More Than Happy

Preposterous exchange this morning between George Will and Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria is a likeable sort for a lot of predictable reasons, the main one being that he seems to be the type of critic that achieves acceptance, namely a member of the tribe that espouses revolutions that improve, don't alter, the status quo. Zakaria claimed that Americans are casualty averse, and in a stunningly silly retort, Will invoked the Civil War and then referred, nebulously, to much other brutality that we had endured.

In a survey class called 'War and American Culture 1870-1920," in college, we were talking about World War I and the professor made reference to the many catastrophes and blood baths, and made it sound as though the US bore an equal share. I raised my hand and said 'at the Somme, a million men died in three days, the total US battle deaths for the whole war were 115,000.' He looked at me stunned and then just said 'no way.' After class, I went to the library, copied the page from the world atlas and slipped it under his office door. Germans and Russians lost 40M in WWII!! US lost 292K on both fronts! Of course, the other reason Will's comments were absurd is because the Civil War was attended by repeated draft riots. Furthermore, the commission of the war was very crude on the Union side, many attending bloodbaths were totally unnecessary.

Zakaria jumped back in and said 'what I was saying is that if the public feels that the war is not worth fighting (and 57% of the population feels that way about Iraq), then they tend to be casualty averse. If the war is one that has to be fought, like the Civil War, they are more than happy to take casualties.'

Does that phrase even make any sense? This is a case of obiter dicta, where the speaker has lost the reasonable point of reference and is speaking only from his rhetorical position, not realizing how offensive the statement is. One of the most interesting things about this statement is the implied frames of reference: the idea that there are people somewhere that are more than happy to see others die, beckons to the oft noted notion of the silent majority, the huge mass of Americans who supported Vietnam from beginning to end (another numbers thing that most people fail to recognize: support for that war never dropped below 50%!). The other frame of reference that is equally absurd is that of the journalist is simply, humbly reporting the will of the majority. This is how democracy works, the loser of the vote, even if attended a tremendous injustice, is asked to just refer to the established count. This is one of the reasons the justice system is so screwed up: the jury can be a crop of complete idiots who totally disregard the evidence, and we call that justice. Voting is not, by itself, the road to anything just and open, but we are such simpletonian reductionists, we fail to be able to see past that. We have regressed. The founders had a far more sophisticated view of voting than we do (even though their means of dealing with scope was discriminatory, it was a case of wrong discrimination: we need to institute a system of discrimination against the real enemy: stupidity (and its first cousin, ignorance)).