Speaking of President Bush and of the Amish of Lancaster County, Pa., Witness was on cable the other night and I was struck again by this bit of dialogue between the grandfather ("Eli," played by Jan Rubes) and the little boy ("Samuel," played by Lukas Haas):
ELI: The gun — that gun of the hand — is for the taking of human life. Would you kill another man? Eh? … What you take into your hands, you take into your heart.
SAMUEL: I would only kill a bad man.
ELI: Only a bad man. I see. And you know these bad men on sight? You are able to look into their hearts and see this badness?
This reminded me of the following, from President Bush after his first summit meeting with the increasingly autocratic Russian President Vladimir Putin:
I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul …
This divine ability to look into the souls of others makes it a simple matter to separate the good from the bad. All that remains, then, is the simple matter of killing all the bad people.
Of course, as George Saunders pointed out in Slate a while ago, even this gets a bit complicated:
In the process of killing the ones who want to kill us, we sometimes kill some who are not trying to kill us. This has been observed to cause a sudden increase in the number who want to kill us, which means a longer stay for us, since we then must kill, not only the ones who originally wanted to kill us, but also the ones who just started wanting to kill us. …
The script for Witness (by William Kelley, Earl W. Wallace and Pamela Wallace) appreciates that the world is more complex than the Simple Plan of "kill all the bad people."
ELI: Only a bad man. I see. And you know these bad men on sight? You are able to look into their hearts and see this badness?
SAMUEL: I can see what they do. I have seen it.
ELI: And having seen, you would become one of them?
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