GENERAL MATTIS IS PROOF LIBERALS DON’T WATCH MOVIES OR READ BOOKS
You’ve heard, I’m sure, of the righteous outcry over Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis’s comment that “It’s fun to shoot some people,” made about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loud complaints from various leaders of special ethnic interest groups belly-aching about it.
Well, actually, it is “fun” to shoot some people – and all of us who have ever waited through an hour and a half movie, or read some 300 pages of a thriller, to the point when the bad guys finally get their comeuppance know this perfectly well. Some people, the ones who ruthlessly sacrifice the lives of completely innocent children and civilians so as to express their anger about something -terrorists and other brutalizers – need to get creamed, and it fun, meaning, satisfying, to do the shooting of such folks.
How often have we witnessed at least the eventual fictional delivery of just deserts from good guys aimed at vicious enslavers, murderers, Nazis, and sundry villains? Why did we breathe sighs of relief once they got theirs good and hard? Why was it a pleasure to walk away from a movie or close the covers of a book once this has happened to such people?
Because it is a matter of justice and moral relief to have such things happen, that is why. The people who do evil to those who haven’t deserved any such brutality, mostly venting their wild anger recklessly at innocent folks, need to be blasted away now and then, when they keep coming and coming and that is the only way to fend them off.
And then those who get to accomplish such a worthwhile feat may well feel some joy in their hearts because it can indeed be “fun” to contribute to the ridding of the world of such scum. The outrage at Lt. Gen. Mattis’s comment is outright paradoxical, as well. On the one hand it suggests that there are no morally bad people at all and thus no joy may be experienced when one has helped rid the world of some of the worst such people, especially in the face of their relentless violent onslaught.
On the other hand the outrage suggests that the likes of Lt. Gen. Mattis are evil people, deserving of scolding and rebuff. Well, you cannot have it both ways. Either there are evil folks and some so evil as to deserve killing under certain circumstances, or there are none, in which case those who have fun killing others simply need to be cured, as they too aren’t doing anything morally wrong.
Indeed, this lopsided moralizing betrays the practically obsessive anti-Americanism of too many people. Only Americans ever do things wrong – the rest need to be defended at all cost no matter how vicious them are. Balderdash.
I guess it goes to show anti-American liberals don’t go to the movies or read novels very much.
Tibor R. Machan is Freedom Communications Professor of Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics, Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, Orange, CA; research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; advisor to Freedom Communications, Inc., Irvine, CA, and Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, AL