84 Moron

"We need ruthless warriors," John believed.

"Nah, I'm a Buddhist," I replied. "I'd rather be dead than be ruthless."

"It won't be just you that's dead," he said. "It will be your family and friends as well or, more likely, someone else will assume the karma of being ruthless and your ass and mine will be saved."

What if our nonviolence and compassion, John asked, are interpreted by our enemies as weakness and thereby further inspire the mass murder of innocents? What if the civilization of the Enlightenment—the freedom of every individual to seek to realize his own joy—is threatened with extermination because we shy from the resolve to embrace the lesser evil? What action then is of benefit to all beings? There are no simple scriptural answers to such questions, John wrote, and to carry in the head a list of commandments, he argued, does not suffice. If it did, it would all be easy, he said, and we'd all be home free—but nonviolence is not an absolute. Compassion may require violence, John argued. It was no accident, he reminded me, that the Taliban blew up the statues of the Buddha. We may have to violate the precepts, said John, in order to keep them.

"There are no rules in Buddhism," John wrote.

Our email debate rolled into December. John forwarded to me excerpts from Buddhist literature explaining why violence is sometimes necessary to prevent harm. I responded by informing John that I had read a report that old men with special skills of use to our armed forces were being hired as private contractors in Iraq and I urged John to apply.

I was joking I think.

John had also been debating the war with people at The Farm—the collective where he had spent eight years working and practicing under the guidance of Stephen Gaskin—and forwarding to me the exchange. Many of those on The Farm had like me for years subscribed to the principle of nonviolence. Pacifism is a strategy that works only if it can tap into a reservoir of good will on the other side, John explained to them, an argument that I had read years before by writers who defended the imprisonment of Gandhi during World War Two for fear that he might persuade simpletons and fools to employ the strategy of nonviolence against Hitler. Although John and I continued through April of 2002 to correspond, I think it was in reading in December 2001 one of his emails to The Farm that I first questioned whether our friendship would survive.

Subject: "Sincere Apologies."

Its text began:

"I would like to apologize to everyone whom I have offended. I've been suffering a lot of intense personal anguish in my life and have been taking it out on all of you sweet, loving, peaceful people, and there's no excuse for it. I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me. I promise, as God is my witness, that I will never insult any of you ever again. Now, if I may, I would like to explain a few things to you morons."

What followed was the argument—for war and for ruthless warriors—with which by now eight years later everyone is familiar. We must be willing, John insisted, to do terrible things. If we are fighting an enemy who places no value whatsoever on human life, he argued, then we cannot fail to defend ourselves for fear of causing the deaths of noncombatants.

Ugh.

To my predictable liberal response John replied:

"I disagree that we must see the lives of all people—whoever they are—as equally precious."

Ultimately it was indeed the call for ruthlessness that carried the day.

The response to the terrorist attacks and to the video of the torture and decapitation of innocent hostages was the pre-emptive war and the attack on Iraq, shock and awe, the capture and detention of enemy suspects, their special rendition to secret prisons, black holes, in foreign nations, the suspension of due process, the use of humiliation, torture, and murder; and on the other side indiscriminate suicide bombing, kidnapping, torture, assassination, execution, and more decapitations; and as I wrote this on Wednesday, July 19, 2006, still in my head were the reports in the local newspaper that morning of corpses found in Iraq, the victims bound and tortured with electric drills, holes bored into their eyes and heads.

Drilled!

It was not difficult to understand the reason why in the defense of national security my friend John and many more defended total war. It was more difficult for me to understand the epithets John applied to me and to others who disagreed. Personally John himself had passed beyond ruthlessness, he said in response to my question about his own willingness to be the kind of ruthless warrior for whom he said he prayed, but he said that he would contribute to the war against terror by being a ruthless rhetorical warrior. In the course of our long discussion and debate John attributed my own point of view to idiocy, stupidity, naivete, misunderstanding, irrationality, ignorance, leftist indoctrination, utopianism, subversion, indifference, apathy, delusion, fundamentalism, moral relativity, moral absolutism, moral condescension, cowardice, and folly. I attributed his point of view to panic, to fear, and to his shame, guilt, and regret for his thirty years in the counterculture of the left—

Then finally to possible mental illness.

I did wonder.

John patiently explained that although he was confronting, politically, what he called the reality of his lifelong devotion to a creed fundamentally totalitarian and destructive; and confronting, personally, the truth of his failures as a husband, as a father, and as a lover, he had definitely not, he said, suffered any kind of emotional or nervous breakdown. No, contrary to my surmise, John said, he had experienced neither fear nor unhappiness—at least none at all abnormal—and my suggestion that he had had pissed him off.

"I don't patronize you, Bob, with unctuous concerns for your mental health," John replied to my inquiry, "just because I think you're wrong."

Throughout our long email debate on the war we had both often signed off with the word "love."

This time his irony was umistakeable—

"Love and kisses."

I felt—just as I do now as I record these memories—heartbroken that on this matter of such gravity my friend of forty years and I could not agree. But John was not crazy.