CAIRO: You seem to forget that you are not in a position at all to insist upon anything!

GUTMAN: Now, come, gentlemen, let's keep our discussion on a friendly basis; but there certainly is something in what Mr. Cairo says.

SPADE: If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird? And if I know you can't afford to kill me, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?

GUTMAN: Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.

SPADE: Yes, that's true, but... they're none of them any good unless the threat of death is behind them. You see what I mean? If you start something I'll make it a matter of your having to kill me, or call it off.

GUTMAN: That's an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because, as you know, sir, in the heat of action, men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.

SPADE: Then the trick from my angle is to make my play strong enough to tie you up, but not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.

GUTMAN: By Gad, sir, you are a character!

Much has been made of Spade's supposed amorality, which allows him to make love to Brigid and still "send her over" for killing his partner, but he clearly has his own moral code (which he later attempts to explain to her when, as they wait for the police to arrive, they carry on an extraordinary debate about what should be her fate). More importantly, he also is, as Gutman says later, a man of "nice judgment", meaning that he's got a clear and accurate take on reality, on what is possible and what is necessary, what will go over and what will sink of its own weight. (In the theatre, we might say that he knows what will play.)

It may be obvious, given our current circumstances, why this section of the book has been rattling around in my brain: it's because what we're so desperately missing in the people in charge of our governance at the moment is just that sense of what's possible, what's necessary, what's realistic, what will fly and what won't. It's not that they lack for certainty about what to do, but their absence of doubt is unfortunately based on faulty premises, inaccurate data, and facts forced into an unrealistic framework warped by ideological requirements. Thus, even if their desired outcomes were good ones (which is not usually the case with this lot), they lack the ability to get the job done because their judgment is as far from "nice" as it can be (in all senses of the word).

(Please note that I'm primarily referring here to the Bush/neoconservative foreign policy, exemplified by the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it seems to me that they really did want to achieve many of the things they publicly announced as their goals. In domestic issues, where the announced intention is more often simply a sham, their antagonism toward the legitmate functions of government leads me to believe that they really don't care if their policies "fail", because they serve to help achieve their larger, overriding goals, i.e. channeling money and influence to their client class and, ultimately, breaking the ability of the Federal government to function in anything but a rudimentary fashion.)

I would feel so much better if I were able to say to myself about the people in charge of our destiny, as Gutman says of Spade, "You're a man of my liking, a man of many resources and nice judgment." I don't know if Kerry would have been that man, we would have had to find out, but it's a certainty that Bush is not and never will be, nor are his advisors, especially now.