded me of an airport in Costa Rica in the 1980s and from there the "Troubles" in Chicago in 1968 and college campuses in 1970.

            If I had thought those weapons were loaded, I'd have felt even less secure.

            Well, there are problems with doing unto others, and the problems aren't exactly solvable. So I'll pass along this much advice and (for a bit) shut up. There's much to be said for Immanuel Kant's "Categorical Imperative" as a Golden Rule I'll paraphrase: act in ways that you can wish the principle of your action could become a rule for everyone. Or, for a less abstract rule, there's the Prophet Micah's paradoxical but useful injunction to "Do justly; love mercy; and walk humbly with your God" (6.8-9).

            (Why paradoxical? Because there's the ancient and useful idea that justice is giving people what they deserve, while mercy has us treating people better than they deserve — and humility implies we shouldn't be judging at all. See Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, esp. 2.2 and 5.1.435-70.

            Especially important is the walking humbly part of Micah's injunction, including knowing that, whether or not there is God or gods, we humans can have only a partial view. That is, we humans can see the world only partially, and we're partial to our own vision of things and our feelings about those things. Egocentrism is part of the human condition — I look around, and the world revolves around ME — but egocentrism in a grownup is silly. Humanity isn't the center of the universe and "Man is" emphatically not "the measure of all things." Much more so, I am not the measure of all things, nor can I assume that what I want or the people I know want is what everyone wants.


            So do unto others as you'd be done by, but very, very carefully. They may want something else. Even if you're trying to protect them, to be kind to them, that might not be what they want or need.

Euphemism: When You Want Truly Obscene Language (9 June 2014)

            It was some time during the 1980s: after 4 July 1982, when I earned my certification as an open-water scuba diver, and before November 1986, when the Iran-Contra affair became national news and few would joke about US actions against Nicaragua. Anyway, sometime in the mid-1980s I went to Roatan Island off the coast of Honduras for some of the best scuba diving in the Caribbean, and I ran into a young officer (captain if I remember right) in the Army of the United States.

            Now at least at that time, and in a cheap resort, there wasn't much to do on Roatan except dive, eat, play cards, play darts, eat more, drink, and, with all of these options, bullshit with other divers. I don't play cards and had had my fill of darts, so I was engaged in some serious drinking and shooting the shit with, among others, the Army officer.

            He wasn't with our diving group, and when we asked what he was doing on Roatan, he said something like, "What else?! I'm a spy." He was also, he said, a "red diaper baby": the offspring of Leftists, one who'd rebelled from his parents a bit — he went no further Right than Liberal — and joined the Army.
            It's possible that he was a spy of sorts, checking out US expatriates on Roatan for news from Nicaragua, though mostly getting in some diving; and there was no reason to doubt his family story. But I don't need any special reason to talk politics, and we proceeded to get moderately drunk, a little loud, and maybe just a tad too emphatic.

            Anyway, apropos of God-knows-what, I took an idea from George Orwell's great essay from 1946, "Politics and the English Language" and pushed the idea farther than I would have sober, saying something like, "You know, the great problem of the 20^th century is euphemism!" The Army officer gleefully jumped on the line, pointing out war and famine and genocide and torture and additional abominations, and suggested, strongly, I withdraw my assertion on grounds of its denseness and my inebriated stupidity. I said something with my usual sophistication, like, "Well, maybe not" and backed down a step or two, or possibly excused myself to empty my bladder or go to bed — or passed out, since that's all I remember of the conversation.

            I should have stood my ground more firmly.

            Indeed, euphemism is not the great problem of the 20^th century or any other century, but as the sainted Georges insist — Carlin as well as Orwell — language is important, and we should recognize in Orwell's words, "that the present political chaos," and that's any "present" I've experienced, "is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

            And the most serious of "the decay of language" and the perversion of language is political euphemism, reinforced by "question begging" — in the old senses, including evading the real issues — "and sheer cloudy vagueness." Orwell's examples: "Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements." That was in the mid-20^th century; in our time we have "nuclear exchange," "collateral damage," "friendly fire," "projection of force," and "area denial munitions" (= landmines) for some military euphemisms, and less spectacular business and political euphemisms for firing people, putting them on the government dole, and then cutting off their money: they're downsized, assisted with welfare, and then encouraged to take responsibility.

            Orwell asks his readers to picture "some comfortable English professor" — an example I resent but won't deny — "defending Russian totalitarianism" under Stalin: i.e., Stalin of the purges, massive "transfer[s] of population," and murderous famines. This hypothetical academic "cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so,'" but would more likely say or write something along the lines of, "‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’"

            This is parody, but, as the Brits might say, spot on parody, including the point that "The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism," and, given Stalin's enthusiasm in killing off his own people, a euphemism that is obscene.

            Overstating his case, Orwell says that most political writing of his time was "largely the defense of the indefensible" and notes, correctly and with no exaggeration, that "Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties."

            So let's follow Orwell and imagine cases nowadays where politicians, pundits, and policy wonks are pressed to say directly what they mean.

            For example, when the President says, "No options are off the table," let's have a reporter ask, "Do you mean, then, that you'd be willing to destroy the major cities of _________ with thermonuclear weapons?" When a senator calls for a "surgical strike" with a drone-launched Hellfire Missile, s/he can be praised for not suggesting the older method of dropping high explosives or incendiaries on a whole village or town but only taking out a house or two — but asked if s/he is suggesting killing or wounding or maiming some relatively innocent people in that house or two in order to kill or wound or maim (given good intelligence and luck) some bad people.

            "The phrase surgical strike," as George Carlin has said, "might be more acceptable if it were common practice to perform surgery with high explosives."

            When fiscal conservatives talk about the need for "belt tightening," they can be asked how many people should lose their jobs for an appropriately tight belt. When defenders of the Bill of Rights talk vaguely about rights of privacy or bearing arms, they should be pressed to give approximate body counts to be risked to protect their e-mails or their right to bring a large-magazine weapon into a bar.

            So, again, euphemism was not the great problem of the 20^th century, but it would be nice in the 21^st if people talking politics were pressured to spell out what they mean with concrete words that call up images.

            If you believe that there are too many deer in an area, say if you like that "We should cull the herd," but add by that you mean shoot some, especially female deer of reproductive years. If you believe we should send troops into combat in support of some policy — and there are times when the United States should do so — say that you wish to send out heavily armed young people to enforce a policy decision by threatening to kill, wound, and maim other young people (and some miscellaneous old people and children) or threaten to do so until we have imposed the will of our leaders upon their leaders. And we'll destroy a fair amount of property, or at least threaten to.

            Basic rule: If you're willing to do something nasty, be willing to say what it is you're proposing to do.

            So, as indicated, I am willing to say that I believe there are situations where I will acquiesce in the killing, wounding, and/or maiming of children in order for my government to get its way. I must say that since I'm not an absolute pacifist. Therefore I believe there can be instances were one should engage in warfare — and kids are always killed in wars of any size. If you drop high explosive or incendiary ordnance into a village or town or city, you will kill people and destroy the products of their labor, and it is somewhere between ridiculous and abhorrent to say, "Well, I didn't intend to do that harm." Some nut throws a heavy-duty fragmentation grenade into a crowd and that's murder, even if he only intended to kill a bad person. Period — and ditto if you drop from the air or send in on a missile a whole lot more high explosive than in a grenade.

            What makes me a "Peacenik" is that I believe you should kill people to get your way only when you really, really have to. I'm one of those bleeding-hearts because I want people to think carefully about even necessary killing and acknowledge that even justifiable and justified homicide is still homicide and that large-scale killing in warfare is evil, even if there's an ethical imperative to do the do the killing.

            It is our duty to choose the lesser of two or least of several evils if those are our only choices. To choose evil, however, is to choose evil — and there is always the possibility that we missed a way out of the dilemma, and the strong likelihood that we put off action until we were trapped in that dilemma.

            Okay, people: do what you're going to do; propose the policies you think we must follow, but call deeds by the right names and bloody well take responsibility for what you do and what you recommend to do.
            Then, and only then, can we have moral discussions. And without moral discussions, we can't have moral action.

            Insofar as euphemism keeps us from honest thought and discussion, it may not be the major problem of politics, but it is a big one.

"Squeamishness," "Manliness" ... Brutality (13 Aug. 2014)

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“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." 

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. 

It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. 

But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) 

in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars 

and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. 

Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like 

 the bureaucracy of a police state or the office 

of a thoroughly nasty business concern. —

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

 

I'm still stewing over the line in an editorial in The Ventura County Star (our local paper in "south-central-coastal California") on President Obama's "squeamishness about the use of force" in Iraq, a sequeamishness he's partly overcome as I write in early middle-ish August of 2014.

Let's go back to a war ambiguous enough to keep a conference of ethicists at work for a few years, but relatively straight-forward as wars go and certainly compared with most wars currently and lately: "The Big One," "WWII," "The Last Good War" (on the side of the Allies).

The people of Dresden and Hamburg were, generally and undoubtedly, "Good Germans," supporting their duly elected Leader. Did they — or the people of Tokyo — deserve to be blown apart or burned to death or asphyxiated as the firestorms destroyed their bombed cities? Did they deserve to have their children killed — or their children to die, often horribly?

To ask such questions is to answer them, and it is rare for politicians or others to justify carpet-bombing cities in terms of deserve. The questions either aren't asked, or justifications are presented in terms of "speed the end of the war."

Air-power advocates had a theory: "strategic bombing," as it was called, would remove the means of making war at their sources by destroying factories, communication networks, and stores of war materiel; would break the morale of the Enemy by terrorizing the civilian population and killing family members of fighters; and (usually spoken very quietly, if at all), kill off many in a rising generation of potential opponents.  Or, as Winston Churchill is said to have put it back in the days before accurate bombing — deny housing to Enemy workers, since if the bombers could get their bombs onto a city, they'd be sure at least to destroy a bunch of houses.

Back when I was studying such things, the war wonks were still arguing whether or not strategic bombing worked, and my Army teachers were dubious. For sure, however, we can say that warfare from the beginning has involved killing civilians and killing them in large numbers: intentionally as part of a terror campaign and/or "business as usual," or, more recently, as "collateral damage," where noncombants are not killed (wounded, maimed, rendered homeless) as a primary objective but as a more or less unfortunate unintended —  but inevitable — consequence.

Similarly for weapons of mass destruction other than strategic bombers, e.g., massed artilley a fleet showing up in  your harbor with large numbers of naval guns and/or, nowadays, missiles.
I don't know whether President Obama was right or wrong in ordering air attacks in Iraq, and right about now I'm too disgusted with both the Israelis and Palestinians to take sides (although I'm Jewish and old enough to know what "Good Germans" of many nations could do to Jews rendered stateless — and the survival of Israel is important to me). What I can do now is repeat yet again a couple ideas drawn from George Orwell on language, Kurt Vonnegut on warfare, and C. S. Lewis (see above) on the nature of modern evil.

There are always men in the world  — mostly men —who have set up "ends," goals they are convinced will justify "any means necessary" to achieve. These people, generally, are fanatics, often fanatics operating from religious assumptions that involve values of infinite worth: saving souls, e.g., establishing The Kingdom of God, as they see it, doing what "God wills" (Deus vult!). There are other men — mostly men — less lofty in their worldviews for whom "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means," or who pursue the Mafia idea of "Business is business," just on vaster and bloodier scales than Mafia dons and soldiers.

 Such folk can do a lot of damage, as can decent people resisting evil or frightened people who will do unto others before those others do unto us — or people understandably out for revenge.
And many such people are armed and dangerous, and sometimes heavily armed.

This has been the way of humankind and in less sophisticated forms (quite likely) the way of many of the ancestors of humankind. So be it. Let us at least, however, face honestly what it is we do.

Contemplating the destruction of Dresden by US and UK aerial bombing during World War II, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”

I can't be quite that much of a pacifist, so my advice to the hawks calling for US "assertiveness" and "use of force" is (1) to put in specific, concrete terms just what they are calling for, (2) think about Vonnegut's actually rather extreme position — as the world goes — and (3) apply the more limited rule, "Only kill when you really, really have to," and, if we're talking about killing people, maybe not even then.

And, while we're engaging in such relatively idealistic behavior, perhaps we can reduce the "massacre machinery" in its nuclear varieties to levels where our willingness to kill one another doesn't get so out of hand that we take down our civilization, if not our species (and maybe vertebrate life and complex plants).

 That may be unmanly talk, but, then, I'm endorsing some varieties of squeamishness.