Barry Farber
Friday, March 2, 2001

Worse, however, than any individual's shrinking powers is the deliberate draining away of the power certain of our crucial words used to pack.

Consider just two: "conscientious objector" and "pardon."

"Conscientious objector" was the vague and spooky item on the menu of avoiding service in Vietnam. Going to Canada, Sweden or jail was solid, concrete, no mystery. Student deferments, National Guard, excavating and exacerbating a forgotten illness needed some explanation, but the rules were soon understood.

"Conscientious objector" required many hours of coaching and briefing in church basements to understand. It was something about hurrying up and adopting a philosophy of not wanting to kill or harm anyone for any reason and learning to talk about it as though it had been your guiding doctrine since somewhere around the middle of the second grade.

Pull that off and you weren't a "draft dodger" fleeing to countries that admire our foreign policy only when we're protecting or liberating THEM. As a "conscientious objector" you never had to manipulate military procedures in a manner that would let you wear the uniform but with the assurance you'd never have to leave Indiana. Not at all. If you were a conscientious objector you were more of a nonviolent guru, a holy man; you and Gandhi.

Like a piece of fruit deteriorated over time on the window sill, conscientious objection and its real meaning went to hell.

During World War I and World War II conscientious objection was not a ticket to avoid service. It was not even a ticket to avoid combat. It was a ticket to let them shoot at you while you were forbidden under oath to shoot back at them! Conscientious objectors were given the most dangerous missions of all, driving ambulances over minefields in no man's land to tend to the wounded on both sides while the bullets of both sides spat and whistled around you. Those bullets spat and whistled around you only if you were lucky. Many of them spat and whistled their way right through you.

All conscientious objection meant in former times was what it was SUPPOSED to mean, that it was your personal belief that it was improper for you to take a human life for any reason under any conditions whatsoever. It did not mean: "Look, fellows, this is cool. My counselor taught me to wrap my own Canada and Sweden around me right here in the U.S.A.!"

Why does this task fall to me? I'm supremely unqualified to tell more than I've already told you. And what I've told you I learned from boys' comic books during World War II and maybe an article or two in something like the Reader's Digest. Sorry. To my knowledge nobody else has ever chosen to drive this point home.

And now "pardons." The scramble for pardons, the payment for pardons, the selling of connections for pardons, even insinuendoes of sex for pardons. Clinton's defenders get more fervent as they get fewer.

Bill Press of CNN's "Crossfire" has no hesitation declaring with a kind of "ha-ha-ha" in his voice that pardons are a president's absolute right and can never under any circumstances be revoked, so why waste time investigating?

I'm old enough to remember when the problem was not how the convict might pay or connive to GET a pardon. It was how the governor or president could get the convict to ACCEPT a pardon!

Accepting a pardon meant you accepted the notion of your guilt. And history, legend, and literature offer countless cases of highly principled, courageous prisoners – innocent, mind you – repeatedly refusing to accept a pardon because they preferred to remain in jails vastly less pleasant than jails today rather than acknowledge guilt.

A new trial? Great! Exoneration by the chief of state complete with abject apology, with or even without financial restitution? Likewise great. But a PARDON!

"No thanks, chief. That's for guilty people. Until your bean-counters and bureaucrats come to the conclusion that I'm utterly innocent, I'll stay put!"

The standards descend like a fast freight elevator. A football player implicated in the murder of a woman who was pregnant with his child, in attempting to make America like him better, reveals: "I didn't really love her. When we slept together, I swear, I didn't even know her name." Apparently on today's moral NASDAQ that's a few notches above eliminating a woman pregnant with your child whom you know, care about, and love.

Remember the New York rampage that gave us the word "wilding": A gang of young male predators attacked and raped a female jogger in Central Park who survived, but only barely. At the station house when police brought the gang in, one of the participants told the arresting officers: "I didn't do anything. I just held her legs."

And just before this column goes to its electronic bed, along comes the ideal ending fresh from the Burton hearings into the Clinton pardons.

For years everybody who took the Fifth Amendment – Mafia dons, labor racketeers, spies, terrorists, communists, etc. – came right out and said something like, "I refuse to answer on grounds it might tend to incriminate me" or "I invoke my constitutional right against self-incrimination."

That didn't sound quite right to Democratic congressman Henry Waxman. It smacked a little too specifically of self-denunciation. Waxman preferred to characterize the taking of the Fifth by Democratic fund-raiser Beth Dozoretz as merely "announcing that she is unable to participate in these hearings"!

Ohio Democratic congressman James Traficant at breath-takers like that says, "Beam me up, Mr. Speaker."

That may work for high-tech Ohio.

In North Carolina we say, "Just put me on the hog train!"

Barry Farber's daily radio show may be heard streamed live Monday through Friday from 5:05 p.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern time at www.talkradionetwork.com.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Sen. Hillary Clinton
Pardongate
Clinton Scandals

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