The Pity Party (3 page)

Chapter 1

H
OW
C
OMPASSION
D
EFINES AND
A
NIMATES
L
IBERALISM

T
o understand how, in order to safeguard Casey the rabbit, Marty the Magician ended up filling out a federal disaster plan with professional help, we must first understand the suffering situation of Pepper the Dalmatian and the family who owned her. Pepper disappeared from the yard of that family's house in 1965. By the time they located Pepper she was already in the custody of a “dog farm,” whose owners refused not only the family's request for access, so they could identify and claim their dog, but also a request made on their behalf by their congressman, Joseph Resnick. Before Pepper's owners were able to take additional measures, the dog farm transferred Pepper to a New York hospital, which euthanized her after a laboratory experiment.
¹

Pepper's story, publicized in a
Sports Illustrated
article, motivated Resnick to introduce a bill that became the Animal Welfare Act of 1966. One of its provisions required laboratories using dogs and cats for research to have licenses for the animals. A 1970 amendment extended the requirement to “exhibitors,” understood at the time to include zoos, circuses, and carnivals, but subsequently interpreted by U.S. Department of Agriculture officials to apply to solo practitioners like Marty Hahne, a magician who performs for school groups and children's birthday parties. Thus it was that in 2005, after a show at a library in Missouri, an official from the USDA approached Hahne. Did he have a license for the rabbit he had pulled out of a hat during his performance?

He does now, a USDA rabbit license granted in exchange for a forty-dollar annual fee, along with Hahne's agreement to take his exhibited animal to the veterinarian regularly and to submit to department officials' unannounced inspections of his home. The 1965 law, four pages long, has led to fourteen pages of regulations solely on the treatment of rabbits. As with many regulatory regimes, it includes a fair sampling of the arbitrary and risible. The rules don't apply to animals raised for consumption, for example, so Hahne would not need a license if Casey were destined to be part of a stew rather than a show. Nor does it cover cold-blooded animals, leaving the performer at liberty to pull an unlicensed lizard out of his hat.

In January 2013 the Department of Agriculture ruled that exhibitors needed, in addition to a license, a “disaster plan” for all animals subject to the license requirement. It announced the intention to create such a regulation in 2008, three years after pets, livestock, and lab animals were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina, some dying, others complicating already difficult efforts to relieve afflicted areas. USDA proposed that any exhibitor required to have a license for an animal must also have a written plan to keep it safe during each of many contingencies listed by the department. It posted the suggested regulation for public comments and received 997, of which 50 were endorsements. Based on that groundswell of support, USDA went ahead and announced it would begin enforcing the new requirement in 2013.

Some magicians, ignoring abundant evidence that the Department of Agriculture has an underdeveloped sense of the absurd, took a minimalist approach. “Note: Take rabbit with you when you leave” was the entirety of one's plan. Hahne, by contrast, chose to err on the side of caution, filling out thirty-two pages with the volunteered assistance of an attorney who writes disaster plans for a living. It covers how Hahne will protect Casey in response to disasters familiar from the Old Testament, such as floods and windstorms, as well as modern perils like broken air conditioners and chemical spills.

When the
Washington Post
first ran a story about Hahne's encounter with the new disaster plan regulations, a USDA spokesman praised the policy's “flexibility,” but within a few hours announced that the secretary had called for its review in the hope that “common sense be applied.”
²
Hahne told one reporter, “I always thought I had a fun, easy job, and I would never have to worry about the government bothering me about it. But our government has gotten so intrusive, their tentacles are everywhere.”
³

Comprehending where compassion can take us requires, first of all, a clear understanding of what it is. The terms “compassion” and “empathy” have come to be used interchangeably in modern discourse. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, “compassion” means, literally, “suffering together with another,” and is also defined, more substantively, as the “feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succour.” The
OED
notes a subtle but significant distinction between those two senses of the term: the first is an emotion shared by “equals or fellow-sufferers,” while the second “is shown toward a person in distress by one who is free from it, who is, in this respect, his superior.” The earliest instances of both senses appeared in the fourteenth century. Some three hundred years later, “compassion” shows up in Shakespeare and in treatises and translations by Thomas Hobbes. “Compassionate” is now strictly an adjective, but it was also a transitive verb until sometime in the nineteenth century, used in a manner similar to “commiserate,” as in, “Men . . . naturally compassionate all . . . whom they see in Distress,” from a 1726 sermon. “Empathy,” defined as “The power of projecting one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation,” first appeared in English in 1904. The term came into existence as an attempt to translate the German word
einfühlung
, used in aesthetic and psychological theory to convey the act of “feeling into” a painting or statue. I'll treat “compassion” and “empathy” as equivalents, the way most twenty-first-century Americans do in speaking or writing.

The reader with access to a search engine, newspaper, or remote control can easily add examples of the rhetoric of compassion to those I've already provided. My inclusion of one by Franklin Roosevelt from 1936 might leave the impression that compassion has been a constant, dominant force within liberalism right from the beginning of the New Deal. That isn't quite true. In 1947 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. expressed his confidence about America's ability to achieve “democratic socialism”—or, more disquietingly, “a not undemocratic socialism”—through the rise of the “politician-manager-intellectual type—the New Dealer,” provided he is “intelligent and decisive.”
⁴
As this stipulation suggests, mid-twentieth-century liberalism reflected a conscious effort to be, and be seen as, tough-minded rather than softhearted. Of course, the choice to undertake such a rebranding argues that at least some liberals at the time believed their ranks contained, and their cause was harmed by, a considerable number of sob sisters.

The desentimentalization of liberalism reached its apogee in the presidency of John Kennedy. His inaugural address spoke of a new American generation “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,” which would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” In a speech silent on domestic issues, the only line that invoked social justice—“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”—came in the context of a call for aid to “peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery,” both because it was right and in order to fortify democracy against the spread of communism. When, in March 1962, a reporter asked JFK about military reservists who resented being called for active duty as tensions in Vietnam and Berlin increased, he replied, “there is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. . . . Life is unfair. But I do hope that . . . these people recognize that they are fulfilling a valuable function, and . . . will have the satisfaction afterwards of feeling that they contributed importantly to the security of their families and their country at a significant time.”
⁵

A great irony of modern political history, to be examined in Chapter Three, is that these efforts to make liberalism tough, pragmatic, and unsentimental collapsed, immediately and decisively, upon Kennedy's assassination in 1963. That liberals so quickly redoubled their commitment to emotionalism does not prove, but strongly suggests, that the effort to purge it was misbegotten from the start. The tough liberals, that is, wanted to turn liberalism into something at odds with its fundamental character. Ever since that day in Dallas, the only reason a liberal politician or intellectual will note that life is unfair is to insist a decent society's most compelling obligation is to make it more fair. Suggesting that any inequity or suffering may lie beyond a government's capacity and rightful power to remedy is the dodge employed by mean-spirited conservatives, not compassionate liberals.

John Kennedy's younger brothers both devoted the rest of their lives to the cause of making empathy paramount over pragmatism. When Edward Kennedy eulogized Robert in 1968 he asked that his brother be remembered “simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” Most of Kennedy's speech, however, consisted of passages from those his brother had given. In one, Bobby Kennedy had said about their father, Joseph Kennedy Sr.:

Beneath it all, he has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off.

Ted Kennedy then quoted more extensively from a speech his older brother had given in 1966:

There is discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. These are differing evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility towards the suffering of our fellows. But we can perhaps remember—even if only for a time—that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
⁶

There are three other statements—by a politician, a journalist, and a professor—that amount to manifestos for compassion. I quote them at some length to offer grist I'll mill subsequently. The first is Mario Cuomo's keynote address to the 1984 Democratic convention, delivered during the second of Cuomo's twelve years as governor of New York. It is remembered as one of the most effective in the era of televised political conventions. Nearly four years after Ronald Reagan had been elected president, Cuomo conceded nothing in defending New Deal and Great Society liberalism:

We [Democrats] believe . . . that a society as blessed as ours, the most affluent democracy in the world's history, one that can spend trillions on instruments of destruction, ought to be able to help the middle class in its struggle, ought to be able to find work for all who can do it, room at the table, shelter for the homeless, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute. And we proclaim as loudly as we can the utter insanity of nuclear proliferation and the need for a nuclear freeze, if only to affirm the simple truth that peace is better than war because life is better than death. . . .

We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings—reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation.

We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.
⁷

In 2007 the
American Prospect
's Paul Waldman wrote “The Failure of Antigovernment Conservatism.” His article examined the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which gave federal subsidies to state programs that helped families secure health insurance for their children if the household incomes were high enough to make them ineligible for Medicaid. Having won control of Congress in 2006, Democrats advocated, and Republicans opposed, plans to make SCHIP available to a larger number of families. The dispute, reduced to what Waldman considered its basics, meant “Democrats want to give health coverage to kids, and Republicans want kids to go without health coverage.” That particular policy disagreement rested on a more basic disjunction:

Progressives believe we're all in it together, while conservatives say we're all on our own and we're all out for ourselves. Progressives think government has to do the things markets can't do—and when it does them, it ought to do them well.