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Where would you stop?
Sep. 16th, 2003 01:24 amI'm damned glad I don't have the power of life and death. I get so angry sometimes, especially when I'm reading Al Franken's latest book.
I mean, if I could decide who lived and who died, I know where I'd want to start, but where do you stop? With conniving underlings, like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, like Wolfowitz and Rice? With corrupt judges, like Scalia and Clarence "Pubic Hair" Thomas, or Alabama's Roy Thomas? With scumbag politicians (fortunately, that's not redundant; at least, not universally so) like Saxby Chambliss (gained office by impugning the patriotism of Max Cleland, who lost an arm and both legs in 'Nam while Chambliss sat on his "bad knee" deferment) or Tom DeLay (started an exterminator business, and later claimed that so many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like himself).
What about their corporate masters, like the poisonously ubiquitous Richard Mellon Scaife?
What about the Boards of Directors who decide it's better to cheat their own country of taxes by moving their official headquarters to a postbox in Bermuda? Or the so-called journalists and pundits who parrot the party line and attack true patriots?
There's just no end. It'd make the most ghastly slaughters of history look like a lover's caress.
I remember a story by Damon Knight— Rule Golden it was called, and although I read it in a collection in the late seventies, it dates back to 1954 or so. It was about an alien who came to Earth to spread a plague, one that made every living creature feel the same pain it caused to any other creature. You step on my foot, yours hurts as much. You shoot me in the heart, yours explodes in your own chest. "Rule Golden"— the "golden rule" backwards: Be done by as you do. (In the tale, we humans were too violent to be allowed to join the Greater Galactic Community; either we learned our lesson or we literally killed ourselves off. Either way, the GGC remained safe.)
It's not all that far-fetched, and with a half-century's advances in biology you could make the virus species-specific. (The alien in the story acknowledged that non-intelligent predator species would quickly die off, since they could no longer hunt and kill their prey without dying from the agony they caused themselves.) But still… would even that be enough?
Not every act of cruelty causes literal pain, at least not immediately.
The manager who lays off a division of highly-trained, highly-paid employees and ships the work to third-world slave-wage countries hasn't hurt the newly-unemployed. Except in today's shit-can economy, it might be months or years before you found an equivalent job at an equivalent wage. Or maybe never, and you and your family wind up starving, or working three or four minimum-wage jobs just to stay alive, and you go to bed hungry so your latch-key kids get enough to eat when they come home from overcrowded, underfunded schools.
The bureaucrat who signs off on rules to allow more pollution so uncaring zillionaires can make even more money isn't "hurting" anyone, at least immediately. Never mind how many people will eventually sicken and die, how many species become extinct, or how much quicker global warming will drown the coastlines and scorch the heartland.
The "journalist" who promulgates the lies and deceit instead of exposing them doesn't cause pain. He just makes it possible for the liars and deceivers to beat the rest of us down, to steal away the last crumb of hope that we can ever take back what's been taken from us, the true principles of liberty and freedom on which this country were founded.
But the hell of it is, even if you could somehow make these evil motherfuckers feel the equivalent pain, they can only die once. Dubya and Cheney and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Grover Norquist and Condi Rice and all the other Vile Bastards In Power couldn't ever feel the pain of a thousand thousand deaths. Or know the horror of choosing to leap 110 floors to certain doom as the best alternative to being burnt alive or crushed to jelly, all because the VBIPs paid absolutely zero attention to the most pressing problems of national security. Another Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Robespierre couldn't die as many times as the deaths they caused, directly and otherwise. They couldn't feel that much pain, experience that much terror and despair. They couldn't live long enough to feel it, even if they lived a thousand years.
I don't have an answer here. I'm not even sure I have a question. I'm just glad I don't have The Power, because I'm not at all certain I could avoid the Abbot of Citeaux's solution: Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His.
I mean, if I could decide who lived and who died, I know where I'd want to start, but where do you stop? With conniving underlings, like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, like Wolfowitz and Rice? With corrupt judges, like Scalia and Clarence "Pubic Hair" Thomas, or Alabama's Roy Thomas? With scumbag politicians (fortunately, that's not redundant; at least, not universally so) like Saxby Chambliss (gained office by impugning the patriotism of Max Cleland, who lost an arm and both legs in 'Nam while Chambliss sat on his "bad knee" deferment) or Tom DeLay (started an exterminator business, and later claimed that so many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like himself).
What about their corporate masters, like the poisonously ubiquitous Richard Mellon Scaife?
What about the Boards of Directors who decide it's better to cheat their own country of taxes by moving their official headquarters to a postbox in Bermuda? Or the so-called journalists and pundits who parrot the party line and attack true patriots?
There's just no end. It'd make the most ghastly slaughters of history look like a lover's caress.
I remember a story by Damon Knight— Rule Golden it was called, and although I read it in a collection in the late seventies, it dates back to 1954 or so. It was about an alien who came to Earth to spread a plague, one that made every living creature feel the same pain it caused to any other creature. You step on my foot, yours hurts as much. You shoot me in the heart, yours explodes in your own chest. "Rule Golden"— the "golden rule" backwards: Be done by as you do. (In the tale, we humans were too violent to be allowed to join the Greater Galactic Community; either we learned our lesson or we literally killed ourselves off. Either way, the GGC remained safe.)
It's not all that far-fetched, and with a half-century's advances in biology you could make the virus species-specific. (The alien in the story acknowledged that non-intelligent predator species would quickly die off, since they could no longer hunt and kill their prey without dying from the agony they caused themselves.) But still… would even that be enough?
Not every act of cruelty causes literal pain, at least not immediately.
The manager who lays off a division of highly-trained, highly-paid employees and ships the work to third-world slave-wage countries hasn't hurt the newly-unemployed. Except in today's shit-can economy, it might be months or years before you found an equivalent job at an equivalent wage. Or maybe never, and you and your family wind up starving, or working three or four minimum-wage jobs just to stay alive, and you go to bed hungry so your latch-key kids get enough to eat when they come home from overcrowded, underfunded schools.
The bureaucrat who signs off on rules to allow more pollution so uncaring zillionaires can make even more money isn't "hurting" anyone, at least immediately. Never mind how many people will eventually sicken and die, how many species become extinct, or how much quicker global warming will drown the coastlines and scorch the heartland.
The "journalist" who promulgates the lies and deceit instead of exposing them doesn't cause pain. He just makes it possible for the liars and deceivers to beat the rest of us down, to steal away the last crumb of hope that we can ever take back what's been taken from us, the true principles of liberty and freedom on which this country were founded.
But the hell of it is, even if you could somehow make these evil motherfuckers feel the equivalent pain, they can only die once. Dubya and Cheney and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Grover Norquist and Condi Rice and all the other Vile Bastards In Power couldn't ever feel the pain of a thousand thousand deaths. Or know the horror of choosing to leap 110 floors to certain doom as the best alternative to being burnt alive or crushed to jelly, all because the VBIPs paid absolutely zero attention to the most pressing problems of national security. Another Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Robespierre couldn't die as many times as the deaths they caused, directly and otherwise. They couldn't feel that much pain, experience that much terror and despair. They couldn't live long enough to feel it, even if they lived a thousand years.
I don't have an answer here. I'm not even sure I have a question. I'm just glad I don't have The Power, because I'm not at all certain I could avoid the Abbot of Citeaux's solution: Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His.
