The great German novelist, Thomas Mann, once observed that some people have a ”sympathy for the abyss.”
He was describing individuals we all know and do not exactly love:
neighbors, friends and, God help us, even news anchors at times, who take their greatest pleasure in celebrating America the disaster. That the United States should achieve anything good or that it should appear valorous or noble is to them a misperception that must be corrected immediately.
What turns them on is America the impoverished failure, America the mean- spirited, America the cowboy giant swaggering across the world as dangerously as a 5-year-old who has smuggled a burp gun into kindergarten for Show and Tell.
This bedeviled characterization of America as the Inspector Clouseau of nations forever bumbling among its betters was brought forward before its troops had climbed the sand dunes above the forlorn shores of Somalia.
Perhaps it was in the classic American tourist mode that photographers were taking pictures as the Navy Seals made their landings. It was also dangerous for all concerned. That was forgotten, however, in the blame game that ensued. While spokesman Pete Williams invoked common sense as the best reason for not turning lights on arriving troops, one reporter played the blame-America game by insisting that Williams acknowledge that he was
”unwilling to admit that the Defense Department dropped the ball on this one.”
Shortly thereafter, some commentators criticized American servicemen for forcing Somalians who turned out to be friendly to stretch out on the ground to be examined for weapons as if this demonstrated bad manners instead of routine precaution.
Actors, for some reason, are particularly good at attacking U.S. motivation or style and Mike Farrell, who has been active in relief work, stood in for Jane Fonda on the ”CBS Morning News.” He thought it was good that Americans had come but he wished, he said soulfully, that they could arrive ”with less bravado.”
These minor indictments are reminiscent of the questions asked by a few tyro journalists on the last sad day of the Persian Gulf War. Weren`t we being unfair, they asked the generals, shooting at the fleeing enemy?
One can confidently expect that the anarchic teenage gunmen who have perpetuated the agony of hunger in their homeland will soon be romanticized into misunderstood heroes, noble savages whose pure hearts make up for their drugged-out heads and killer behavior. Perhaps, as some equally misguided experts decreed in the `60s in Chicago, these gangs should be eligible for grants to maintain order. Their oppressive enemy, of course, will be the United States, which will also be blamed for causing the original problems in the Horn of Africa through its Cold War policies.
You can easily identify people who relish the ”sympathy for the abyss.” They match that sentiment with a failure to understand the tragic nature of human life.
Only those who have not looked deeply enough at life find themselves excited and motivated by the prospect of chronic corruption and failure in every human institution. They insist on the perfectability of the world and do not understand its wounded state. They fail to comprehend or to deal realistically with the brutal realities of warfare that military leaders themselves hate.
War represents human failure of the worst kind. Its gods greedily consume youth, hope and the achievements of culture. To think that anybody can enter its dark heart as if walking onto a tennis court where gentlemen are not expected to cheat or curse symbolizes such an artless lack of worldly wisdom that its possessors may still need instructions to the bus drivers pinned to their coats.
Such people delight in the idea of America as unworthy and untrustworthy. They have, therefore, been busy deconstructing the nation`s victory in the gulf war, stripping that action of almost any honor or achievement.
These critics, allergic to any American success, now tell us that nothing and nobody performed well in Operation Desert Storm. The mission to liberate Kuwait failed, the war ended too soon, the Patriot missiles didn`t work, and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf isn`t the outsized hero we believe him to be.
This is the recurrent theme in the looney-tunes symphony of our national life. The police, for example, are to be disbelieved on principle. Should they prove unexpectedly effective risking their lives to protect us and preserve the public order, the famous Rodney King home video can be shown as if it were a giant instant replay that can be used to invalidate any heroic act on the part of any law enforcement agent in the nation.
Add to that the highly politicized belief that America`s economy is doomed, that its inventiveness and productivity are faint traces in its Alzheimer-afflicted entrepreneurial memory, and that we are morally and philosophically behind even primitive nations, and the message is clear:
America is a failed experiment that should never have been undertaken.
On the same day, however, that American forces landed to ensure the feeding of the hungry in Somalia, the newspapers told the stories of what the countries supposedly superior to ours were doing.
The bells tolled of death across India where Muslims and Hindus rioted murderously in a war of religious hatred that has smoldered for centuries and that makes the differences between the religious Left and the Right in the United States seem like mannered exercises in civility and tolerance.
In Berlin, the doors of freedom clanged shut as leaders of the main political parties agreed to a law that would make it harder for asylum-seekers and refugees to enter Germany. In Japan, further details were revealed of the ongoing government scandals that have boiled over from the long-term relationship between political leaders and the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia.
Compassion is, according to many moralists, the highest act of human beings. Through it, they place themselves, at the risk of their lives, in the place of other people in order to help them.
That was what Americans were doing on that day on which other countries were revealing their hardness of heart and the viciousness of their accepted internal dynamics.
One could review other American triumphs and gains in productivity and accomplishment and invention. It is enough to underscore the remarkable compassion that its citizens, their faults well known to them, still display as no other people in the world do.
Lovers of the abyss will hate it but the rest of the country can be proud that in these shortest days of the year we made one of the longest of journeys in order to feed the hungry.
