A fly by night rant

I'm a little tired this morning because I was woken at about 3:20am and couldn't get back to sleep. The cause of my insomnia was a comment made by a Fox "News" anchor that I found troubling (and regrettably consistent with my take on the channel's approach to broadcasting).

The comment in question involved the setting up of a segment following a commercial break which was to be devoted to ridiculing those (namely PETA) who suggested that President Obama's killing of a fly, and his seemingly indifferent attitude to the intentional ending of a life, might be something worth talking seriously about in terms of the questions it raises.

What bothers me about the Fox News anchor's comment (and its tone) is its lack of reflection. The implication was clearly "why the fuss; it’s only a fly". It is a predictable knee-jerk reaction to an organization that Fox likely labels "dangerous nutters" - yet in the organization's response was surprisingly low key.

Stripped to fundamentals, what we saw was the premeditated killing of a complex self-sustaining multi-celled organism. Fox chose to ridicule those who it imagined would take exception to the callous destruction of any complex multi-celled life-form - animals - while it vilifies anyone who entertains the possibility of destroying a non-self-sustaining single cell for any reason whatsoever - just because the latter is human.

It is this inability or unwillingness to make connections and consider comparisons between situations that might share some common underlying attributes that is troubling. It is the same kind of disconnect manifest in those who advocate killing doctors who perform abortions or suggest that right to life applies to embryos but not to those sentenced to death. Without taking a position on any of these questions, one inevitable conclusion is that the right to life is not absolute, but that it comes with implicit boundary conditions; what these are differs depending on who you ask.

It is this same lack of reflection that prevents one from seeing one person's terrorist as another's heroic freedom fighter, depending on ones vantage point. This could be said of those who fought a guerilla war to liberate the colonies from the British, the Basque separatists, the Taliban mujaheddin (who were widely seen as heroes during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but are now longer held in such high regard), the Irish Republican Army and even some who resisted the Coalition occupation of Iraq.

It is thoughtless compartmentalization - "that principle applies there but not here" - that allows a single person to hold two axiomatically contradictory positions. The typical workaround that allows inconsistency to be ignored is simply "oh, but that's different". The questions, too infrequently asked in the media, must be "How exactly are they different? and why does that particular distinction matter?" Ultimately, such unexamined contradictions reflect either intellectual laziness or indifference to a coherent ethical position.

All of this is not to say that killing a fly ranks along side water-boarding, the Iranian election, North Korea's antics, the regulation of the financial services industry, and health care reform; the fly, like Letterman's stupid joke, is not one of the pressing issues of the day. But it does offer a starting point for a discussion on the right to life that gets past the ideology dogma and into the realm of ethics and morality.