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.