Thursday, June 24, 2004
...it's easy to lose yours when you stand too close. When almost every news story carries a throw-away line about Abu Ghraib, and the background context of every casualty is the number of our troops killed, not the number of Muslims saved through the overthrow of one of the worst tyrants of the 21st century, it's easy to lose sight of things. It's difficult to keep perspective. And that makes it difficult to judge and measure - our actions against our enemies, our deeds against what might have been. And that makes for a dangerous landscape in which we lose the ability to make rational decisions going forward.
That's the message in this Brett Stephens piece calling into question the perspective of some of the more vocal, yet still quite mainstream, Bush-haters. If Bush is a "Fascist," what do we do when we come across a real one...like Saddam?
...So here is one aspect of this insanity: no sense of proportion. For Mr. Blumenthal, Fallujah isn't merely like Stalingrad. It may as well be Stalingrad, just as Guantanamo may as well be Lefertovo and Abu Ghraib may as well be Buchenwald, and Mr. Bush may as well be Hitler and Hoover combined, and Iraq may as well be Vietnam and Bill Clinton may as well be Franklin Roosevelt.
The absence of proportion stems, in turn, from a problem of perspective. If you have no idea where you stand in relation to certain objects, then an elephant may seem as small as a fly and a fly may seem as large as an elephant. Similarly, Mr. Blumenthal can compare the American detention infrastructure to the Gulag archipelago only if he has no concept of the actual size of things. And he can have no concept of the size of things because he neither knows enough about them nor where he stands in relation to them. What is the vantage point from which Mr. Blumenthal observes the world? It is one where Fallujah is "Stalingrad-like." How does one manage to see the world this way? By standing too close to Fallujah and too far from Stalingrad. By being consumed by the present. By losing not just the sense, but the possibility, of judgment...
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