THE ANONYMOUS TURKEY (Thanksgiving Day, 2003)

Interesting? Perhaps. Significant? Maybe. Paradigmatic? I dunno. Mountain out of molehill? Probably. Reaction of a knee-jerk liberal? Of course.

The President, up-close-and-personal, pardoned, as always, the official White House First Turkey. Then, just a couple of days later, there he was, chowing down on some faceless-headless-nameless anonymous turkey with the troops in Iraq.

Is there something about being up-close-and-personal that makes pain or death just that much more difficult to inflict? Is it harder when one looks the potential victim in the eye, establishes a relationship, builds some kind of a commonality of presence? How much easier is it to shoot the enemy when he is remote, depersonalized and demonized into a “Gook,” “Kraut,” “Nip,” “Veet-namese” (Thank you, Robert McNamara.), “Towelhead,” or part of the “Axis of Evil”? And, how much more attractive is it to rant about “niggers,” “Jewboys” and “faggots” in their anonymity than it is to croon the same epithet to their face?

Jailers are consistently warned not to build an empathic relationship with convicts. Recently, I visited a maximum-security prison just 20 miles from my home to minister to three Jewish lifers. That in itself is a story. The prison, though, was in lock-down, because a few days earlier, the chaplain, a truly decent, compassionate guy, was taken hostage . . . and blessedly released unharmed.

Certainly, the executioner must be a detached non-persona . . . and so many of them ultimately suffer residual trauma, anyways. Dylan the Bard articulated it in the early 60’s, in anticipation of an impending nuclear holocaust and a war that we could not win: “The face of the executioner,” he drawled, “is always well hidden.”

Perhaps when the enemy is really evil, fueled with genocidal venom, anonymity is essential to doing the heroic task at hand. Then again – here comes the unrepentant liberal in me – perhaps that theory is a confusion of cause and effect: Dehumanization, perhaps, is the force that gives birth to genocidal agendas. Maybe that is why the only people truly beyond redemption are certifiable psychopaths, sociopaths and malignant narcissists.

The roots of benevolence-up-close-and-cruelty-afar likely derive not from higher human conscience, but from our basic animal nature. Decades ago, Robert Ardrey expounded on this thesis in his The Territorial Imperative. The animal kingdom typically stakes its turf. It is hyper-protective of those who are near and dear and hostile to “outsider” beasts whom they perceive as encroaching on their territory.

Hence, too, human turf-protectiveness, sometimes to the point of irrationality. Hence, too, the rise in crime in tandem with the invention of the automobile, as conscience and fear of social sanction lessen when the victim is of another place and circumstance. Hence, too, the distrust that inheres in no longer knowing ones neighbor or walking the street among faceless strangers.

And, yes, that protectiveness of the up-close-and-personal extends even – for some people, especially – to the animals that surround us. Seasonal children’s farm-tales abound about fattening up the Christmas goose, only to find that it had become so much of the family that it was spared from the chopping block. In these stories, though, the punchline is typically not about substituting an anonymous goose, but by the family eating mashed potatoes and salad for Christmas dinner. (A friend once suggested that Jewish vegetarians should serve “paschal yam” at the Passover Seder!)

And, Garrison Keillor likewise has a wonderfully bittersweet tale about the elders of Lake Wobegon conducting the annual pig-slaughter as a solemn sacrament, not cruel carnage, and training their young sons, as a rite of passage, to carry on the sacred tradition.

I have plenty of gripes with the President, but on this one I will give him a pass. My Thanksgiving turkey, too, is an anonymous bird, slaughtered, plucked, hermetically sealed and frozen, from some unknown place straight to our abundant table. But, in the throes of a distant and nearby war and too many young men and women coming home in body bags, slaughter of any kind might give us pause to consider the inestimable tragedy that anonymity can leave in its wake.

Then again, Hillary went to Afghanistan to spend Thanksgiving with the troops, up-close-and-personal. Eat turkey? Of course. Eat crow? Never. So much for knee-jerk liberalism.