Empathy, Bitches!

You know, sometimes it's overrated. (The Limits of Empathy By DAVID BROOKS)

But maybe not.

There are a lot of books that say one thing, but there's this other book that says something else.

Let's say empathy is like, well, like a stream of piss. Sure, it feels great, but it's better to pee in a urinal or toilet and not just walk around peeing randomly on people's shoes. Because this is not good for you, or the shoes, or the person on whose shoes you are peeing.

Unless that person was on fire.

Like finding a dime in a phone booth in 1970 (I know it doesn't make any sense so just keep moving along), it would be OK to pee on them -- empathetically or not -- if (and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough [which reminds me, did you ever notice that word "empathize" and "emphasize" sorta sound alike? Anyway...]) if you are peeing on them to put the fire out.

Like in "The Adventures of Gulliver"!

Boy, was that ever a cool teevee series, even if it did come out while the country was positively infested with hippies! Let's see, there was Gulliver and Glum...and Eager and Bunko...and Flirtacia and Tagg...

...and Jesus, but doesn't that sound an awful lot like the output from a Sarah Palin Random Baby Name Generator!

Maybe I should write a bestselling book about it?

Anyhoo, I don't think the animated kid's series had anyone being peed on, even though is was produced by Hanna-Barbera, who I'm pretty sure were high all the time.

But as I understand the Wikipedia notes on the book that the cartoon was based on, Gulliver got in big trouble by peeing out a fire at the castle of the Lilliputian king. Gulliver was all bemused and mocking about it when he was peeing on the Lilliputians, but people forget that he was later picked up by the Brobdingnagians, to whom Gulliver seemed just as petty and boastful as the Lilliputians had seemed to him.

I am almost positive that there is a lesson there, and in my next bestselling book I shall explore this deeply.

After all, some Nazis cried when they killed people.

Sometimes.

Early on.

And those Milgram Experiment subjects -- while they were a little too sweaty and ethnic -- did seem to demonstrate some consternation about the people they thought they were electrocuting.

Which is why empathy sucks (or maybe not) and moral codes rule, bitches!

People who live by strong codes of conduct are awesome. Like John Carter of Mars. Or Darth Vader. Or David Koresh. They all lived by powerful codes larger than themselves.

Or so I am told.

They weren't just out there sparking up marijuana cigarettes and then not giving me any, or fucking practically every guy in the dorm except me.

No, sirree. They believed in shit, man! Big, important shit that you, Mister-always-showing-off-that-your-emotion-chip- wasn't-removed-as-part-of-a-monstrous-Faustian-bargain-you-made-with-William-Buckley could not possibly understand.

And even though no one anywhere has ever suggested that empathy could or should be seen as some kind of free-floating haint (look it up) sylphing (look it up) around the moral universe sapping our precious fluids somehow by its utter divorcedness from moral codes and/or rational policies, I am going to infer just such a thing to be true.

Because inventing imaginary controversies and then writing about the imaginary conflict's imaginary Reasonable Middle Ground gives me something to turn in to my rubber-stamping bosses at the New York Times today.

In fact, I'll go further and infer with no evidence whatsoever that there is some pandemic level of unfettered, nekkid, lusty empathy being wallowed in by unspecified groups of people, and that this rampancy of fellow-feeling is a direct, oppositional threat to....something?

Wall Street maybe?

The military?

Jesus, I'm halfway though one more of these on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand book reports and I have no idea what the fuck I'm even talking about.

I've got one of the the most important columns in the most important paper in America, and what the fuck am I even talking about? This isn't even creative typing, This is...reflex gibberish. Machine-generated mad-libs of what a David Brooks column looks like. Like one of those vacuum molded insta-sculptures of animals you usta could get at the Zoo for a quarter.

Hey, remember that plastic smell? And that fastfastfast, repeater-rifle clacking noise the machine made as it shot the goop -- black for panthers, brown for monkeys -- into the mold?

Remember that adhesive sucking noise it made as your treasure was dispensed, and you could watch the whole thing happen under the gadget's clear, Lucite dome?

That little ridge-line that ran all the way around it? And how warm it felt in your hand, especially if you were visiting the Zoo on a cold Fall or winter day?

The sun was so bright then.

The colors -- even the brown leaves and brown grass -- so damn vivid and sharp. And the scent of musk and ancient danger in the Lion House.

Hard now to believe that at the same moment an impossible plastic tiger or crocodile was being fabricated just for me and dropping into my little hand by a gleaming American-made machine, my country was napalming the hell out of some corner of Vietnam jungle.

Hard now to believe that as I was curled up with a cup of cocoa watching "The Adventures of Gulliver" my country -- the country to which I'm sure I had repeatedly pledged allegiance to earlier that week -- was feeding young men into a mindless, monstrous, futile meatgrinding machine 10,000 miles away and in my name.

Damn!

What is wrong with me?

Did one of those "Occupy Wall Street" hempathy-Nazis slip me some bad acid, and I've just been sitting here for hours? days? obsessively re-litigating the pros and cons of imaginary unicorns?

Have whole weeks slipped by and I have just forgotten it?

What else have I forgotten?

Oh my God, have I forgotten how to breathe? I mean, when was the last time I did it? And would I even be thinking about my breathing or peeing or empathy if I hadn't been dosed by some horrid little hempathy-goblin?

Am I still on deadline?

Is this some old column I wrote years ago and I just think its new?

Did I really just base a whole column on picking a fight with empathy? With fucking empathy?

Dear Lord, why didn't I just go all-in and punch a baby in the face on "Meet the Press"?

Have I just been sitting here for months? Decades? Typing meaningless strings of letters like this

Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.

and this

You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar.

over and over again?

"Pang"? "Pang"? Oh God, now I can't stop thinking about it!

"Pang"?

I mean, is that even a word at all?

Is this Hell? Am I in Hell?

Maybe.

Or maybe this is just highway hypnosis. White line fever. Very, very white line fever. Zombied out from watching my fingers type out slight variations of the same damn Broderian column year after year.

Heck, maybe I'm hammered. Lubricated just enough again to get over the intense feeling of self-loathing that my contribution to humanity amounts to making crap like this up twice a week?

Which. like empathy and so many other horribly shameful bodily functions, might be necessary, but is also fundamentally embarrassing and something you really should only do in private.

In the dark.

When you are "crushing your flower".

If you know what I mean.


Also my Fall Fundraiser will begin in a day or so, but if you want to beat the rush...