At lunch today, I started reading Sten Johansson's Esperanto translation of Hjalmar Söderberg's short novel Doctor Glas. Söderberg was a Swedish author of the early twentieth century who was, and apparently remains, popular with Swedish readers. He was also apparently less popular with Swedish moralists, critics and bluenoses of the early twentieth century. Sound familiar?
I got as far as page 6 and then lapsed into thought. You see, Doctor Glas, the story's main character (I won't say "hero"), has just refused to abort a young woman's fourth pregnancy, quoting the usual sanctimonious arguments about "respect for human life" and the like. And after the young woman leaves, Glas thinks to himself (translation to English is mine):
Respect for human life – what is that in my mouth except ignoble hypocrisy, and what can it be for anyone who has occasionally passed a free hour in thought. Human life swarms everywhere. And nobody has ever seriously had the tiniest care for foreign, unknown, unseen human lives, with the possible exception of a few obviously over-naive philanthropists, We show that by actions. Every government and parliament in the world shows that.
This made me think of the "pro-life" activists in our country today. They want to save every human fetus from the holocaust perpetrated by the abortion-doctors. And yet these are, for the most part, the same people who supported imposing sanctions on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, sanctions that ultimately killed more than half a million children – and I doubt whether any of them ever shed a tear over those foreign, unknown, unseen little waifs or their corpses. More recently they have supported starting a war that has not only killed some tens of thousands more of those foreign, unknown, unseen human lives, but even several thousand of the lives they purported to save in the womb. Is there not some taint of ignoble hypocrisy here?
Of course, I suppose one could make the same argument about the other side. Aren't those liberals who are trying to pull us out of Iraq and save the lives of our soldiers and thousands of Iraqis not the same people who want to condemn thousands of innocent fetuses to obliteration? Well ... perhaps not. The "pro-choice" movement isn't trying to kill fetuses – a lot of them, perhaps most, find abortion as personally abhorrent as the pro-lifers do. They are simply trying to deny society the right to make that choice, and to leave it in the hands of those most directly involved in the matter. And similarly they're not trying to save all those Iraqi lives, but simply trying to take the matter out of the hands of an incompetent and perhaps malicious government in Washington and leave it in the hands of those most directly involved, the Iraqis themselves.
So it strikes me that there is "ignoble hypocrisy" here, and that it's mostly (perhaps not completely, but mostly) found on one side.
The following letter of mine was published on May 8 in the West County Times:
"Bush ... left no doubt when a reporter asked whether he believed the national anthem would hold the same value if it were sung in Spanish. 'No,' he said without hesitation. 'I don't.'"
President of the United States? This sounds like the President of DENSA, MENSA's evil twin.
A song or poem does not have value, period; it only has value in the context of the person reading, hearing or singing it. Can even George Bush imagine that a new citizen who speaks fluent Spanish and perfunctory 21st-century workplace English would get more value out of a collection of early-19th-century poetic misrenderings such as "O'er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming" than he would out of a decent 21st-century Spanish translation?
"The Star Spangled Banner" has been translated and sung for years, even before it became our national anthem, in other languages, up to and including Esperanto. Why must we get our underwear in a knot over this right now? Don't we have better things to argue about?