Good and Evil in Littleton
Good and Evil in Littleton “I don’t know why human beings do evil.” Thus Vice President Al Gore, at last Sunday’s memorial service in Littleton, Colorado. Of course, as Andrew Ferguson reports...
...Bush was not as fast off the mark as McCain in calling for victory in the Yugoslav war, but eventually he did take a firm and honorable stand...
...Milosevic wins, the United States and NATO lose...
...So did much of the media analysis...
...The most humanly interesting stories from Littleton are not those of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold...
...Time, meanwhile, featured color photos of the killers, with this cover line: “The monsters next door...
...They are 17-year-old Cassie Bernall, choosing to die rather than deny her faith...
...I am the law...
...It isn’t fun or easy to cut against the grain of one’s own party...
...Game over...
...Which leaves it up to the leading Republican presidential candidates to save the party from the ignominy into which the congressional GOP threatens to plunge it...
...McCain’s efforts have been heroic, but he cannot accomplish this vital task alone...
...Posing for TV cameras while sitting on anti-aircraft guns in Belgrade...
...She could have fudged or quibbled—but didn’t...
...Isn’t that rather “black and white...
...For us, the monstrous is real...
...They fly off, Ramsey Clark-style, to negotiate with American enemies and their backers in Moscow...
...For Littleton was not only about inexplicable evil...
...As the GOP presidential front-runner, however, and in the absence of sound congressional leadership, Bush needs to do more...
...She simply said yes...
...We live in an ‘it depends’ kind of world and, Bill Clinton’s egregious example notwithstanding, that probably isn’t a bad thing...
...But as they stumped on behalf of their favorite “solutions,” the speeches rang even hollower than usual...
...Most press attention focused on the vote that denied President Clinton support for the air campaign...
...And the more lessons we were given about how to prevent our children from going off the rails (U.S...
...It is also often uninteresting...
...Because they can’t help but assume that the actions of Harris and Klebold are somehow more solid, more real than those of Bernall and Sanders...
...So is there nothing to be done but to deplore the terrible events and move on...
...But it seems pretty clear that for now the majority of congressional Republicans are set in their unfortunate ways...
...But at moments like this, that is what leaders do...
...Of course, as Andrew Ferguson reports below, politicians of both parties soon abandoned such unusual honesty and humility...
...News asked simply, “Why...
...military action against Yugoslavia...
...Not as part of any diplomatic settlement, not in return for any concessions by Milosevic, not even as part of some phony Russian-brokered deal, for which so many McGovernite Republicans are foolishly pressing...
...Less noticed, but in our view even more shocking, was the fact that 127 House Republicans—57 percent of the Republican majority—voted to invoke the War Powers Act and compel the president to withdraw all American forces from the conflict within 30 days...
...It is the manifestations of good, more than of evil, that make Littleton so powerful a story and so important a moment...
...Feel no remorse, no sense of shame...
...Why have the media given so much more attention to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold than to Cassie Bernall and Dave Sanders...
...Modernity began with Machiavelli...
...The noble is not...
...Right now, the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination is George W. Bush...
...It depends...
...What made them do it...
...Eric Harris wrote: “My belief is that if I say something, it goes...
...47-year-old Dave Sanders, sacrificing himself to save the lives of his students...
...What’s next...
...He should reiterate his position that America must win this war...
...And wasn’t it the “absolutely intolerant” killers who were thoroughly modern, who disbelieved in moral absolutes, who denied that any truth bound them...
...And they invoke the War Powers Act, which Republican presidents from Nixon to Reagan to Bush have declared an unconstitutional restraint on executive prerogative...
...On Wednesday, April 28, a majority of Republican House members cast two deeply irresponsible votes on the U.S...
...Republicans voted six to one against the resolution, and its failure sent a terrible signal, both to American pilots who now have to continue risking their lives knowing that the Republican Congress does not support their mission, and to Slobodan Milosevic, who will undoubtedly read the vote as strong evidence that the United States lacks the will to prevail...
...Last week, the covers of both Newsweek and U.S...
...The Washington Post referred to Cassie Bernall in its headline as a “‘martyr.’ ” Time, on the other hand, felt no need to put quotation marks around its description of the two killers as monsters...
...Moving on doesn’t do justice to what happened in Littleton...
...There you have it: the culmination, the end, of modernity...
...In the House, 27 Republicans, led by the redoubtable Henry Hyde, voted against invoking the War Powers Act and for the air campaign...
...Last Wednesday was a defining moment for the congressional Republican party, and Republicans defined themselves as the party of defeat...
...A few brave Republicans, led by Senator John McCain, have tried to prevent the party from driving off this isolationist cliff...
...Needless to say, the newsweeklies could not answer their own questions...
...It was also about extraordinary good...
...But the writer felt compelled to begin his editorial in this way: “Yes...
...Congressional Republicans have now miraculously transformed themselves into a simulacrum of Vietnam-era left-wing Democrats...
...The Chicago Tribune had a moving editorial last week praising Cassie Bernall’s deed as “a humbling and awe-inspiring” example of “true moral heroism...
...This warning at the top of the editorial was, fortunately, forgotten by its end, when the Tribune praised Cassie’s simple moral choice: “She could have lied—but didn’t...
...The great interpreter of Machiavelli, the late Leo Strauss, concluded his book on that unbelievably brilliant and subtle “teacher of evil” with the suggestion that we could only ascend from the dead-end of Machiavellian modernity by returning to an earlier notion of “the primacy of the good...
...No, just cut and run...
...That is what a majority of Republicans voted for last week, and no amount of Republican support for increased defense spending—urgent as that is—can cover up the shame of that vote...
...The more we learned about Eric Harris’s diary and Dylan Klebold’s Little League, the more we were reminded that evil is often banal...
...William Kristol GOPeaceniks The congressional Republican party hit bottom last week...
...Evil is often inexplicable...
...The world isn’t all black and white, and absolutists— moral, political or other—tend quickly to become absolutely intolerant and intolerable...
...News promised to tell us “How parents, kids, and schools can spot trouble—and head it off ”), the less enlightened we felt...
...That good can be more interesting than evil, that good can be more powerful than evil—these are hard truths for us moderns to accept...
...William Kristol and Robert Kagan, for the Editors...
...Sit-ins...
...More important, he should repudiate last week’s votes—for the sake of his party, and the nation...
...15-year-old Daniel Rohrbough, killed while holding an exit door open for his fleeing classmates...
...Cassie Bernall and Dave Sanders, in different ways, took their bearings from the primacy of the good...
...They call for peace at any price...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 32
