Do you stop, ever, to ask whether professional skills are
badly used? It would seem obvious that men are born with
strengths they should not use, else running your car over the
neighborhood pest asks only the question, "Do it?" -- eliminating
the critical question, "Ought I to do it?"
There is general agreement that just because the doctor knows
how to end life, that doesn't mean he should go ahead and do so
simply because he has the skills in hand. There are debates of
enormous consequence whether the doctor who can end a pregnancy
should feel free to do so, and we read that in fighting various
widespread afflictions in Africa, short cuts are taken that
condemn the marginal player. Triage, they call it, when human
cunning seeks out a parable for moral cover.
The White House report by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York
Times is headlined, "Bush-Watchers Wonder How He Copes With
Stress." Now that wording is arrantly mischievous, because there
is a planted axiom there. It is: No one should be able to cope
with such responsibilities as Mr. Bush exercises.
If one suffers from an incapacity to sleep, one calls in the
medical community for advice. But what if such advice can't
honorably be given? Can one envision the doctor at the White
House, pill in hand, standing by and saying: "Mr. President, I
have the means to grant you physical relief from the pain you are
undergoing, in the knowledge that while you sleep a dozen
Americans will be killed in Iraq because of orders you issued. Is
it right that I should be the instrument by which your anxiety,
remorse, indecision, are palliated?"
"Presidents in trouble," Ms. Stolberg writes, "often look to
history for solace, and Mr. Bush is no exception. He has
sometimes likened himself to Harry S. Truman -- a president who
struggled to explain the nation's involvement in Korea, but whose
reputation was redeemed after his death."
But what games are we here playing? History records that when
Mr. Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped on Japan, he went to
sleep and learned of the effect of the bomb only after he woke.
Was he troubled by the capacity to remove his thoughts from acts
that, as a man of action, he had authorized?
The great, the weighty question of taking responsibility for
the hideous transcriptions of power is coped with only by such as
Shakespeare. But is there any way to handle the trivialization of
the question?