"If he does really think that there is no distinction between I virtue and vice," warns Dr. Samuel Johnson, "why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons." Judging by the recent pronouncements of some of our leaders, it is time to start husbanding spoons. Not that anyone in public life denies that there are moral distinctions to be made; but there seems to be a growing unwillingness—or is it an inability?—to make them, even the most simple.
Consider the case of another wise and respected doctor, Dr.
Seuss. His latest epic, The Butter Battle Book, is a parable of the nuclear age. Two peoples, the Yooks and the Zooks, find themselves in such fierce—and pointless—confrontation that each is ready to drop the fatal Bitsy Big-Boy Bomberoo on the other. They are very similar, these Yooks and Zooks. They seem to differ in only one way: one side takes its bread butter-side up, the other butter-side down. Yooks, Zooks. East, West. Butter-side up, butter-side down.
What's the difference? cries the good Dr. Seuss in a plea predictably hailed for its sanity by everyone from Art Buchwald ("must reading") to Ralph Nader ("a bundle of wisdom in a small package"). Now is it really necessary to observe that in this world, as opposed to Dr. Seuss's cuddly creation, what divides Yooks and Zooks is democracy and constitutional government, among other conventions? The principal reason Yooks insist on arming themselves is that the Zooks of this planet have the unfortunate tendency to build gulags (for export too) and to stockpile those nasty intercontinental ballistic bomberoos.
The allergy to elementary distinctions is not confined to child educators and their admirers. It also turns up on the political front, even among presidential candidates. For example, when Louis Farrakhan publicly threatened the life of the Washington Post reporter who had disclosed Jesse Jackson's "Hymie" slur, Jackson characterized the episode as a "conflict" between "two very able professionals caught in a cycle that could be damaging to their careers."
This is the language of moral equivalence. "Two professionals"—each guy just doing his job—cleverly places the two men on the same moral plane. "Caught"—passive victims, both men done to and not doing—neatly removes any notion of guilt or responsibility. "In a cycle"—no beginning and no end—insinuates an indeterminateness in the relationship between the two men: Someone may have started this, but who can tell and what does it matter? (Nor is this the first time Jackson has pressed the cycle image into dubious service. Remember his "cycle of pain" in Lebanon, as if Navy Lieut. Robert Goodman, the flyer for the American peace-keeping force that had lost more than 250 men to terrorist attack, and President Hafez Assad, who had at least acquiesced in that attack, were equal partners in crime?) Having framed the issue in these terms, Jackson proceeded to the logical conclusion: he proposed a meeting between Farrakhan and the reporter, offering himself as mediator.