'Storm Troopers' Who Cry - The reign of sentimentality - sentimentality in politics and daily life as demonstrated by the Elian Gonzalez case - Column

National Review, May 22, 2000 by Ramesh Ponnuru

THE Clinton administration and its allies like to depict the controversy over Elian Gonzalez as a conflict between reason and emotion. The cool, dispassionate workings of the law, they say, should not be disrupted by a mob of Castro-hating Cuban-American hotheads. And it is obviously true that the Gonzalez family in Miami has sometimes let its emotions cloud its judgments-although it would be nice if its critics would acknowledge that those emotions include love and concern for the child as well as (justified) hatred of Castro.

It is true, as well, that the conservatives in Washington who have taken up Little Havana's cause can reasonably be charged with sentimentality. Some of them have treated a six-year-old's expressed wishes about where he should be raised as authoritative. One wonders, also, whether a pimply teenager would have inspired the same devotion that the undeniably cute Elian has. The administration, then, would seem to have a point when it suggests that the people who want Elian to stay in America have lost sight of the proper impersonality of the rule of law.

And yet, and yet. There is also a flood of images that belie the selfpresentation of the send-him-back crowd. The INS agents who broke down the Gonzalez family's door broke down when they handed Elian over to his father. If these are "storm troopers," as the hotheads have said, they are storm troopers who cry. Janet Reno, too, wept during the raid. Dan Rather, a de facto press secretary for Reno, asked Juan Miguel Gonzalez whether he had cried watching the video of his son asking to stay in America. And Rather himself teared up while contemplating the reunion of father and son. These tribunes of reason are quite a weepy bunch. No doubt if Greg Craig has tear ducts, they've gotten a good workout too.

It is hard to picture, say, J. Edgar Hoover needing to reach for the Kleenex after ordering a deadly assault-let alone an assault where no shots were fired. It is tempting to conclude that the change is a reflection of a feminized America. But it might be better to use less loaded language and say that the entire debate over Elian has unfolded in an America whose sensibility is softening.

This softness manifests itself, above all, in sentimentality. Sentimentality is a kind of willful self-deception. Our culture is so sunk in it that it hardly even knows it is lying to itself by refusing to regard sentimentality as a vice at all. Our culture is also increasingly uncomfortable with crisp logic, stark choices, and hard realities. Given a choice between removing a president and leaving him untouched, it will seek censure-a basically meaningless act. Even more, it will want to "move on" from unpleasant thoughts. It is impatient with politics, with the demands of public life.

It is, unsurprisingly, a culture that makes a fetish of compassion. As C. S. Lewis remarks in The Screwtape Letters, every age indulges its characteristic vices by exalting the virtues nearest to them. We may think it is compassion that moves us to want to save a distant people from slaughter; but it is sentimentality that tells us we can secure that objective without risk or sacrifice. When we thus delude ourselves about our motivations, we can be capable of extraordinary callousness. We may, with a mad mercy, drop bombs on the objects of our charity.

The softness of contemporary Ameri ca has affected both sides of the debate over Elian. But it seems to have worked to the overall benefit of the send-him-back side. The parallel to the impeachment debate may be instructive. In each case, the public's conservative instincts led it to conclusions opposite those of most conservatives. A concern for stability made people worry about removing the president; a concern for public decency made them long for an end to the Lewinsky chatter. In the Gonzalez case, the public's pro- family and pro-law-enforcement instincts are arrayed against conservatives.

In both cases, however, the public also had less flattering reasons to hold its opinion. People are bored with Elian, as they were with the Lewinsky scandal. They are eager to flip the channel. Never mind that flipping the channel might mean allowing presidential lawlessness or destroying a boy's future. The public has no tolerance for "partisan bickering"-i.e., congressional oversight of executive agencies. This may sound like a pretty damning indictment of the public. And so it is. But even more blame should attach to those influential Americans, from Hollywood to Washington, who have done so much to make politics a dirty word.

How many times in the last few months have we heard that family ties ought to matter more than a "mere" difference in political systems? One might have thought that Reno was trying to send Elian to a monarchy, perhaps Denmark. With the Cold War over, most Americans find it hard to conceive of what totalitarianism is. It doesn't help that most of the repression takes place off-camera. What coverage of Cuba there has been during the Elian controversy has either interviewed the man on the street as though he could speak his mind fearlessly or, worse, romanticized the poverty in which Castro has kept the island.