Add this to your lexicon: Conspicuous Compassion

The Husband pointed this out to me in an opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal (about the politics and morals of drug addiction). Here's the great sentence, containing my new great phrase.

"... [A]s a society, we are always on the lookout for a category of victims upon whom to expend our virtuous, which is to say conspicuous, compassion."

Thank you to Theodore Dalrymple, author Romancing Opiates. From a quick glance at his commentary, conspicuous compassion has been about as helpful for drug addicts as it has been for Palestinians. From a description of his book at Amazon:

Dalrymple shows that doctors, psychologists and social workers, all of them uncritically accepting addicts' descriptions of addiction, have employed literary myths (drugs are creative and intense) in constructing an equal and opposite myth of quasi-treatment.

Very interesting. Thanks to The Husband for bringing me out of my Israel-Only box, however briefly :)