The quality of mercy is not political

by David Benjamin

“Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins.”
— Cheyenne proverb

MADISON, Wis. — A funny thing happened on Capitol Hill this week, when Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst apparently teamed up with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, from New York, on a proposal that would tighten the screws on men in the U.S. armed forces who demean, molest, abuse and rape their female colleagues.

This is odd because Joni belongs to the “she was asking for it” school of sexual-violence orthodoxy, otherwise known as the Republican Party. Solicitude toward rape victims, especially if the girls were drinking, wearing a lacy red push-up bra or acting “flirty” is alien to the outlook of contemporary conservatism. Joni has shown a slavish loyalty to the survivival-of-the-meanest philosophy that was bricked into her Party with the coronation of the Gipper forty years ago. Remember that Joni’s initial claim to political “authenticity” derived from her boast that she loved taking a gelding shears into the pigsty on her family farm and clipping the nuts off pubescent boars.

So, you wonder, what’s going on here? Beats there a tiny, squishy heart beneath the bodice of Hard-Hearted Hannah?

Joni is aware that a hint of niceness might dismay the hardboiled reactionaries in her Hawkeye base. So, she offered a hasty alibi for taking up common cause with an East Coast liberal. Joni was, she explained, raped in college. This trauma, kept shamefully secret for lo, these many years, has softened her attitude about young women in coeducational settings made vulnerable to the bestial hungers of the strapping linebackers who circle them lustfully and regard undefended nookie as their God-given birthright.

In this rare instance, Joni is right. The measure she’s co-sponsoring with Sen. Gillibrand is overdue, appropriate, necessary and incongruously compassionate. Ambiguous, however, is Joni’s motivation. For the sake of this law and only this law, Jonis has applied what might be called a necessary suspension of cruelty. It’s okay for her, an otherwise ruthless and Darwinian conservative, to care for her fellow human beings and offer them a helping hand — in blatant defiance of her partisan faith — because she was herself, personally, a victim of the outrage against which she has consented to legislate.

Consider, for comparison, former vice president Dick Cheney. If ever there were a poster-gargoyle for the GOP philosophy of emptying society’s lifeboats of the poor, the wretched, the helpless and the hungry, and chumming the water for sharks, it was the guy known simply, in his biopic, as “Vice.” However, as Dick’s history reveals, he sacrificed his shot at the presidency out of fatherly fealty to his lesbian daughter, Mary. Despite his Party’s fierce hostility to any minuscule concession to gay, lesbian, transgender and generally queer minorities — to marry, to serve in the armed forces, to pee in their preferred lavatory — Dick stood (alongside Joe Biden) for gay rights even before Barack Obama “evolved.”

Vice, of course, has made it clear that he’s otherwise an orthodox right-wing firebrand in every aspect of American culture. His empathy toward gay folks — because his little girl is one of ‘em — is the unique compromise he has made to walking in his neighbor’s moccasins. In GOP circles, this sort of empathy is heresy. But it’s forgivable, like Joni’s uncharacteristic softheartedness toward campus sluts and eleventh-grade teases, because it’s personal.

Right-wing icon Irving Kristol has said that a conservative is a “liberal who’s been mugged.” A similar, but more complicated dynamic emerges from the intimate travail of conservatives who stumble inadvertently into hardships that they prefer to reserve for people with whom they rarely or never associate. They are, in a sense, ambushed by empathy.

An absence of mercy, in the human heart, has always struck me as an acquired deficit. I tend to believe that feeling for other people — for total strangers — who are in trouble is an instinct. Cruelty must be cultivated, and the harvest of that seed can be poisonous. When armies, as they must, teach brutality, their veterans too often suffer its crippling hangover — nightmares, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress, divorce, isolation, homelessness, impulsive violence, suicide and… brutality.

When I was twelve, I started going to movies all by myself, at the Erwin Theater in Tomah, Wisconsin. One of the flicks into which I bumbled, unaware of its sheer ghastliness, was Erwin Leiser’s documentary of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, Mein Kampf. A Catholic school kid in the woodsy Midwest, I knew nary of Jewishness, little about the Third Reich and I felt not a twinge of racial identity. I was a wide-eyed kid. But the images in the movie — of SS soldiers firing bullets into the brains of Jews lined up in front of pits, of humans herded from boxcars, stripped naked and hustled into gas chambers, then shoved dead, white and floppy-limbed into ovens, of piles of corpses twenty feet tall being bulldozed through the mud and crushed beneath the treads like dried stalks and empty cartons — altered my thinking, my feelings, as much as any experience in my life.

Seeing the Holocaust, in footage proudly filmed by its Nazi authors, simplified the theology I was learning at St. Mary’s School. I belonged to a faith that still, in those days, subtly demonized the Jew. After discovering the Final Solution, I tore the membrane of sectarianism. I became less a Catholic and less even a “Christian,” becoming instead just an admirer of a mortal Jesus who befriended unbelievers, scorned the moneychangers and offended the high priests, praised the kindness of strangers, walked among lepers and lunatics, and washed the feet of the village whore. I became, I guess, a humanist. I became what was called, in a memorable episode of “Star Trek,” an “empath.”

In high school, in tune with this conversion, I fell in love with a girl named Linda who was more empath than me, who felt everyone else’s pain so deeply that she lived in a gentle cloud of melancholy that was both endearing and heartbreaking. The flip side — my consolation in loving Linda madly — was that, as sensitive as she was to intimations of hurt and anguish, she was similarly receptive to joy. It was easy, and exhilarating, to make her laugh.

My friendship with Linda, which has never gone away, compels me to regard Joni Ernst’s exceptional spasm of compassion with less than complete scorn. Joni’s concern for women who’ve endured what once she endured validates — somewhat — my conviction that humans are innately, though perhaps tenuously, empathetic. We start out caring, but we can learn — through ideology or indoctrination or through a lifelong series of muggings both real and imaginary — to harden.

The essence of compassion — no, of humanity — is the power — no, the instinct — to extend the quality of mercy beyond one’s own narrow sphere, to cry, as I did alone in the Erwin, for the death-camp millions, their religion and ethnicity beyond my experience, but their agonies an ache in my heart and their murder a deep-felt guilt that I’ll never shake.

The human imperative is not just enough to walk — but to feel, to hurt, to weep, to rejoice and to laugh — in your neighbor’s moccasins.