(This letter is part of the Open Letters BlogBurst against war on Iraq)

The Letter for Democrats

Dear Senator Daschle:

I am writing today to urge you to take a leadership role to stop the Bush administration’s plans for unprovoked war against Iraq.

As the Majority Leader in the Senate, you will have to choose whether to cooperate with the Bush administration’s lawless and politically-motivated plans for war, or to take a stand for the rule of law and the lives of innocent civilians. You will have a great deal of responsibility on your shoulders, and you will have to choose whether you will exercise it in the name of international aggression or international justice.

The Bush administration has floated over a dozen rationalizations for crying havoc, and yet no conclusive evidence has ever been produced which shows that the Iraqi government poses an imminent threat to the life or liberty of American citizens. After Iraq accepted the Bush administration’s demand for weapons inspectors to return, the administration turns around and declares that it will invade Iraq anyway. Unjustified by evidence and unsupported by the international community, the Bush administration is asking for your cooperation in a naked war for conquest.

This is literally a matter of life and death—for American men and women in uniform, and for the innocent Iraqi civilians who will be caught in the line of fire. As you prepare for the upcoming November elections, I urge you to remember that according to recent Zogby polls, the majority of Americans oppose unilateral war against Iraq, and that Americans consider the jobs and the domestic economy to be the most important issue in the upcoming election. The President’s rush to war is a transparent attempt to keep corporate corruption and the increasingly fragile economy off the front pages. If Democrats speak with a united voice against his asleep-at-the-wheel domestic policies and his October surprise warmongering, then they can easily make their case to the American public and clean up in the November elections. If, on the other hand, they remain divided and let the administration get away with its callous manipulations, they will lose—and they will deserve to lose. Today I join many other Americans in pledging that I will never vote for, and will actively work against, any Democrat who votes in favor of the Bush administration’s dangerous proposal for lawless aggression. I urge you to work to give the American people a principled alternative to Republican war-mongering—by voting against any resolution authorizing unprovoked war against Iraq.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing your views on this urgent issue.

The Letter for Republicans

Dear Senator Sessions:

In a matter of days, the Senate will have a choice to make.

The Senate leadership on both sides of the aisle is working to bring a resolution to the floor which would authorize President Bush to wage war against Iraq. You will have to choose whether to vote for or against war on Iraq. You will have to choose whether to sign off on unprovoked aggression, or to stand up for the rule of law and the lives of innocent civilians. There is a great deal of responsibility on your shoulders, and you will have to choose whether you will exercise it in the name of international aggression or international justice.

The Bush administration has floated over a dozen rationalizations for crying havoc, and yet no conclusive evidence has ever been produced which shows that the Iraqi government poses an imminent threat to the life or liberty of American citizens. After Iraq accepted the Bush administration’s demand for weapons inspectors to return, the administration turns around and declares that it will invade Iraq anyway. Unjustified by evidence and unsupported by the international community, the Bush administration is asking for your cooperation in a naked war for conquest.

This is literally a matter of life and death—for American men and women in uniform, and for the innocent Iraqi civilians who will be caught in the line of fire. As you prepare for the upcoming November elections, I remind you that the majority of Americans oppose unilateral war against Iraq. I have voted in every election since I became eligible, and I pledge today that I will never vote for, and will actively work against, any elected official who votes in favor of the Bush administration’s dangerous proposal for lawless aggression. As your constituent, I urge you to give Alabama a Senator we can support—by voting against any resolution authorizing the unprovoked use of force against Iraq.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing your views on this urgent issue.

P.S.

Excuse me, but could someone please, please, please explain to me what the bloody hell the point is of going to the UN and demanding that Iraq allow arms inspectors to re-enter the country—and then when they do allow arms inspectors to re-enter the country, turning around and declaring that we don’t give a damn and we’ll bomb ‘em back to the Stone Age, anyway?

Also, could someone explain to me why the hell the Democratic leadership in DC has insisted on not just being spineless and amoral—I expect that out of them—but also politically suicidal? It’s one thing to be yellow-bellied, but it’s quite another to just roll over and allow this sloped-brow thug to run around and play international cowboy in a painfully transparent and obvious attempt at an October Surprise before the mid-term Congressional elections. Are the War Party toadies in Congress that committed to spreading death and destruction far and wide? Or are they just that oblivious to the fact that the American public still is nowhere near sold on war against Iraq, with a majority opposing unilateral action and opposing a commitment that would result in serious American casualties and opposing a war that would result in Iraqi civilian casualties?

I mean, for crying out loud, how pathetic is it when Al fucking Gore is the only high-level Democrat who is making sense on this issue? According to Zogby, 22% of Americans rate the economy and jobs as the single most important issue in the upcoming election—which is more people than any other issue pulled. The war was the most influential issue for only 10% of the people. And, as Gore has pointed out, George W. Bush is presiding over the worst economy slump since… well, since George H. W. Bush was President. The whole administration is asleep at the wheel, but the administration is using their ridiculous antics toward Iraq in a painfully obvious attempt to keep his War Party toadies on the other side of the aisle from giving him the media plastering he so richly deserves.

Take Action

We have about a week left to act. Congress is still debating whether or not to give Bush the resolution he wants; but there’s still time to get the Democrats’ heads out of their asses and convince them to stand firm against Mr. Bush’s war. First, sign Michael Moore’s pledge to let the Democrats know we’re not fucking around: You’re either with us, or you’re fired!. Second, call your Senators and Representative and—firmly but politely—demand that they vote against further aggression against Iraq. If they are Democrats, remind them that the election is coming up and insist that they hold the administration accountable for its economic failures instead of letting it get away with its Wag the Dog strategy. Third, write a letter to the editor of your local paper speaking out against war on Iraq. Finally, talk to your friends, and make sure that everyone knows what bullshit this sabre-rattling is. The elections are coming up and Congress-critters will be watching the signs of public opinion very carefully.

We are faced with an administration that is just a step short of overtly speaking of global empire. Every day they are acting in an even more lawless and aggressive fashion. There’s time left to stop them, but we have to get our shit together now, draw a line in the sand, and fight hard. Will we win on Iraq? Who knows. But whether we do or not, if we don’t unite now, we are doomed to lose on everything else.

I must apologize for the neglect of the website as of late. I have been either in the throes of, or recovering from the effects of, preparing a paper for the Auburn Philosophical Society roundtable on death. Since I (rightly) suspected that everyone else’s papers would be about the subjective fact of death—the value or disvalue of immortality, being-unto-death, that sort of thing—I decided to put together a paper which focuses not on me dying, but on other people dying, that is to say, on the question of mourning for the dead. Bottom line: Stoic arguments against mourning commit a modal fallacy, and the mutilation of emotive response to the world that they advocate because of this fallacy is nothing short of depraved. Nevertheless, Stoic considerations show that the two obvious ways in which we could account for why we mourn—and why we eventually cease to mourn—are inadequate. To properly understand our commonsense intuitions about mourning, we must venture into bizarre oracular pronouncements and the space of the I-Thou relationship. Those are the assertions, in any case; you may find the arguments by reading over the paper.

An aspiring young philosophy major who attended the talk pushed me on two questions whose answers I do take for granted in the paper. First: how can death be said to be bad for the person who dies, when the person who dies cannot suffer anything (being oblivious to anything that happens in the world)? And second: since the deceased cannot suffer at the fact of death, isn’t it better that the bereaved move beyond their grief as quickly as possible, since emotional peace of mind is a natural good? These are two of the critical questions to ask when examining Stoic moral psychology and the question of mourning, but I do not think that the objection to my anti-Stoic arguments based on these questions can stand. Let us examine them in reverse order.

First: is it true that emotional peace of mind is a natural good? Prima facie, I suppose, we would all like to have peace of mind. But we have to remember that emotions are essentially world-directed; emotions such as grief are what they are in relation to a state of affairs which we confront. To try to cut our emotions off from the world and manipulate them into a state of psychological contentment is to violate the very nature of what emotions are supposed to be—a mutilation that would make us depraved to the degree we carried it through. Anaxagoras, when told his son had just died, calmly said, "I knew my son was mortal" and went on with the day. And surely this response is wrong, the manifestation of something deeply wrong with Anaxagoras. We want peace of mind, but only because we want a good state of affairs that merits peace of mind. Resolve in the face of hardship beyond one’s control is an admirable virtue, but simple insensitivity to the basic fact that you are facing hardship is a tragic form of blindness.

Now that we have moved beyond the notion that psychological satiety is the be-all and end-all of the good life, we can also begin to see why it is that death is bad for the person who dies, even though the person who dies does not undergo any psychological suffering or frustration because of it. Sensate pleasures are not the only goods, and sensate pains are not the only bads. Nor are other goods and bads only good or bad in virtue of their connexion with sensate pleasure or pain. As a parallel example: imagine that you are accidentally lobotomized by a head injury, in such a way that you are reduced to the level of a gurgling infant. Now, as it happens, you have savings enough to ensure that you will be cared for by a nurse for the rest of your life, and you will live out your life well-fed, always changed, and generally quite contented. Nevertheless, I think just about everyone would believe that to be reduced to the state of a contented, gurgling infant would be a terrible tragedy for the adult who suffered the change (if you don’t believe that you’d consider it a terrible tragedy, ask yourself this: if you were given the choice to reduce yourself to an infant in such a way, would you do so?). There’s no lack of pleasure or occurrence of pain you can point to that explains the preference. Rather, the loss is to explained in terms being cut off from the possibility of a continued adult, rational life—and this is exactly what death does to the person who dies, as well.

So, then, death is bad for the person who dies, and the survivors have a duty to mourn—worries from faulty moral psychology notwithstanding. How are we to mourn? What duty do we have to the departed? How do we show our grief, and for how long, and in what way?

Well, to Roderick the question, we should mourn in the right amount, for the right time, in the right respect, and to the right degree. But there are no non-trivial rules beyond this that can tell us how to mourn the deceased. Each I-Thou relationship, just because it is an I-Thou relationship, is essentially unique in character. There is no common rule that can unite them all. The way in which we mourn—in which we give the deceased what is their due—is like the way in which we show gratitude. How we conduct the funeral, the signs we make of grief, the feelings we have, how long we continue to mourn, and so on are all rooted in the love that was shared, not some universal Form of Love or Mourning—for there is no such thing. It is an act for which there are no fixed rules, which requires moral imagination and a respect for the unique intimacy that was between I and You.