A Wretchard Choice

Richard Fernandez, né Wretchard, the writer of The Belmont Club, doesn’t need my help publicizing his blog; I’m putting this comment of his up in my own blog more as a reminder to myself of how well he’s put this point. I argued the same in a letter to a friend of my father that I wrote about three years ago, but never sent (he didn’t want his angry friend to turn his guns on me, and I think he thought one of my generation responding to one of his, outside of family, unseemly). I doubt, however, that I put it as well. The crux of the argument, that I was making specifically in regard to the Iraq war, and which Wretchard Fernandez is making more generally, is: “We don’t want to go there,” “going there” being defined as “being forced to destroy with nuclear weapons vast segments of Islamic society.” Here are his words, as they appear in the third comment of this post, Thinking the Unthinkable: (should the link fail to work, he may have moved his archives over to his new home at Pajamas Media, here):

The argument has already been made and widely
accepted that Western society is guilty and deserves
collective punishment. Much of the Left believes this, an[d]
certainly Osama Bin Laden does. Terrorism is all about
collective punishment. That's why terrorists don't meet
armies or enemy forces directly. They strike at civilian
and other targets reasoning that one is as “guilty” as the
other.

The idea of collective retaliation is an old one. What was
the bombing of Dresden about? The Japanese, who
butchered civilians in Nanking and Manila knew all about
collective punishment. And so did the Brits, who used
poison gas and strafing runs against Iraqis in the pre-
World War 2 years. There is no way to prettify collective
punishment. It is so unavoidable that deterrence -- the
thing that kept the world in one piece from 1949 to
1989 -- was based on it.

Consider, that if in 1963 it was US policy to incinerate
every Russian man, woman and child in the event they
had to “duck and cover” -- American schoolkids were
taught to try to survive a nuclear blast -- then why is it
less moral to apply the same morality to terrorist
supporters and places of prestige?

In truth, they are equally immoral. And for myself, I think
it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.
About all you can say is that it may be necessary.
Necessary to make these threats to keep the peace. So
maybe you can argue that we can threaten the immoral to
achieve the moral -- which is the prevention of war -- aka
deterrence.

This used to be called, back in grad school, the art of
“thinking the unthinkable.” At this point some people
mentally short circuit, raise themselves erect, throw back
their heads and announce “I shall not contemplate this.”
But after a while, they sit down and realize that heroic
poses aside, he's still stuck in the same bottle along with
all the rest of the trapped scorpions. Then they go back to
doodling.

For my part, I think the only unambiguously moral action
to take is work toward avoiding this fix to start with. That
means nipping WMD terror threats in the bud. Hitting the
enemy conventionally and precisely now. I don't hold
with the idea, so dear to many pacifists, that we should
just let things slide, because “nothing can be worse than
war” -- meaning limited war, against terrorists. Or holding
back from criticizing noxious ideologies. There is
something far, far worse than this.

And the Hoover piece gives us a glimpse into what that
worse thing is. We don't want to go there. Though we
seem to be doing our damndest to go there anyway.

“‘I shall not contemplate this.’” Turning the other cheek calls for this stance. I wrote a few days ago that it is ok to turn one’s own – ok to let one’s own self be destroyed by a terrorist bomb – but not ok to tell others to turn theirs. I.e., it is ok to fight to prevent injustice being done to others. That said, however, I believe in the professional pacifist. Jesus was not a Zealot, even if they were fighting for freedom from the Romans. Clergy generally refrain from taking up arms. Maxmillian Kolbe did so, but left no doubt as to his bravery. I am not a pacifist, and I’m not even against collective punishment (I am a teacher, after all), but when it comes to nuclear weapons … well, I have thought and written and sometimes spoken in favor of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but if I had the key to the suitcase, if I were in charge of pushing the little red button, I don’t know if I could do it. Perhaps that makes me a coward, but perhaps deep down I hold to that law of morality, that one not do evil, even with the intention that good may come of it. Ech.

If there’s any certainty in all of this for me, I can say these three things: 1. better we colonize the whole of Islamia than nuke it all (note that I am not necessarily recommending this); 2. like one categorically opposed to the death penalty is an invalid juror, I would be an invalid President of the United States; 3. it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to be sinless while living in this world, which is why the monastery has such appeal at times. As Wre- As Fernandez might say of the world, “it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.”

The Lobo Moment

My wife’s second and probably most beloved dog, a German Shepherd-Collie mix, was called Lobo. When we took him off to have him put down (at fifteen years old (!), his back legs were no longer working, due to tumors on the spine), two guys from the Animal Hospital took him gently out of the back of the car, placed him on a rolling trolley and wheeled him across the parking lot and inside. Normally, being half shepherd, Lobo would have torn to shreds, or at least threatened severely, any stranger who had reached into his car. But it was a quiet and peaceful dog that allowed himself to be lifted from the car and placed on the trolley. As he was being wheeled off, he threw his head back and looked back at us – especially at “Mommy,” my mother-in-law. I asked my wife what she thought he was saying. She says, “It wasn’t exactly concern, but he knew he was going to something serious, and he wanted to connect.”

She referenced this “Lobo Moment,” after she came out of surgery. As she had been wheeled off from the room, and I was told to go the other way down the hallway, she had looked back from her gurney and said, “I love you.” “That was my Lobo moment,” she said. She meant that that had been her moment to connect one last time before we were temporarily separated, not that she was being wheeled off to be euthanized, but I reacted as if stricken – after all, death was the fear, death was the unspoken reason for that connection. God thankfully forbade that anything like that would happen to her, but I had been so afraid that I would lose her that even after the surgery I just couldn’t think of that as her “Lobo Moment.”

Signs?

For many months now I have prayed rosaries for my wife, though not nearly as often as I should, certainly not every day. When I have been strong enough to pray, however, I have most happily prayed the Joyful Mysteries: the Annunciation, the Visitation to Elizabeth, the Nativity, the Presentation, and the finding of the Christ Child in the Temple, for the obvious reason that they are about the miracle birth of Jesus, and we are in need of a bit of a miracle now. We prayed these mysteries in our Rosary on the drive out to Omaha, even though it was on a Sunday and it is suggested that one prays the Glorious Mysteries. When I told my wife we were praying the “wrong” Mysteries, she said, “Can you do that? Is it allowed?” I told her it would be fine.

I was prompted to mention this because, I discovered on the day of my wife’s surgery – yesterday, Tuesday the 24th of June – that three of that day’s scripture passages (the First Reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel) mention the role of God in forming us in the womb. Here are the relevant passages, with their locations:

The First Reading:
1 … The LORD called me from the womb, from the body
of my mother he named my name. 2 He made my mouth
like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me
away…. 5 And now the LORD says, who formed me from
the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him …
(Isaiah 49: 1-6)

The Psalm:
13 For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit
me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise thee, for
thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works!
Thou knowest me right well; 15 my frame was not hidden
from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately
wrought in the depths of the earth (Psalms 139: 1-3, 13-15).

The Gospel:
57 Now the time came for
Elizabeth to be delivered, and she gave birth to a son. 58
And her neighbors and kinsfolk heard that the Lord had
shown great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her. 59
And on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child;
and they would have named him Zechari’ah after his
father, 60 but his mother said, “Not so; he shall be called
John.” 61 And they said to her, “None of your kindred is
called by this name.” 62 And they made signs to his
father, inquiring what he would have him called. 63 And
he asked for a writing tablet, and wrote, “His name is
John.” And they all marveled. 64 And immediately his
mouth was opened and his tongue loosed, and he spoke,
blessing God. 65 And fear came on all their neighbors.
And all these things were talked about through all the hill
country of Judea; 66 and all who heard them laid them
up in their hearts, saying, “What then will this child be?”
For the hand of the Lord was with him. 80 And the child
grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the
wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel
(Luke 1: 57-66, 80).

That last reading is of course related to the Visitation – it is the birth of John, later the Baptist, the child who leaps in the womb of Elizabeth when the pregnant Mary visits her older cousin. I don’t believe in omens, and I doubt I am worthy of signs, but finding out that these were the readings for the day of my wife’s surgery, I hoped.

I had another moment, a possible communication through ordinary happenstance, of what might come of this surgery. Just before we pulled out of our parking spot at home to start off to Omaha, my wife asked me whether I had brought our “pod” – which is what we call our i-Audio mp3 player. When I said no, she said, “Go up and get it.” So I did, and as I came out to lock the door, I heard the new baby upstairs crying. It seems like nothing, but he’s been there for a month, and we’ve never heard him crying before. Again, I don’t believe in omens and I consider myself unworthy of signs (or perhaps I am simply weak in my faith), but some things make one wonder.

Literally ...

As my wife dozes, I have been doing some reading online (updates on her after I go get some dinner). I get James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column in my e-mail, and have enjoyed it for a few years now. A lot of his ideas are politically creative, though sometimes he tries to be a bit too cute. Not today, however, when he went after one of my least favorite grammatical solecisms, in an item called “The Wet Look.” He comments on an article by Tom Gantert of the Ann Arbor News, in which the writer says, “Peirce literally gushes about a homeless man she got to know the last six months at the shelter named ‘Vittorio.’ ” Quips Taranto: “We hope the reporter was standing back.” The image is less than pleasant, but think of it as directed towards the reporter who came up with it in the first place, rather than the poor gal subjected to it.

Operation Day

The psychological ordeal is over, for the time being, and now the physical ordeal has begun for my wife. It really began last night, when she first drank her bottle of magnesium citrate, but this morning she will be put under and have to go through surgery. I’ve thought to write about this, and I’ve thought about this over and over, but I’ve not written much down. I’ve been too stressed out by the thought of thinking this over. My most common thought has been fear, fear of losing my wife, fear for her parents’ loss and loneliness, and fear of being blamed, by myself, by my family, by her parents, perhaps by God. And though I don’t think I am, I’ve also been afraid of finding out I’ve been wrong.

We met with Dr. Thomas Hilgers again yesterday (we last saw him after her exploratory laproscopy last December). He’s a quietly intense man, a slightly disconcerting presence, a bit inscrutable, like most doctors, and with penetrating, appraising eyes. He’s jovial, though, bearded and rotund, a bit like a well-trimmed, tailored, gray-haired Santa Claus. He repeated a few times, “Well, we have our work cut out for us,” in relation to my wife’s severe endometriosis and adhesions. That unnerved her a bit, but she observed that he seems confident; he just seems to be communicating that what he’s doing is labor- and concentration-intensive.

There was a funny exchange between us regarding colleges. I had mentioned a mutual friend to Dr. Hilgers – a local doctor – noting that I knew the man because I had gone to college with his daughter and her husband. He asked, “Where’s college?” When I answered Notre Dame, he remarked, “Well, there you go!” – a remark that wasn’t clarified by the context. He followed that up by asking my wife where she went to school. She was surprised to know that he was familiar with St. Olaf – “oh,” he said, “in Northfield.” It turns out he is from Minnesota, went to St. John’s for college, and did some of his medical training at Mayo, to which my wife responded, “Well, there you go!” to general laughter. Hers seemed pretty clear – it seemed to say, “Wow.” His could have been “Wow,” or “Figures,” knowing how divergent opinions on ND can be.

When I first came into the waiting room, around 6:30 this morning, there were two TV’s on. I was the only one there, and they were both blaring, and so I turned one of them down entirely. I was too slow to turn the other one down, as a group came in while I snooped around the room looking for anyone who might reprimand me for turning off a waiting room television. They left eventually, so I girded my loins and charged over to turn it down. When they came back, they seemed unbothered by the change in sound level (they had previously been sitting right in front of it as it blared, and went back to the same place), so I had peace up until now, about 9:00, when the nice old lady in the waiting room came over to turn on the TV for a young boy who’s waiting on his own. The boy, a son of African immigrants, to judge by his beautifully deep black skin, is sitting without anything to do, other than look across the room at the TV (he seems not to be interested in the magazines), and so she came over to turn up the closer television for him, which is right next to me. I silently groaned, but after she fiddled with it for awhile, she asked the boy if he wanted to watch it. He said no, and she turned to me to find out whether the still low volume was too high. I said no, not wanting to lord it over the whole waiting room, but she then decided to turn it off, since no one would be watching it.

Later:
Just heard from the nurse liaison, a trial position here at Creighton Hospital. She makes a circuit of the operating rooms to find out how the patients are doing. She then comes to the waiting room and updates the family members who are waiting for news. About an hour or two into the surgery, my wife is doing fine. The anesthesiologist says she is stable, and the surgeons are inside, just beginning to take bits of endometriosis out – they are using lasers to cut away the adhesions. I then went out to make a call to update my wife’s parents, who are eager for news, as one might expect.

Later:
The nice old lady came over again. The boy is apparently Sudanese, and they apparently are quite friendly and have the nicest handwriting – or at least he does. She’s a garrulous old gal, but perfectly friendly. When I signed in to the waiting room, she asked who my surgeon was. When I answered Dr. Hilgers, she said, “I knew it. The nicest young couples always come in to him.” Now she wanted to tell me about the Sudanese boy. He’s apparently finished middle school and is on his way to a high school. She advised him not to stay out late, because our culture has changed and there are bad people about. He assured her that he’s always in early. She was quite happy to hear that I am a teacher – I get far more praise for that than I deserve – and commiserated with me like Socrates over the state of today’s youth. She seems to think the Sudanese boy is an exception, and I do too, from the little I saw. He was quite polite with her when she sat down to talk with him, taking her advice without resentment, and when I left to use the phone, I asked him to keep an eye on my laptop, which he did without incident.

Later:
The nice old lady is being nice again, now at 10:34, this time inquiring as to whether a few other people, who aren’t apparently interested enough in their own amusement to bring something to read, would like to watch TV. She asked the woman in question what she would like to watch, CNN? The woman responded, “CNN, Home and Garden, whatever.” “Whatever.” Doesn’t that say it all?

Later:
It is now 12:48. About an hour and a half ago I heard from the nurse liason that things were going well. My wife is still stable, and they have found the fallopian tubes. Way back in December, when they did a laproscopy to check out her interior, they couldn’t get very far. Most importantly, they couldn’t find her fallopian tubes, which might have been damaged or even obliterated by the scarring of the interior by the endometriosis. Dr. Hilgers has found them, however, and they are open and in good shape. I was told at the time that her surgery, instead of finishing between 11 and 12, would now finish closer to 1:00. So, as might be expected, I am starting to get a bit nervous.

Shortly after I received that phone call, I got my in-laws and my parents up-to-date; my father was jokingly unhappy to be called last – in fact, he called me, while I was talking to my mother – but I think he understands. My mother-in-law has been quite nervous, but I think is doing ok. She was moved to tears to hear that my wife and I said some prayers together before she was wheeled out. As a staunch Protestant, she may not have been as moved to tears if she knew the prayers were three Hail Mary’s, but she’s a good woman and easily moved, so she might well have. I also said a Rosary as I sat in the waiting room, a somewhat flawed rosary, however, as I was dozing off in the later decades, due to waking up at 4:30 or so. My final religious effort was a minor sacrifice: last night I ate what my wife ate – broth, jello, and popsicles – and this morning I decided not to eat until I knew she was in the Recovery room. At that point I’ll get up and go out of the hospital to eat something somewhere, but until then I’m devoting this very minor fast to her health and to the Doctor’s success.

Later:
Just heard that Doctor Hilgers might be out to see me in the next fifteen minutes. My wife is apparently doing well, and she will be in the recovery room in about an hour. Ran downstairs to give Sandy a quick call, and then shot right back upstairs.

A New-ish Cliché, Long Disproven

I am a subscriber to and enjoy Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day. The word itself is fairly often one I don’t know, and is accompanied by one or two quotations showing the word in context, as well as another at the bottom of the missive, presumably meant to communicate what Mr. Garg believes are wise thoughts. Sometimes the wisdom is true, but other times it is not. Mr. Garg seems to have a streak of pretty typical Western liberalism in him, all the details of which I cannot remember without looking back through a list of his quotations, but one of which is a penchant for – perhaps a conviction regarding – pacifism. (Take a look at his list of organizations which he supports, at the bottom of this page here, and you’ll see I’m correct about the general drift of his thought.) Thus this bit, which I regard as rather clichéd, but which may not have been at the time, from Tolstoy:

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.

I have to say, not being able to find the context using Google, I can’t quite make out what Tolstoy’s trying to say, or at least how he’s trying to say what it seems he is saying, that violence is equivalent to evil. The literal effort – using violence to prevent evil – implies a paradox between the means and the end, but the metaphorical effort – stopping a cloud to prevent the rain – does not contain that paradox, illustrating only the uselessness of the means because of the inevitability of the unwanted end. Perhaps he feels that stopping a cloud would cause rain, which would lead to the idea that violence causes evil, but of course stopping a cloud would not cause rain but would merely delay it, as it drifted its way through the cloud to an unblocked exit point. Perhaps, though I doubt it, he feels that evil is a natural, inevitable force that should be allowed to do its work unmolested. I have some sympathy with Tolstoy on the first point, believing in original sin as I do: evil will never be fully destroyed, while this world lasts. But evil is not a substance that is everywhere the same. The evil that leached out in 2001 is not the same evil that was prevented in the second half of 1945. More importantly, the people who avoided evil in 1945 are not the same who suffered it in 2001. Nor are the people who prevented it in 1945 the same as those who prevented it in 2002. It is a good to be saved from evil. It is good to save others from evil. Both actions change individuals in ways different from, and seemingly better than, succumbing to violence or watching others do so would.

I’ve not read Tolstoy, so I can’t say what value he gave to the defense of Russia by her soldiers against Napoleon, but from my historical perspective, he’s all wrong. Whenever I hear this violence-is-inherently-evil-and-useless meme, from Tolstoy, from Lennon, from Edwin Starr, from the Pet Shop Boys, this is what I think of:

What other response can there be? Nothing to kill or die for? Violence … breeds violence? Tell it to the men in this photo. This is what war is good for. It is one thing to turn the other cheek, but it is another to look on while the other fellow gets struck, and then, placidly or with an air of tragic regret, advise him to turn his.
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Thanks, by the way, to the folks at A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust for posting the photo above on their site. The photo itself is by Hugh C. Daly, from his book, 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division: A Combat history of World War II. Photos from this book seem to show up here and there around the web, and the book seems to be out of print, so I thought it allowable to use one. If I am incorrect in that assumption, please contact me to let me know. Thank you.

I Need a Synchronizer

The proliferation of information is a botheration to me. I have now four or five computers with multiple copies of the same information on them. I don’t want to lose any of the information, in case it is ever valuable again (much of it is – pictures, music files, tests and questions for my classes), so I copy it and copy it and copy it, over and over again. So now I have multiple copies of each document, sometimes multiple copies on one computer. And when I try to copy over the old stuff, I first am scared to because of what I might lose – I have not composed exclusively on only one or the other ever. And I am second scared because when I try to erase them I am sometimes told that I cannot erase this or that “system file,” that some system file called “thumbs,” an unprepossessing name if ever there was one, might bring down all of Windows. I need a synchronizer, a program that will tell me about these various files, destroying the older identical copies and telling me the amount of variation betweten the mostly identical copies, maybe combining them into one document with the newer text, wherever it is, tacked on or interpolated into the old, pictured in red, or underlined, or preserved in speechclouds that can be called up at the asterisks that identify them, the old text shaded or parentheseed or italicized. There’s gotta be some way of organizing reams of virtual text without being swallowed up in the cataclysm of copies I’ve created.