175. The Economist Calls for Intervention in Syria.

 

You'd never say that the editors of The Economist write heart-rending prose, but yet they can do something to hearts.

"Is it because America and Europe have tired of their own wars that they have started to turn their backs on other people's?" one asks this week in a leader.  "The number of dead in Syria has passed 30,000 and some days 250 bodies are added to the pile."

See the bodies, see them in a pile, see it growing, and growing, and growing — unless you do something?  Images.  Not as vivid as TV images, but still images.  The writer didn't have to give us that pile.  Nor what comes next, a hypothesized picture of "Syria's great cities ... ground to rubble" in a future where "the whole Middle East would choke on dust." 

He tells us that the dictator Assad's assault is against "civilians" (not "rebels") and the violence of it "breeds implacable hatred, and so the rebels [has to be "rebels" now; "civilians" doesn't fit the final verb] will fight on."  If Assad weren't so violent the rebels wouldn't fight on?  "Let's quit; he's just arresting us"?  The nouns are ticklish but that connective ("and so") is downright painful.  Painful to one accustomed to The Economist's care with cause and effect, that is.

Their care is to avoid the vague and wishful, and yet that "and so" is wishful.  So is much that is said to show that intervention is "feasible."  "It is possible" that the "mere threat" of a no-fly zone would "keep Mr. Assad's planes on the ground."  So is the word "probably" in this sentence about the behavior of other Arab countries:  "So long as there is no invading ground force (and there won't be), they will probably fall into line."  How confident that "and there won't be" is.  I think of earlier confidence: "Bombing will do the job.  Surgical strikes."

But, in light of the whole editorial, that must be a slip.  Economist caution, Economist cool, prevails.  The writer knows that "intervention is a slippery slope," that "nobody can be sure who would replace [Assad]."  He does "not call lightly for the world to undertake such a risky operation."

Maybe the coolest reason that journals can now offer for action in any region is that somebody is "destabilizing" it.  With the rest of them The Economist assumes that stability is good, and in a State Department way.  Geopolitical.  But "stability" can remain good only if you keep your eyes off of the root, "stable."  It means "firmly established, not likely to change."  Good only, then, if it's your good.  Not good if it's Torquemada's Spain or Stalin's Russia, no matter how firmly they're established.  Torquemada and Stalin have just as much claim on the word as you do, American journal writers. So we need some other word to justify going into Syria.  The Economist needs it — if it's to be superior to other journals

If the writer of the leader doesn't use the kind of words I'm looking for, the superior words, who does?  The writer in the business section.  Yes, an accountant is what I want.  Somebody able to do a cost-benefit analysis.  Makes realistic projections.  Makes sure that what goes on her page reflects what's in the real world.  Chary of images.

I see her coming over to give some instruction to this leader writer.  She's pretty severe.  "No, no.  You can’t talk about giving Syria 'a chance to re-emerge as a nation at peace with itself and its neighbours' without readiness to tell your reader when that peace was.  You say re-emerge.  Was there a time when no Sunnis had to fear an Alawite massacre, when Syria was at peace with Israel?" 

But it's the editorial's last sentence that will get her, the sentence that gives the boss (in this case the reader) what he pays an accountant for, a solid weighing up: The sooner the world intervenes the more lives can be saved.  "What figures back that up?  What experience?  Your reader is not an accountant but he can read the news.  Just today (Oct. 20, 2012), the papers tell of 'back-to-back bomb blasts in a crowded Baghdad market near a revered Shiite shrine,' and of a 'string of shootings targeting government officials' that killed at least 17 people.  On the net he can see that in the first eight months of this year 3,323 Iraqi civilians died by violence, about 1800 of them killed by suicide attacks and vehicle bombs.  Markets, shrines, children's playgrounds, pilgrim's buses, were targets.  This eleven years after an intervention for which humanitarian goals much like yours were part of the justification.  That's our experience in the real world, and the people who pay us will expect us to take it into account."

174. "I had binders full of women." Enough.

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We all know what Romney meant: "I had binders full of women's resumés."  It's the kind of shortcut we all take and expect it, if it's noticed at all, to produce only a moment of mild amusement, which we will participate in.

But this is an election year and you've got to make a big deal of anything that makes the guy on the other side look stupid.  It tickles your friends.  It makes the candidate's whole political base feel superior.  But it does nothing to win those who haven't taken sides yet, and may turn them off.

You're too eager, friends, friends of the base.  Eagerness was for the early days, the primaries, where any stick that beat a dog was a respectable stick.  Not so now, within two weeks of the election.  Intelligent independents are outside the partisan choir, listening to the music, and judging it — as a judgment on you.  They'll decide the election.

And what will they hear?  They'll hear you straining your wits, snapping at anything.  A sign of shallow minds.  "So that's his base.  Those are his friends." 

So lay off it.  You're making tinny music.  Only serious chords will register now.

173. Baseball Is as Unfair as Life. (2)

 

We left Scott Rolen fielding that grounder as the winning run streaked toward home.  I want to put you in the stands or in front of the set as the ball bounces toward him.  Say you want to know exactly how games are won and lost, and who's responsible.  You're a scientist, or a judge.  And let's say you've just come from a hockey game where you have been terribly confused.  God himself couldn't have figured out what went on in that melee.

OK, the ball is taking its last bounce.  Rolen is lowering his glove.  You know this is a play the game is riding on.  Is there anything you and the rest of the 44,000 in the stands, or the millions watching on TV, aren't going to know?  Is there going to be any doubt in anybody's mind about the responsibility?  the blame?

This is the world of baseball: a spot of light moving with the ball from one player to another.  If Rolen fields and throws, the spot will move to Votto at first, who will or will not let the ball get through him, but who might, if the ball is thrown in the dirt, dig it out.  You may say "goat" and you may say "hero," but you're never going to say, "I'm ignorant."

Baseball is clarity and knowledge.  It is also loneliness.  Nobody on the field can help Rolen at that moment.  It's him and that ball.  And there's an oddity: knowing that it's just you and the ball and that the game depends on how you handle it makes you anxious, the worst thing you can be when you handle a ball.   So what a good ballplayer wants is ignorance.  Fat lot of good all that clarity and knowledge does him when the ball's coming at him.  So with players of this brainy game it's the stupider the better.  Managers know this.  The best relief pitcher is "a bubble-blower with his brains beat out."

But you can't do that with your own brain.  You've got to train it to blot out what it knows.  Make each play for what it is in itself, without context or drama.  With anxiety lost you can maintain poise, the virtue that fields grounders and wins games most reliably.  Poise through self-control.

It's so easy to lose self-control, and, for pitchers, so disastrous.  In that last and deciding game young Mat Latos, going into the fifth having held the Giants to only two solid singles, got a couple of bad calls by the umpire.  He gave up a single and a triple to two players at the bottom of the batting order.  (This, like everything that happened that inning, could have happened to the most poised pitcher in the world, baseball being the chance thing it is, but I will guess a break in poise.)  OK, the Reds are behind 1-0 but they are a catch-up team, and he can get out of this.  He gets a grounder back to him from Matt Cain.  The runner has to hold as he throws Cain out.  Get the next batter, Angel Pagan, without that runner on third scoring and he's got a good chance of getting out of the inning.  The infield is drawn in for a play at the plate on a grounder.  He gets the grounder.  And Cozart the shortstop fumbles it!  Giants up 2-0.  Now a pretty sure sign of emotional breakdown: he walks the next batter on four pitches.  After that a single and a home run, it's 6-0, and we're out of the playoffs.  If Latos had pulled himself together at any number of places in that inning we might have pulled it out.  We scored four runs and lost 6-4. 

Latos took full blame.  "I lost it."  Just what Cozart said, probably thinking that if he'd made that play Latos would have kept a grip on himself.  But then, by what Rolen had said two games back, neither one could have lost it.  He had already lost the series with his fumble.

Of course no fellow player gave any sign of reproach.  That's not baseball.  There but for the grace of God go I.  But it's more than that.  Players who had lived through a season with Rolen and Cozart had seen them save many games.  Pitchers, as we now know well through face close-ups, can be extremely grateful to fielders.  Watch closely after a good play with men on base.  Nobody has received more tender looks of gratitude than Scott Rolen, winner of eight gold gloves.

Gratitude.  Gratitude to the point of love.  Add that to the clarity and knowledge and loneliness and anxiety in baseball.  Gratitude is an important addition because baseball lacks so much that other sports give us in the way of team spirit, the shoulder-to-shoulder effort that binds us to our fellows.  It's a game for individualists, as we, with our moving spotlight and teammates watching helplessly, have already acknowledged.  Yet there is a bond.  And I think it shows up in the gratitude.  "Good old Pete, hanging onto that ball after he crashed into the fence."

If we see it as more than gratitude, if we see it as love, we're going to have to add pain, because this is an activity in which you can do very little for the loved one, and have to watch him suffer.  I think of Stephen Spender, looking at the war-wounded, feeling "all love's aidlessness."

Gratitude, love, sympathy.  That seems to be what baseball has to offer in place of shoulder-to-shoulder spirit.  The love, felt by both teammates and home fans, has to operate at a distance but you can't say it doesn't form a bond.  Is it a peculiarly American bond?  What a nation of individualists has to hope for?  Another question too deep for one post.

172. Baseball Is as Unfair as Life.

 

The Cincinnati Reds, though they had the second-best season record in all of major league baseball, have just lost three games out of five to the San Francisco Giants and are out of the postseason playoffs to determine which team gets to be called "the best team in baseball."

I think that that call, "best team," is one of the worst calls the public can make.  Under any common meaning of the word "best," the playoffs are not what determines the best team.  They are not even baseball.  Baseball is a game of random, uneven, unfairly distributed tests.  It takes 162 games to determine who even comes close to passing these tests best.  It just cannot be done in the 11 to 19 games of a team's postseason play. 

We recognized this feature of baseball right away when we first set up the World Series way of determining "the best."  Not a single game, not two out of three, not three out of five, but four out of seven.  We were trying to allow for the odd, the atypical, the sometimes weird events that in baseball can give a victory any time to even the worst team in the league. 

To see the injustice (I'll use the Cincinnati word) in a five-game series all you have to do is divide a team's season record into five-game segments.  In a 162-game season there are 158 of these.  In the 2012 season the Reds, who blasted through their division with 97 victories and a nine-game lead over the second-place team, lost three out of five 28 times.  That, 28 out of 158, gives you an idea of how easy it is for a really good team to suffer the crushing elimination they have just suffered.  Though the competition is stiffer there is no good reason to think a playoff is anything more than a slice of the season.

And, inasmuch as life is a series of random, uneven, unfairly distributed tests, the playoffs are a slice of life.  With no assurance of how things are going to turn out you just play the percentages.

That expression "playing the percentages" is used so often, and with such simple reference (dice probabilities in a crap game), that we forget what rich challenges it presents us with.  Like the one it put before Brandon Phillips in the just-concluded series.  In the first inning of the third game, played in Cincinnati after the Reds had won two in the enemy park, Phillips, stealing second with none out, saw that the ball had gotten through the Giants' catcher, Buster Posey.  Should he try for third?

There is so much to be considered in answering that question that I'm almost sorry I raised it in a blog post.  But this is baseball, and worth your understanding (particularly if you're a foreigner), so I'll do it.  Page four, here we come.  Start with the conventional wisdom, which is that you should never take a chance on making the first or the third out at third base.  The percentages confirm that wisdom.  You have a good chance of scoring from third with one out, a much less good chance of scoring with two outs (no grounder or fly ball will do it), and a not-much-better chance of scoring with no outs than if you had stayed on second.  Add in some other things, like that it's early in the game and a good time to preserve outs and go for the big inning, and it's clear that Phillips would have to see a sure thing before he's justified in going on to third.  The reward is not worth the risk.

Well, Phillips tried for it and got thrown out and after a walk and two singles we had one run instead of two.  Now here's baseball, and maybe life: that missing run cost us the ballgame.  If we'd had it we'd have won 2-1, and won the series 3-0, having given our opponents only three total runs, and gone on to the League Championship Series looking like champions, the Big Red Pitching Machine.  Instead we were tied 1-1 at the end of nine and lost it in the tenth, 2-1, followed by the two losses that eliminated us.

But more baseball.  I here in this blog lay out for you the percentages that had to be played and the things that had to be done.  Phillips had to do that instantly, balancing so many things — how far the ball had gone past the catcher, the strength of the catcher's arm, the likelihood of an accurate throw — and then deciding whether he had a sure thing or not.  With sure things you're past percentages.  And grabbing this one — if it were one — had certain psychological advantages, to be cranked into your computing mind: inspiring your team, bringing the crowd's noise down on the visitors, upsetting them maybe, getting them to press and make more errors, producing a really big inning. 

Those big innings, though.  If the Reds had had one at any time in the remaining eight innings all that I'm talking about would have been wiped out.  If the Giants had had one.  So what that a misjudgment got a guy caught at third.  Phillips (and I) could now be sleeping at night.

Certainly a high percentage of the time your error, your inattention, your bad judgment, doesn't matter.  Then along comes the moment when it does.  And in baseball you won't know that it's the moment.  Not unless it's the last play of the game.  So you've got to play as if the game were riding on every ball that comes to you, every step you make on the base paths, every decision you weigh.  A saint, they say, is one who sees the crisis in every moment.  Ballplayers have to be saints.

They know that, oh they know that, and they blame themselves for falling short.  In the tenth inning of that crucial game Scott Rolen muffed the grounder that let in the winning run.  It was a play he makes 99 times out of a hundred.  "I lost the game," he said.  Was he too aware of crisis?  Did he look at that ball coming toward him knowing that it carried disaster?  Did he say to himself, "I'm going to have this game, this series, this team's future, in my hands?"  The go-ahead run was charging in from third.  And he bobbled the ball.  Would he have done so anyway, or was it the pressure, the knowledge of the crisis?

Baseball, though a team game, is essentially a series of individual performances.  But there is a dependence.  Scott Rolen wouldn't have been under such pressure if Ryan Hanigan hadn't put that runner on third by letting a pitch get through him.  And neither one would have been under that or any of the other kinds of pressure, terrific pressure, awaiting them in the coming two games if Phillips had decided to stop at second.

Well, that's too fraught for me to go on, as I intended, to what it all says about America and life so I'll quit, though maybe take it up in another post.

171. Primitive Emotions

 

  

I know that irresponsible and stupid war lovers, like William Randolph Hearst, do all they can to get the rest of us to join them.  I know they appeal to primitive emotions, like the male desire to protect women and children.  I know all about how Hearst got us to go to war with Spain by playing up the way dirty, mustachioed Spanish men mistreated their sweet, innocent women.  There it is on the front page of the New York Journal, a drawing of them strip-searching poor Clamencia Arango, standing naked before them.

I am professionally against appeals to the primitive emotions.  As an academic I taught appeals to reason.  As an English teacher I taught students to analyze appeals, exposing the irrational ones and developing the rational ones.  My fellow teachers and I scorned all experts in irrational appeal — Hearst, Murdoch, Limbaugh — and competed with each other at lunch for the best example of their sob-sister absurdity and danger.  These heart-wringers were our natural enemies.  Educate readers' hearts to be more careful and we'd drive them out of business.

Now, on the front page of yesterday's New York Times, I see this picture of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old Muslim girl who wanted to go to school in Taliban country.  They boarded her school bus and shot her.  I see big, strong, dirty, bearded men crowding past terrified little children to get to her.  In the six-month-old picture the Times supplied the eyes looking at me from under the headscarf are sweet and gentle.  There is none of the exaggeration of the Journal picture (which in crucial respects was false).  This happened as reported and the Taliban, through a spokesman, verified it and claimed credit.  "Let this be a lesson."

Of course I want to go to war against the Taliban, and what I want done to them in that war is inexpressible in civilized language.  I know there are ironies in this but I don't care.  If there are clever heart-tugs in this Times story too (as analysis would surely show) I don't want to hear about them.  Analyze, schmanalyze.  I want to castrate these bastards.

Both the Journal and the Times rouse me to defend women and children from foreign brutes but there is a difference: the Journal rouses me to a fight we can win. We so far outgun Spain that it will be a romp, a little imperialist romp, a testosterone blowoff.  The Times rouses me to plunge my country into a quagmire.

 So I, the Times-reading professor, am a more dangerous citizen than the Journal-reading lout.  Quagmires are worse than romps.  And my emotion — surely the best, the most humane— has to be suppressed more firmly.  Goodness has nothing to do with danger.

OK, so I'll do my best to suppress this good emotion.  But you know what?  I already know I'm not going to succeed.  One glance at Malala's picture tells me.  Nature, selecting for male protectiveness, is way ahead of me.  And, I see, ahead of me not just on this narrow front, but over the whole field, male aggressiveness.  Testosterone.

This whole thing, going to war, is probably out of my hands.  Professors and louts, both helpless.  Poets too.  Oh poets.  A. E. Housman, living through the height of British imperialism, saw his Shropshire lads marching to one war after another, and grieved over their fate:

East and west on fields forgotten

Bleach the bones of comrades slain,

Lovely lads and dead and rotten,

None that go return again.

Yet he, lying on his "idle hill of summer," knows he can't help joining them:

Far the calling bugles hollo,

High the screaming fife replies,

Gay the files of scarlet follow:

Woman bore me, I will rise.

Opium War, Boer War, World War, First Crusade, Second Crusade...you can't fight testosterone.

170. To the American Who Thinks Times Are Bad.

 

You there, you who are doing what I have done for 70 years, read the newspapers and worry, don't let these politicians make you think times are bad.  They don't know bad.  They can't imagine bad.

You want to know bad?  Bad is looking for the funnies in your newspaper on the floor, seeing the big, black headlines, and being told by your dad that this very bad man Adolf Hitler had invaded Austria, that England and France had done nothing, and that there was no telling what would stop him now.

Up to that time you had thought bad was the unemployment numbers your town's Republican paper kept putting on the front page all through 1937, climbing month by month from 14 to 19%.   The Depression was coming back!  Where would it stop?  How many more of your friends' dads would go broke, as mine did in 1938?

Bad is not having any more layers of fat left.  Mothers of my time wanted to fatten their children so that, if they got sick, they'd have "something in reserve to draw on."  Find nothing soft when you felt your arm and you figured that with the next whooping cough you were going to lose some bone.  That would be very bad.  (My grandmother applied "layers of fat" to luxuries of the twenties she hadn't approved of, and which were being stripped away after The Crash.)

You want to know worry?  Worry is being a child in the forties like Meg Greenfield, a Jew, and John Updike, a Christian, watching the lines of defense collapse toward you, and not knowing how much your country had ready to protect you, or whether God cared.  (You might even try putting yourself in the place of an adult in 1942; you know we were going to be winners in the war, he didn't.)

Worry is what you do as an adult when Stewart Alsop writes that the Soviet Union has just MIRVed its long-range missiles, making some hydrogen-bomb hits a certainty.  It's what grows when you learn that your country contains people sympathetic to the MIRV-firing side, and willing to help them improve their firing — or, if not that, work to make your country more like that country, to the point of revolution.

Worry is what you do when you hear a worker for Gene McCarthy tell his crew of fellow students when Nixon looks like the winner:  "Well, what we've got to hope for now is a quick revolution."

Look at what we have now with those things in mind and what do you see?  Enemies with no H-bombs, no delivery vehicles that can reach our shores, no tanks that can break through our lines, no more divisions than the Vatican had.  And, even better, no enemies with significant sympathy, much less a constituency, in the United States.  Has there ever been a group more generally scorned than the Taliban?

Look at our candidates.  Each meets the Stewart Alsop test: Will he be acceptable to the other party?  He meant without driving them to talk of revolution.

Look at unemployment, 7.8%.  Bad, but far from 19%, and we know which direction it's going in.  Furthermore, we're not all teetering over a canyon with no safety net under us.  And, I might add for those willing to make a leap in space as well as time, we're not living in a country where that 7.8 figure, being of advantage to the incumbent power, is generally distrusted.  Indeed, we're living in a country in which those who express such distrust are hooted off the stage.

As for loss of fat, you who assess the nation's health, try looking at it my grandmother's way. The nation added layer after layer, beginning in the fifties, until we were bulging with it.  That's OK, I suppose, until you begin to think the bulge is normal, and necessary, and your right, and the loss of it a disaster. 

Here's where the imagination comes in.  Try a thought experiment.  Imagine what it would be like as layer after layer of the fat added since the forties came off.  Would it be as terrible as you think, and are told?  Maybe you'd get a lesson in material disasters, and how they're different from moral and spiritual disasters.  Maybe you'd find yourself, and the nation, reading Emerson and Thoreau more seriously.  Maybe, as Republicans lament America's loss of its position as the number one superpower, you'd look more closely at the Swiss and the Swedes, and ask more seriously how they could be happy.

Want to picture what a moral and spiritual disaster would be?  Picture us, fat with weapons, dropping an atom bomb on North Vietnam, as Curtis LeMay wanted to do.  "America would lose her soul," said Walter Lippmann, and I think he was right.

Finally, look more closely at all the politicians who have been haranguing you from stage and screen for these many months, calling each other names, raking up the other guy's muck, displaying their own clean families, making you sick one moment with their sentimentality and outraged the next with their divisiveness.  Look at them, maybe with the help of your college history teacher, against the full background of the past, with John Adams (or his birther flacks) calling Thomas Jefferson the "son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto" and Adams calling Jefferson "hideous," "bald," "toothless" and "hermaphroditical." Look at our politicians with our model democracy in the background, ancient Athens, with clean families on the stage winning one case after another and politicians groomed by the best flacks (named "rhetoricians" then) winning the best offices. 

169. Rome, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran

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No, Romulus, I don't want any ancient Romans speaking on this blog.  You're heartless.  You decimate people.  Forty percent of the human beings in your empire were slaves.  You'll ruin my reputation.

"OK, OK, but if you had listened to me twelve years ago you'd be a lot better off than you are now.  You'd be at least a trillion richer in dollars and 6000 richer in lives."

Yes, but in how much danger?

"Probably in less danger than you're in now.  You'd have concentrated on danger.  None of this restructuring their society, changing their values, training their young men to be government soldiers, getting them (admit it) to love us.  Just wiping out — or scaring the pants off — the people that are a danger to you."

And how exactly do you avoid what we did?  When you break a country it's yours, isn't it?  You're responsible.  And, long-term, making a country a democracy makes it safe, doesn't it?  Democracies aren't aggressive.

"Oh, you are so wrong.  And in so many ways.  I won't even mention your belief that democracies aren't aggressors.  What do you think your wonderful Athens was?  Jeez, read Thucydides.  And have you noticed that the builder of the biggest empire since ours, Britain, was a democracy?"

No, since you haven't mentioned it.

"All right, let that pass.  Go to this: 'breaking a country.'  You don't have to do that.  You just break what's a danger to you.  Do they have elephants?  You say, 'If I find an elephant in here I'm going to zap it and all the people around it.'  Do they have elephant training camps?   You say, 'I find one and I'll zap it too.  Too many elephant camps in your country, Mr. King, and I'll zap you.'  I know you can do that.  I've read about your spying and zapping powers."

But suppose they worship elephants?  Suppose they have a fetish about using them?  Suppose that's the whole problem: they have an elephant culture.  That culture is a thousand miles from our culture and it's what makes them hate us.  You want us to ignore that?

"Yes! Yes!  Yes!  You're not interested in culture.  You're interested in living, breathing elephants, physical creatures that can hurt you, threats to your life — not symbolic beasts contrary to 'everything you stand for.'  The truth is, you don't understand your best interest.  You don't know the most economical way to satisfy it.  You don't know how to display it.  And you don't know how to voice it, not in a way to make sure there's no misunderstanding."

Well maybe you could tell me how to voice it.

"I can't exactly, not in your terms.  But in my terms it's very simple. To a nation you have entered you say, 'Keep your own culture, worship whomever or whatever you want, treat each other in any way you want.  Just keep the elephants out, the roads maintained, and the tribute coming.  Do it the Roman way and we'll get along fine.'"

And if some evil is growing in that nation, if in their schools they are raising a generation of elephant fanatics, you'll just let that ideology or culture or whatever, grow.  Well let me tell you something, something you don't know: we tried that once.  The evil was named Nazism.  And we let it grow until it was too late to stop it.  And you know who we blame now for that?  People like you.  We call them isolationists.  "Ignore other countries as long as the tribute — or in our case, profit from trade — keeps coming in."

"And so, because of that Nazi evil, you'll never be isolationist again.  But there's isolationism and there's isolationism.  Can you conceive of a kind in which, while assuring that no country's rockets or elephants can hurt you, you just sit behind your fences and make yourself attractive?  Attractive enough to induce your enemies to change?  Be such an example of freedom and democracy they won't be able resist.  And yes, be prosperous.  Work hard at that.  You and all your democratic allies.  The outsiders will see the connection."

And really change?  I can't see it.  The religion goes too deep.

"Here's where you go Roman.  With all that prosperity inside the fence you and your allies build it very high, with strict conditions about coming in and joining up. (You're always open to that; for long-term world peace you want everybody inside it.)  You count on the contrast between the ways the two cultures play out.  And on their ability, eventually, to see the connection between culture and prosperity.  (At first.  Later they may see connections to less material benefits.)" 

You're not who I thought you were.  You know a lot about our times.

"I do because I've done some studying.  But I'm still Roman.  I'm still saying, 'Keep your own culture, worship whoever or whatever you want.'  I'm just adding  'and bear the consequences.'  And I'm ready to get really Roman with those who can't bear to watch them bear the consequences, or who try to soften them.  Help those people, send them technology, say 'there, there, your culture's really as good as any other,' and you're out of the alliance.'  A good Roman is able to, well, 'watch them starve.'  Because he thinks suffering the consequences is the best way to learn about your religion and culture, what's wrong with it.   The starvation he watches is a means to a good end: getting them permanently into a proven feeding system.  Good end for them.  For us, it's securing our lives against them."

And that comes first, right?

"Right.  And you get it by holding to the strict conditions.  Nobody gets inside the fence, nobody joins the circle of the well-fed, without checking his elephants at the gate and opening his courts for a check by the others.  Any member of the circle who makes it easier for an entrant to skip this, or reduce the motivation to accept the conditions, you throw him out."

Man, we'd have to have a lot of power to do that, or a lot of sympathy among the other members of our alliance, or both.

"I agree.  At one time I think you had both.  Right after 9-11.  Now it may be too late.  But what else gives you a better chance against something so deep?"