[Newspoetry] Expand the War on War Crimes

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear 3D,

You make an excellent case for your position.  I live by inconsistencies, when it comes to some kind of mental life.  So, although it is not quite a justification of why I say you should say that you support the Troops, when I say that it is as important to say in what ways and how you support the Troops, and also in what kinds your support for them is conditioned.  Even the biggest war-hawks have only conditional support for the troops, as you can find out if you ask them questions like "Would you support the troops if they raped all the women in Basra?  Would you support them if they shot all the children in Baghdad? etc."  

The point about conditions is to point out to people who think that they support some things unquestioningly and absolutely that they actually could not bring even their most rah-rah-gung-ho self into a form of self-acceptance if that absolutism were in fact true in the way that they deceive themselves into thinking that it could be.  People hate to be reminded that there are no absolutes, so they persecute people who relativize values that are (to them (the putative persecutors)) absolute (relatively).  They take pleasure in this act, although they frequently and most often will not admit that they delight in torturing others, for their differences in beliefs -- or just how far they will truly go, to torture those who disagree with them.

Relativism is the most moral standard that the world has ever created for itself, it is at the apex of thought that deems evolution to be a possibility that nature does not guarantee.  Nature makes no guarantee because, obviously, nature as such, as any form of entity (traditionally, god) does not, quite obviously, exist, except as a metaphorical, analogical construct which helps objectify that which has no objectivity to it, at all, as such -- and thus has no possible world in which it could be true.  IE: this proposition is absolutely true: There is no possible world which could contain a god of the kind that is meant traditionally.

So, I support the troops in certain qualified senses, which it is important to state when I say that I support the troops.  I could also state the paired proposition of opposition, similarly, for it must also be true, conditionally, as well: "I oppose the troops, in certain ways, when they commit certain kinds of wrongs."  In truth, you might think that I could neither support nor oppose the Troops and, in that thought, you might be right, as well.  The statement might be irrelevant, except for its public, political character, about the relationship between right doing and wrong doing, the abuse of authority and the responsibility that we all have to support responsible uses of authority, even when we do not agree with a "relevant" authority upon a final question.

Another thought crosses my thinking here.  My parents and in-laws used to say to me, "You must learn to love the sinner but hate the sin that defines the sinner as a sinning person."  Well, actually, I have rephrased what they said, in the general interest of a more universal clarity.  And, sometimes, I'd hear them say, as well, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory that we think some god has."  (Rephrased, of course, from Romans.)  So, I inferred I had to learn to distinguish between the moral qualities, as to how I might hate or love them (as if performative conduct were thing-like), and the person, whom I elsewhere have taken to be commended to me absolutely, that I should love all persons and that it is morally wrong to hate any person.  So, I can love the Troops, and also say that I do, without in anyway suggesting that I (or anyone) could love any crime that they may be committing, wittingly or not.  Here, then, I morph support into love, and distinguish between persons as subjects of love and objects for which any kind of love is simply, absolutely, always wrong (as in the wrong modality of relationship: one can not love what one can own or not (see, generally, the notions of freedom, slavery, and sacrifice)).

And Michael Moore does have it right, just as the Berrigan brothers did, when they poured animal blood on Pentagon-draft office-war machine records 30 years ago.  Sometimes, you have to sacrifice some of your personal freedom, to be as a slave to the idea of the good, to be willing, reluctantly, to call your fellow man and woman to attention, to the wrongdoings that they would otherwise dismiss and ignore, during which they might frolic at Oscar parties, as if nothing too drastically was wrong in the world outside the hall where the masque of Red Death is feted, and to take on then, almost joyfully, when apprehended, the chains of slavery, as a prisoner, as person who has become a prisoner of his own conscience, first.  If we are not such willing slaves to our ideals, what could be so ideal about them, that we would (or not) want to sacrifice in this way, or some other ways, for them?  What conditions our values -- what guards, protects and promotes our ideals?  What life is there but ours to give, as we see fit, to our ideas of what-makes-life-worth-continuing-to-live?  (Traditionally, this hyphen-phrase would be symbolically given as god, but it fails every test of reason, to say "god", because of the emptiness of that word, in most minds.)

Well, now, I know I am too cursory here, in this big sketch -- or big scribble -- if I think back on at least one NewsPoem of a recent Editor-in-Chief of this webbetic site.  thanks for listening, as ever, to this babbling fountain of youth, Donald L Emerick
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