Guns and butter

...It may seem unfair to poor Dr...

...Jihad...

...And inasmuch as there are evils, there are also goods...

...Like other influential Catholic political liberals, e.g., Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill, she's a disappointment to the anti-abortion cause...

...It is right to protest the funding of terrorists in Nicaragua, and to encourage the hope which Solidarity brings to the people of Poland...

...Anyone who has watched babies play with one another knows that D R. SEUSS has just published a book, aware, politically correct, is in reality a if it weren't for civilization it would be all The Butter Battle (Random way of assuaging our own guilts...

...On one side of the wall people who don't believe in but- ter at all are put into prison, and some of them are killed...

...Something else bothers me about the book...

...I don't mean any analogies here be- tween existing superpowers, except to say that each has plenty with which to charge the other, and that the differences are quite serious...

...but at the same time we must teach them that there are values which cannot be com- promised and evils which must be re-sisted...

...If life were only a matter of two fuzzy bunches of warm bodies whose difference consisted in which sides of the bread they liked to put their butter on, things would be so much simpler -- almost as simple as they are in The Butter Battle...

...I believe that no Christian has the right to give unqualified allegiance to any country, or to identify the cause of God with the victory of any particular political ideology...

...Civilization has House, $6.95) which introduces have produced moral children we our- done a little (not nearly enough) to even children to the arms race...

...None of this is to suggest that there is anything insincere or merely expedient about Rep...

...In a world in which all values are matters of taste, subjective preference, it really is crazy to think of killing or dying for anything at all...

...Seuss to single him out as an object lesson in lib- eral sentimentality...

...But without a large and influential constituency, doctrines of public morality, no matter how sound, can be no more than interesting speculative propositions...

...There are examples, in our cen- tury, of effective nonviolent resistance: the Danish resistance to the Nazis, Gan- dhi's role in the liberation of India, and the continuing existence of Solidarity...

...On this differ- ence the two sides base hatreds for each other, and build ever-increasingly de- structive weapons, moving towards ul- timate destruction...

...What if we do...

...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 424...

...on the other side they butter it on top...

...The world may burn in a conflict between Soviet paranoia and American innocence, but what it suffers for and maybe dies for will be something rather more important than what side of the bread gets buttered...

...Part of me finds selves must be pure,'or at least on the the odds between our propensity to do this objectionable: leave kids alone...

...There are standards against which we must measure things...

...Fair enough...

...That adult women should wish to be free to determine their own sexual conduct is easy to understand, as is their desire to decide which medical/surgical procedures they will or will not submit to...

...DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...

...You will, of course, be well thought of among many Catholic bishops, but there is little evidence to date that their prayers are efficacious in the way of delivering votes or campaign contributions...

...We must indeed teach our chil- dren that the arms race is something which cannot be allowed to continue...

...David R. Carlin, Jr., a senator in the Rhode Island state legislature, is the author of "The Dilemma of an Anti-Abortion Democrat" [Nov...

...There are, after all, things worth caring a lot about...

...The liber- als will disown you, since you can't be one of them without being a feminist, and you can't be a feminist without being pro-choice...

...We are responsible for doing what we can do about evils on both sides of what- ever borders exist...

...let right track.., this, anyway, is a tempt- damage to anyone who contradicts our them get at least to their teenage years ing thought for a lot of us...

...But it isn't there for any frivolous reason...

...For those of us who are anti-abortion it is often difficult to understand how an intelligent person who has given serious thought to the issue can honestly support the abortion-on- demand position legitimized by the United States Supreme Court...

...But at the same time, there are distinc- tions which must be made...

...Her pro-life garment displays a conspicuous pro-choice patch...

...Nothing is less realistic than those desperation...

...The Butter Battle is, I suppose, an ef- fort to begin this civilization by doing a kind of consciousness-raising among children before the militarists get to them...

...The innocence of butter up or down, nice as it would be, isn't any- where close to what is true about our world...

...It is often a losing battle, civilization involving both Chartres and the Crusades, the Sermon on the Mount and the...

...No one is good here, no one innocent...

...If you are a nationally Of several minds: John Garvey GUNS & BUTTER DR...

...You know some parent is standing behind that angelic baby with a pointed stick, urging the right answer which is not, "I want to see Tommy Ryan break both his arms...

...We politicians, like almost everyone else in the world, normally believe sincerely in those positions which it is expedient for us to adopt...

...It is rather with the cute conceit which precedes it...

...18, 1983] and many other articles in Com-monweal...

...The question is rather whether we can learn and teach forms of resistance to evil which will not inevitably lead to vio- lence...

...The book's descrip- tion of the illogical nature of the arms race is uncomfortably true: there really is something crazy about what we have done and continue to do...

...which is about two groups of typi- cally funny-looking Seuss creatures who live with a wall between them...

...The truly utopian belief is that we can go on as we are, and nothing will go wrong...

...On one side of the wall people (or critters) butter their bread on the bottom...

...It is also not hard to understand, whatever the problems of moral theology involved, that women feel they should have the right to abort in difficult cases, cases involving rape, incest, and probable serious birth defects, for example, especially when such abortions are done early in the preg- nancy...

...But none of these considerations help us understand why anyone would favor abortion on demand, that is, the right to have an abortion at anytime, no matter how late in the pregnancy, and for any reason, no matter how trivial...

...The American presence in Vietnam, the Russian presence in Afghanistan, the American support of right-wing dictators and the Russian support of left-wing dic- tators, all of this is ugly -- but it involves something substantial, something which in fact matters deeply...

...To believe that nonviolent resis- tance is necessary for our world may seem utopian, until you face the fact that the alternative is racial suicide...

...Let's rewrite the book...

...How can anyone deny, we wonder, that in the last, say, two-thirds of the pregnancy, there is a significant degree of probability that the life to be terminated is that of a human being...

...The Ferraro phenomenon highlights the absence of anything resembling an effective constituency for the seamless garment point of view, and it demonstrates the need to begin the long-term political spadework and brainwork required to create that constituency...

...To speak of the Soviets as "an evil empire" in a way which implies that we represent the forces of light is a move towards idolatry...

...SEUSS'S LIBERAL SENTIMENTALITY significant politician, or aspire to be one, and you'd like to be, h la Cardinal Bernardin, both liberal and anti-abortion, you'll find you have a microscopically small constituency...

...But put philosophical considerations aside for the moment and consider the politics of abortion...

...Far from it...

...with, was seen aiming a flower at various innocent bystanders and shooting them with it...

...Neither superpower, of the two that now threaten to grind the rest of the world underneath, is blameless...

...It is right to delight in the victory of an Alfonsin in F ) \ Argentina, and to protest the imprison- ment of Father Gleb Yakunin and the persecution of Sakharov in the Soviet Union...

...A will and our desire to survive and cooper- before giving them concrete reasons for friend of mine, devoted to nonviolence, ate...

...Ferraro, as the media have not ceased to remind us ever since her name was first floated as a vice-presidential possibil- ity, is both pro-choice on abortion and Roman Catholic -- and not just incidentally Catholic, but a graduate of Marymount College in Manhattan back in the days when Catholic colleges were thoroughly, sometimes oppressively, Catholic...

...It is of course not the job of bishops to supply a political constituency for the social doctrines they enunciate...

...If we Crusades, all Jihad...

...I agree that the arms race is a tragic absurdity...

...On the other side, people whose color is wrong are forced into poverty, and those who protest are tor- tured...

...The major prob- lem, according to this line of thinking, is that we don't understand one another...

...And the conservatives won't receive you, since no matter how right you may be on the abortion question, you're still wrong, from their point of view, on a hundred and one other questions...

...If Solidarity had decided on violence as a tool, it would have been crushed at birth...

...It backf'ues...

...it is an attempt to remind those liberals or progressives who are normally on the side of the angels when it comes to issues of social justice and world peace that they are guilty of a fatal inconsistency if they are at the same time pro-choice or (to use the indelicate expression for the same thing) pro-abortion...

...The simple fact is that if Geraldine Ferraro had elected to be an anti-abortion liberal there's not a chance in the world she would have attained her current ele- vated status...

...What if we do, and hate what the other guy thinks...

...If it all comes down to which side of the bread you butter, of course it is mad (or, in child-terms, jusi plain silly) to build weapons and aim them at one another...

...The idea that children should be dragged early into the political arena is one I am willing to bracket...

...But in fact his latest book suggests something that exists at certain levels of liberal thought, and has existed there for years...

...They matter deeply, much more than the difference involved in buttering bread on the top or on the bottom...

...but this means, at the very least, admitting that there are evils...

...I wonder how much our at- was recently perplexed when her son, Franciscan ads in which a child of five, tempt to make our children politically who does not have any toy guns to play asked what he most dearly longs for, 10 August 1984:423 lisps, "World peace...

...Children are violent like the rest of us...

...Our inability to know what really is happening to Sakharov, our knowledge of what has happened to religious prisoners in the Soviet Union --these understandings matter as much as our understanding of America's terrible role in Latin America, its support of anti-democratic forces wherever there is the suspicion that American interests might be threatened, its unwillingness to listen to the experi- ence of other nations, and its insistence on its own innocence...

...Ferraro's pro-choice stance...

...The values that divide us from the Soviet system, as well as the actions which contradict our own professed de- votion to freedom and democracy, are important --it isn't a matter of learning simply to accept our differences...

...What if our understanding of the other's values is based on such real and ugly things as the Gulag, or Vietnam, or genocide...

...The seamless garment may lead the pack philosophically, but politically it's a nonstarter...

...Violence is something which is civilized out of us...

...My discomfort isn't with that part of the story...