It's All About Me
By Michael R. Bowen (02/25/03)
A joke circulating on the Internet these days compares a liberal and a conservative father escorting their families back to the car at night after a movie. The father is armed. A crazed-appearing man with a knife emerges from an alley way and threatens the family. The liberal's first thought is, "Did I do something to offend this guy?" He wonders whether the man is oppressed or disadvantaged, whether he could just hit him with the pistol butt, whether he could allow the man to knife him while the family escapes, and on and on. The conservative's response: BANG!
A caricature, of course, but all caricatures require a grain of truth. What distinguishes the two responses is who the father thinks of first. For the liberal, it is himself: did he provoke the situation, would he be wrong to defend his family, is he prejudiced against the attacker in some way? As for the conservative, it could fairly be said that there is no thought at all. His loved ones are threatened, and he acts immediately without worrying about his motives.
It's a little-remarked phenomenon, this narcissism of the liberal mind. The first object is to be in the right, to be seen as acting from pure motives, and never to be guilty of acting in self-interest. This is where we get the pomposity of Jimmy Carter, concerned more with being perfectly fair than with protecting Americans. It also drives today's peace movement: confronted with the possibility of America going to war, the peacenik's first thought is not whether Americans are threatened; instead it's an introspective navel-gazing inquiry as to whether we ourselves are free from sin. Like the teacher's pet eagerly waving his hand, the peacenik is proclaiming his righteousness more than his rightness.
In an earlier column I remarked that the peace activists are operating on feelings rather than thought. But maybe that's backward: when confronted with a crisis, the liberal falls into convoluted self-analysis while the conservative takes immediate action out of love. Perhaps both are operating on feelings, but it's the liberal's feelings about himself versus the conservative's feelings about others.
This plays itself out in the debates about the war. All the liberal arguments are like the first father in the joke: it's a war for oil and greed, America has created her own enemies, we're losing the respect of the rest of the world. The supporters of President Bush, by contrast, are looking outward. They're talking about the oppression of the Iraqi people and the threat not just to America, but to all mankind.
We can argue all day about whether bin Laden is the fault of American oil tycoons, but in the end it's irrelevant. The man with the knife might indeed have a just grievance against the father, but it does not follow that the father must let his family be slaughtered. The slogan of the peace movement isn't really "No War For Oil". Their banners should read "It's All About Me".
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