A sense of proportion

Sometimes, I will write formal essays, and sometimes I will post links to articles and interviews I consider noteworthy. Since my intention here at OBH is to take a more philosophical look at the underpinnings of our various national dialogues, rather than provide the usual daily news-blog commentary, you will hopefully see more of the former here. Nonetheless, there will be times - this past week, for instance - when the sheer onslaught of information far outpaces my ability to comment on it. Today, I glanced at my notes and made a quick count of essays-in-progress since this time, last week. There are ten. Clearly, I have my work cut out for me. For the moment, I offer a brief foray into something I cannot let slip into silence.

The biggest story for me this week is the study published in The Lancet which estimates over 650, 000 excess Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. It goes without saying that this is a staggering number. Staggering but, it seems, based on sound and commonly used methodology. This is not the first time the Lancet has drawn controversey - a study reporting 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq in 2004 received a similarly skeptical reception (from politicians and media pundits, that is - to my knowledge, that report has never been scientificially falsified).
That the Bush Administration dismisses these figures is not surprising. What is eerie is that that the report has already, after the passage of mere days, receded into the background. The public, it seems, has only so much energy for outrage on reserve, and that fuel is being spent to make sure that, at all costs, congressmen are prevented from flirting with teenagers.

Don't get me wrong, I think Foley's conduct was inexcuseable. And yes, this revelation of his misconduct is nothing short of gin-soaked, sweat-stained manna from heaven for us liberals and lefties wishing to see the Republican juggernaut implode in time for November 7. But as we stand, licking our lips and sharpening our steak-knives, ready to carve into this Republican corpse, we need to maintain a sense of perspective and recognize that this is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory for us. Let us look (if we dare) at what we've become - depraved panty-sniffers and mud-slingers, feeding the public apetite for an entertaining scandal.

Our national dialogue - the dialogue responsible for fertilizing consent for our domestic and foreign policy - is defined by a lack of perspective of genuinely sociopathic proportions. Most of our political debates occur based on premesis only meaningful if one has completely failed to apprehend reality. No one even considers it a debatable point, for instance, that a congressman's sexual conduct has any demonstrable correlation to his performance on the job. Yet this is precisely what is taken for granted. Also taken for granted (on both sides of the aisle) - that Foley's indescretions are of far greater importance to us than any discussion of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in Iraq. Like the product of some post-modern nightmare, the number 650,000 appears for one day, in close proximity to the word "death", and then recedes back into the subconscious, giving our super-egos their proper space to contemplate the clandestine diddling of page boys.

This imbalance is precisely why any political victory in November will be only, at best, the very beginning of a long, difficult path to recovery. The poison of cultural narcissism flows through the veins of every American, myself included. Democrats are not our saviors. We are voting for Pepsi instead of Coke - one of them is over-sweetened, the other gassier. Our darkest battles are fought on the knife-edge of the world's horizon, too far away for us to count. 30,000? 300,000? Do we have the numeric literacy to perceive meaningful differences in these numbers, to understand what happens to a nation when so many lives are lost? The news says "650,000 deaths" and our president claims it is only 30,000 - and no one sees the fundamental absurdity of this public conversation, in which we might just as well be discussing the latest economic growth figures.

I often ask myself if my fellow countrymen truly realize that these numbers refer to people. Specifically, that they refer to beings every bit as human and complex as you and I and everyone else we know who enjoys sex, food, and television. These were people with memories of childhood (if not, in fact, children), with emotions and desires, people who cooked and sewed and sang, who had troubling dreams, and happy ones, who were tired after a day's work and who felt fear and loss and joy just as we do.

They are gone. They are dead, and the perpetrators of the act seem to believe that the scales of morality weigh human souls like beans - that there is number which is reasonable, and another which is not. In believing this, we have abandoned the very concept of justice. Justice is not a utilitarian idea - it does not place discrete values on human lives. In a just society, we assume the right of the living to life to be inviolable - because one is human, not because one is American. We take life only when attacked, when no alternative for self-preservation exists. The dire need of self-defense is the only justifiable circumstance, for then we can truly say that our hand was forced, that the attacker threw himself upon our sword. In no other condition is the taking of life just.

But invading Iraq had nothing to do with justice. It was about utility, and virtually every mainstream discussion since the invasion, either pro or con, has been argued on utilitarian grouns. Did we use enough troops? Was the time right? Was it too soon after Afghanistan? And so on. Far more critics are willing to attack the incompetence of the operation than its fundamental moral wrongness. Even now, more than three years later, have any politicians spoken up for principles? Or do they say simply that they could've done a better job?

This is what we need to watch for. Democrats are not speaking up for human rights. Perhaps they feel safer attacking Bush's competence, rather than his morals. This, for them, is a wiser target if they wish to reserve for themselves the possibility of pre-emptive strikes in the future, or if they wish to make their own special use of the Consitutional wiggle-room recently leveraged into our torture and surveillance policies. The morality of the Iraq war has yet to appear on the table for discussion. Indeed, if it did, if we assumed that Iraqis had the same human rights as Americans, we would be out of options. The vast majority of them want us to leave now - that is their will, and the right of the people to be heard by definition supercedes any argument we might have for staying, even for a limited period of time.

We must be a nation of principles, or we are nothing more than our armaments.