Sighs in Babylon

“There’s always a horribly foreign element in everything you say; imperial, even,” I sighed. “Even if I thought your meandering prevarications could somehow hold together long enough to constitute an argument, we’d only be quibbling if we argued it out. In the end, or at the beginning, rather, the objection I have is that we’re not the same; we might pronounce the exact same speech and still be miles apart. You call upon my principles to undermine them. You take the words, the sounds and syllables, and redefine them. You cry for justice. Fine. In the abstract, I want justice, but what you mean, what your idea of justice comes to, is preferential treatment to someone you’ve deemed undertrodden and punitive measures against someone perceive as privileged. You want to destroy racism by punishing me for my race. So, I’ll agree with you that racism is bad only for you to disagree with what you said a moment ago. Then I try, without either strangling you or pulling out my hair, to reason, to ask you to stand by a consistent definition of your words, all the while fearing, suspecting, dreading, that I’m not talking to a person at all, that you’ve given up discourse entirely and are like a mere growling animal, the sounds you make having only the withering appearance of words as the very bonds of our humanity are severed. That’s what I mean when I say a foreign and imperial element. For one, you’re a conqueror. You argue by fiat, finding some commonly held principle and brutally redefining it into a paradox of its original meaning. So, unless I support your injustice, you call me unjust. You demand I respect someone by lying, or, as your shifting words have recently changed, love someone by lying. I begin to wonder if what I’m talking to is even human, if it is not bestial or even lower; if we have not fallen now into the very pits of Hell. If you were actually a foreigner, if you had your own words and language and history, we might be able to reach some sort of compromise from our distinct perspectives, but as long as you’re ever trying to usurp and undermine, to wear like a mask this façade, this presumed similarity, between ourselves, I’ll always reject you as an invader, insidious, a thing, not to be reasoned with but destroyed, cleaned.”