Here's Frank Paynter on something I said the other day:

A week or so ago Doc Searls responded to this question:

...do you really believe the best thing for the World would be for the US to pull out now and leave one of the cruelest dictorships in modern times at the helm in Iraq, with all the cruel and innocent deaths that would follow in the wake of such a move.

"No," Doc said, "I don't. Now that we're in there, I want us to finish with minimal loss of life on all sides. I hope we take out Saddam Hussein's regime and return the country to its oppressed people. Then I hope we go home."

And while Doc's and Tom's are the reasonable hopes of peaceful men, I think things have gone too far. These hopes are impossible. And to wish for the impossible is delusional. Yet to cast a gimlet eye on the world stage and to accept that our own country is being held hostage to the interests of a high caste of modern industrialists whose goals are being masked by a chase after shadow figures, evil men who frighten the American electorate in large part because of the images Rupert Murdoch and his cronies convey of them day after day -- to accept this is enormously difficult. Because with this acceptance comes the knowledge that right action is required. And the right action that is required seems so hopeless, so alienated, so out of touch. But Dennis Kucinich and Tammy Baldwin and Cynthia McKinney and Barbara Lee and the thirty or so others who can be counted on in Congress to speak truth as they see it are not sufficient to our cause. And the strongest voices for peace in the Senate, the Paul Wellstones, the Mel Carnahan's... well, they've met the same fate as the Kennedy scion in light plane "accidents."

I wonder what is the next great military challenge Rumsfeld and Bush and Cheney have in mind for us. I wonder if they even know.

Some strong yet subtle shit in there. Deep too. Especially in that last line.

I often wish I could match the certitudes of certidudes like Frank and Andrew and Michael and Charles. But I can't. Deep down I'm a pacifist, but just as deeply I'm a libertarian too. Go figure.

While I believe war is worse than wrong — that it is, as Mumford said (somewhere... I can't find it), nothing better than an institutionalized form of human sacrifice (and that all the intellectualizing about "just war" is nothing more than that, and therefore fulla shit, going all the way back to Aquinas and Augustine), I can't ignore the differences between this military campaign, and the respects it pays to the civilians it tries not to kill, and the campaigns that have come before, including the last Iraq war, when our forces incinerated a defenseless retreating army. This one is different. There are positive moral opportunities in what the Administration says it's up to here, even if Cheney still stands to get rich off of whatever Halliburton does for The New Iraq.

Hey, if Bush and his buddies say they're doing all this military stuff for the People of Iraq, I want the People of America, England and Spain (and hell, everybody else) to cheer them on and hold them accountable for their promises. Whether these guys suck or not (and I'm sure they're a mixed bag), they're trying to do some Good Things here. I hope they succeed.

And while I believe that George W. Bush was erected president by a series of events that would have caused a constitutional crisis if our country was half as committed to the Constitution as it thinks it is, I do believe the process, while deeply fucked, was still legitimate. In case anybody cares.

And while I believe it really sucks that Wellstone and Carnahan went down in plane crashes, I don't believe their political enemies were any more responsible for those accidents than they were for those that claimed Bill Graham and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Lots of celebrities and pols die in plane crashes. Comes with the territory.

But my point isn't about any of that. It's about partisanship and paranoia. To me all the certidudes are equally off base because they're convinced the Other Guys are part of some big-ass Conspiracy, or are what Craig Burton calls EWBU: Evil, Wrong, Bad and Ugly. That's how Michael Moore sees the Bush and the Administration. And that's how Andrew Sullivan sees Howell Raines and the Academic Left. Their rants make for great reading; but they're not fully engaged with Reality, which includes, let's admit, the possibility that the other side isn't always full of shit.

See, here's the real problem. (Brace yourselves. I'm leveraging Lakoff again.) Basically, all our politics proceed from two radically opposed notions that are nonetheless equally true. The one on the Right holds that the world is a dangerous place, that bad people are on the loose, and that we need to keep ourselves safe from those people. The one on the Left holds that the world is a good place, and that we should do everything we can to nurture whatever keeps it that way. As bases for default thinking both server to explain and dismiss much of what goes on in the world. Neither is correct in every case, and both are biassed. (A reader makes a good point: Basing ones thinking at one end or the other often leads to hatred and contempt — which we find in the language of blogging from both political extremes.) Only one of those, however, makes interesting news. Only one of those is good for stirring up the kind of righteous anger that carries us to war, and to "delivering justice," whatever we decide that is, and to justifying the deaths of the few for the good of the many (or of the wrong for the right, or whatever). Only one of those lends itself to handy all-simplifying sports and war metaphors. Only one of those justifies killing folks who have the misfortune of living in the wrong house, eating in the wrong restaurant or wearing the wrong clothes.

Until we discover the limits of the might-makes-Right's moralities, its obsessions with power and security, its willingness to trash the very liberties it seeks to protect, and its ability to carry out its military ambitions, theirs are the arguments that are not only going to carry the day, but be tested in the real world.

I say let 'em test away. I just hope that somewhere along the way some of the world's nonviolent goodness (you know, all that Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness stuff) successfully argues for itself.

[Later...] Okay, here's some Mumford:

Human sacrifice , then, is the dark shadow, vague but ominous, that accompanied the myth of maternity and the superb technical and cultural feats of domestication. And as so often happens, this particular mutation, quantitatively restricted in the culture where it originated, dominated and debased the urban civilization that grew out of it, by taking another collective form: the collective sacrifice of war, the negative counterpart of the life-promoting rituals of domestication."

Also this, from Technics and Civilization, found on my own damn bookshelf:

For war is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society...

But war, for those actually engaged in combat, likewise brings a release from the sordid motives of profit-making and self-seeking that govern the prevailing forms of business enterprise, including sport: the action has the significance of high drama... the death or maiming of the body gives the drama the element of a tragic sacrifice, like that which underlies so many primitive religious rituals...

War sanctions the utmost exhibition of the primitive at the same time that it deifies the mechanical. In modern war the raw primitive and the clockwork mechanical are one.

Mumford goes on to visit the tensions between mechanized civilization and the higher purposes of life, which are nurturant and not destructive, generally speaking.

Makes me think that what Bush and his people are trying to prove is how war, and Weapons of Selective Destruction, can be Good Things in the Right Hands. (See? Only a few of you are dead and most of your buildings are still up. You have no government now, but we're here to help you start a new one. Have a nice country!)

I think they're wrong. But I'm no less afraid of how I might be proven right.

Bonus link: OpenPolitics' Word for the day: Patriobfuscate.

[Later again...] Tom Shugart and Frank Paynter respond to each other.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]