126. "Facts on the ground"

The expression "facts on the ground" was apparently first used by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the 70s. He was describing the new settlements in the Occupied Territories. By adding "on the ground" to a word that was already sufficient he suggested something to future statesmen: this is something solidly based, stuck in the earth, and you are not going to change it easily.

He also implied a distinction from facts of another sort, I think, the facts you might call "facts in the heart," facts that are hard to see and, some say, easy to change. Disapproval of the settlements is a fact in the heart of many Americans and Israelis. It is certainly a fact in the heart of Tzaly Reshef, one of the founders of Peace Now, who last week wondered (NYT, 3-25) whether the Israeli Supreme Court would be able to get Benjamin Netanyahu to change the old "facts on the ground."

But Reshef and his fellows in Peace Now, and, more distantly, in the United Sates, are dismissed as idealists. Understandably. None of their talk has had any effect. The settlements have continued to expand during the regimes of every Israeli prime minister, liberal or conservative, hawk or dove.

"What do you expect, idealists? That facts on the ground will give way before your heart's desire? Get used to them." That's what I hear the realists, the ones Menachem Begin counted on, saying now.

The tough-ground-soft-heart distinction is not as firm as it looks, though.  Facts on the ground come from human intention — which is to say, the human heart. There is a logical connection (effect to cause) between a settler's hut and a Likud prime minister's heart. Bend your eyes to that and you can raise them to the larger connections — to future needs, to American support, to peace in the Middle East. No, you're not looking at the sky; you're trying to see future facts on the ground.

Imaginative statesmen raise their eyes. Realistic statesmen don't blink at what they see. Tough statesmen don't hesitate to ask questions about them. They're determined to know what, on the ground, their country is going to have to live with. So imaginative, tough, realistic American presidents would have asked each of the Israeli prime ministers who expanded the settlements this idealistic-sounding but very realistic question, "Tell me, Menachem (or Yitzhak or Benjamin), do you, in your heart, want all of the West Bank for your people?"

And all tough, imaginative Americans wanting a realistic foreign policy for their country, would ask all the Jewish groups supporting those prime ministers the same question.

Ah, but is that realistic? Can anybody actually picture any American President putting that question to any Israeli Prime Minister? No, it has suited everybody politically, and has suited everybody politically for 35 years, to keep that question locked up, which is to say, it suits them, linguistically, to keep "facts on the ground" separate from "facts in the heart." Let us, says the Israeli, just look at what's there, now, and leave what will be there out of the discussion. Let us, says the American Congressman, let us not upset the Christian constituency that supports the Israeli moves. You can talk about the heart, but do it in some other context.

I can't help thinking that they will have church in mind. Church is where the idealists gather, isn't it? It is certainly where Christians will hear a lot of talk about the heart. That's where, according to Jesus, you look to find sin.

Yes, church is the perfect place to put Americans who want to talk about the heart. They're accustomed to talking about the facts there before they get back to the facts on the ground during the business week.

But I wonder how much compartmentalizers really know about American churches. Do they know that some congregations pay close attention to world affairs? And some preachers use extreme language? I have known some, and I can hear them now: 'Whoso looketh at the West Bank to lust hath already committed aggression in his heart.'"

And I've heard there are some rabbis who say the same kind of thing. It's not true that all the heart talk comes out of the New Testament. There's "Thou shalt not covet" from Moses. I think we could have a rabbi in the pulpit right next to our preacher, shouting across the water, though I'm not sure about his speech. I hear, "Hey, you. You know you can't covet your neighbor's ox or ass or wife. So what's this you're coveting the West Bank?"

So you can't even count on keeping facts on the ground separate from facts in the heart in church. Some people there are very good at reading the truth in your heart from the facts you put on the ground.

121. Power Sucks

The trouble with power is that as soon as people know you have it they're running to you to settle their quarrels. You arrive in a nice valley full of farmers, kill the big man in the castle, and right away you've got a bunch of farmers in your courtyard boo-hooing about other farmers.

Say you want to be a big man in the Old Testament. You beat up on this tribe and that tribe and take all the crescents off the necks of their camels. You've done more with the sword than any Hebrew hero in years. And where do they put your story? In the book of Judges. You're a damned quarrel-settler.

Go beyond your valley or your county and it gets worse. Build the biggest navy in the world, bombard your way into a few continents for their minerals, and what do you get? Not just minerals. Not just an empire. You get countries running to you to for quarrel-settlement. You decide on boundaries, you make rules, you prescribe systems. When the world's geography needs ordering you give it latitude and longitude.

I know, the assignment is inevitable. People go to the big power because no matter what judgment they get from the little power it can be overturned, smack, by the big power. So even if he's just a dumb jock (like Samson) the big man has to put on the robes, do the assizes, be the judge.

"But isn't being the big world power worth it? Getting all those minerals? Getting to make your place zero longitude?"

Only if you can stand all the names people call you. "Imperialist." "Aggressor." Besides, the payoff in minerals changes. In the old days you could just march in and take somebody's oil. Now there's a world organization with a court and a publicity system. You'd have the whole universe yelling at you. That's what it is to be the big power now. All quarrel-settling and damn few minerals.

"I think if I had the power I'd just sit there and not use it. Except for my own safety. At least I'd have nobody yelling at me."

A lot you know. People know you have the power. They know you can smack anybody you want to. And they don't care how dumb a jock you are. They'll want you to come in and settle quarrels a genius couldn't figure out.

"You mean it takes a genius to see that innocent people are dying, that a dictator is making war on his own people, that death by gas is horrible?"

No, it's easy to see those horrors. So easy that you can't help seeing them on both sides. That's where it gets tough.  Which side is committing the most horrors?  The worst?  How much worse to count against how many close-to-worst?  Suppose you have thirty pretty bad horrors and two downright awful.  Sometimes you've got to be a genius. You're not a genius, you don't go in to end the horrors, and everybody calls you bad names.  "Inhumane."  "Immoral." You're in as much pain not using your power as you were when you used it and got called "an imperialist."

"Sounds like the only way to avoid pain is to give up power. But then you'd never have the satisfaction of seeing a success, a nation with its own quarrel-settling system, democracy, set up and functioning. That will never happen unless you go in."

Don't talk to me about satisfaction. I may not be smart but I've lived. I know you can set up a democratic system that finally, after centuries, gives a people the power their majority calls for and then, if they're like the Iraqi Shi'ites, they'll throw their shoes at you. If satisfaction depends on gratitude, forget it.

"So you'll never use your power to help any Middle Eastern nation set up a democratic government?"

Not unless I get a lot smarter. Smart enough, anyway, to tell which side in a quarrel has a chance of doing democracy long term. Smart enough to see a semi- revolution, rather than a revolution, coming up. The trouble with revolutions, as Robert Frost pointed out, is that they bring the same kind of people back on top. The trouble with going in and helping revolutionaries is that you don't know how far they're going to revolve.

"And if you don't get that smart you'll what? Give up power? Go back to farming?"

No, I'll go for the power of example. The greater success our people have in managing their own quarrels the more the quarreling people of the world will be moved to the same kind of management in their countries. The power to invade isn't the only kind of power the United States can use. Think of the number of countries we didn't invade that became democracies.

71. "Bleeding heart"

 

For centuries a bleeding heart was a good thing — Christ's sacred heart bleeding for humanity, Mary's immaculate heart bleeding for her son, human hearts (in the "imitation of Christ") bleeding for their fellows. Catholic painters gave it to you — the actual heart, there, blood streaming — and Protestant authors reminded you of it. Some of Dickens' most sympathetic characters were found in Bleeding Heart Yard. A bleeding heart meant compassion.

Now a "bleeding heart" means "liberal sap." Are you downtrodden? Are you being called imprudent? Is your favorite species in danger? Here's an organ that will bleed for you.

The opposite of a bleeding heart would be a callused heart. "Callused heart" is not used as a comeback in the put-down contest but if it were I suppose liberals would apply it to Ron Paul, who just objected (Fox News, 8/30/11) to FEMA's enlarged part in aid to disaster victims.

Care has to be taken in identifying either kind of heart, though. The callused heart must be distinguished from the tough heart, which can be loving, and the bleeding heart must be distinguished from the compassionate heart, which is … different how? There's a problem. A compassionate heart bleeds, doesn't it?

Yes, but not publicly. The difference is in the display. The person the conservatives identify is saying, "Look at me. Am I not a good Christian? Am I not sensitive to suffering?" It's more than compassion. "Bleeding heart" distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart displayer.

And "callused heart" (in the Bible the "hardened heart") distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart dismisser. The dismissal comes across in the way victims are spoken of. “The bleeding heart will say, well, we have to take care of them,” said Ron Paul of the flood victims. He's betrayed by his indifferent tone. And also, I should say, by his word-choice. Callused hearts often give themselves away by their use of "bleeding heart."

Which isn't to say that heart-display is good or bad. That's very much in dispute, especially since T. E. Hulme complained about it in the Romantic poets. "I object," he said, "to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other." I think he must have had Shelley in mind. "Wail, for the world's wrong."

Shelley. Would you like to see, or be reminded of, some real sappiness? Follow him through "The Indian Serenade." A dream of his lady wakes him up and a "spirit in his feet," he says, leads him to her chamber window where he's so overcome by love that he passes out.

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast —

Oh! Press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.

It doesn't help to say that Shelley was writing for a public which at that time admired sensitive male responses. So much the worse for the public and poets who cater to it.

And so much the worse for our definition of "bleeding heart." We've added cynicism to it. When Shelley, at the end of a very serious poem, "Ode to the West Wind," says, "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed," we see a play to the public. We take him less seriously.

Are Christian hearts more prone to bleeding than others? You'd expect them to be, considering where sin is located for Christians: not in the deed, not in the consequence, but in the motive. Wish to kill your brother and you have killed him. "Whosoever looketh after a woman to lust hath committed adultery in his heart." Locate sin in the heart and you're going to have a lot of looking into it. And oh what temptation to display what you have found, or would like people to think you have found.

Some have wondered whether Christian democracies are more prone to well-intentioned blunders than other nations.   I'd say yes, you'd expect them to be. Their voters will worry more about wanting good ends, having their hearts in the right place, than good means, having their armies in the right place.