The Cherry Orchard

I started this blog last July, because I was disturbed by the wars raging in the Holy Lands, frustrated with the lack of useful debate in America over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and disgusted by the news from Darfur. Despite the cozy weather, I remember last summer as a moral nadir, a season of hopelessness.

In the nine months since, I’m glad to say the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas has mostly held up (though a cease-fire is a far cry from a peace settlement). I’m also glad that a majority of sensible politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties have made the smart decision to stop backing the Bush/Cheney position on Iraq, and I have much more faith in our legislative branch since the November elections (though the season of hopelessness is far from over in Darfur, and we’ve got stuff like global warming and nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran to worry about).

I’m also glad that The Cherry Orchard is regularly finding more readers, and that I’m doing a better job of figuring out how to write about political topics (after years of writing about fiction and poetry on LitKicks I thought it’d be easy, but it’s not). A post I put up immediately after the Virginia Tech killings was cited in an article by Graeme Hamilton in Canada’s National Post, which is nice, even though it inspired an excitable fellow who writes for a blog called Weapons of Mass Discussion to call me an asshat and question my honesty when I say I would not sit quietly and pray for salvation if a crazy person entered a room I was in with guns and started shooting.

How does it feel to have somebody call you an “asshat” on their blog? Honestly, it feels just fine. I stand by my words, and I think it’s amusing that this person calls me “cowardly and idiotic”, and then goes on to say that I have a point. Yes, my name-calling friend, I certainly do.

I was also pleased to be cited in a post-Dems-debate roundup by Michael Weiss at Slate. I especially like it that Weiss refers to this site as a “nonpartisan political blog” because, despite the fact that I feel such deep rage at the Bush-Cheney administration that I sometimes want to call them “asshats”, I do tend to be a moderate on most issues, and I think the best political writing recognizes the validity of all sides of an argument. That’s why the blogroll on this site lists everything from Firedoglake to Little Green Footballs, from Sabbah’s blog to Solomania. I want all the viewpoints, because anybody who believes in a position strongly enough to argue it in public must have something valid to say.

What is an argument? Why do we argue, and more interestingly, what exactly do we do when we argue? I think I’d like to take a break from my news-oriented postings here at the Fruitstand, and begin another “inquiry” (yes, that’s right, it’s time for another multi-part series of postings on a single topic). The subject of this inquiry goes back to my days as a philosophy student studying Plato and Hume and Nietzsche and James, but I hope I’ll also show some wisdom from the years I’ve lived since then. The inquiry will begin shortly, and the topic is: “What Are People Doing When They Argue?”. Yeah, it sounds like the title of a Raymond Carver story, and maybe we can even argue about the title of the inquiry, if you want. You asshat.

First impressions of the Democratic party’s presidential candidates on parade: they’re all fine, and there is absolutely no reason to consider this a two-person or three-person race at this point.

John Edwards got the most votes in a well-attended Daily Kos poll, and I agree with this result. The blow-dried southerner appears serious, unflappable and appropriately angry about the current state of things. Another candidate who made a good impression on me is New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, more for his earnest body language and focused message than anything else.

Hillary Clinton did just fine, and I have no doubt that she’d be a hardworking, intensely practical President. I admire her very much for her courage and positive attitude. However, she has yet to prove that she can raise voters’ passions as well as she can raise funds, that she can appeal to outsiders as well as knowledgeable insiders, and it’s starting to seem clear that her stiff public persona remains a barrier to her electability.

As for Barack Obama, I’m sorry but I’m still not on this bandwagon at all. His performance last night was mechanical and safe, and I really, really, really don’t care that he has a Kennedy-esque mystique. In fact, I am more and more offended by the idea that anybody should consider this candidate a front-runner just based on his good looks and charisma. He did not particularly distinguish himself in last night’s debate, which adds to my impression that the buzz-to-substance ratio is too high here. Obama cerrtainly has a right to press his candidacy along with the rest of this pack, and there’s still plenty of time for him to win me over. But he’s not going to do it by standing there looking handsome, and I’m sorry to say that seemed to be his core strategy during the debate.

Of course I like Dennis Kucinich, and I’m glad to see him on this stage, just as I’m glad to see him working hard on various fronts in Congress. Kucinich would have been the evening’s designated oddball candidate if Alaska’s Mike Gravel were not there to play the angry clown. Gravel’s just fine, but he’s not going to be our next President.

Chris Dodd is running? I missed that press release. I don’t see him playing much of a role in this election, nor Joe Biden, but maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong.

One final thought: regardless of which of these politicians wins the nomination, they are all doing good work on behalf of significant causes. I’m glad they’re all around, from the staid Dodd to the blustering Gravel, and the only thing that would disappoint me now is if the party were to begin to converge on a front-runner too early. We’ve got a lot more debating to do.

Oh, finally: this stuff is pretty good.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is all over the news this week, following his unconvincing Senate testimony last week (here’s one of the stories going around, and there was a lot of hilarity after President Bush claimed that Gonzales’s testimony helped his case). Still, I have a strange sense that most news outlets aren’t communicating exactly why this is such a high-stakes situation for the Bush administration and for the House/Senate leadership, and why the Bush administration is clinging so stubbornly to the hope that Gonzales will not be eventually forced to resign. There’s a hidden story here, and most Washington DC journalists know it and hint about it, but for some reason few journalists are coming right out and explaining what’s going on in this case.

The fact is, Gonzales is not just another high-ranking Bush appointee. He’s the Attorney General, which means he has the authority to investigate and prosecute anyone suspected of committing a federal crime, including top administration officials up to the level of the President’s top staff, thus encircling the President himself. As a longtime friend of George W. Bush and a key member of the Bush/Cheney team, Alberto Gonzales is not going to prosecute anybody close to the Bush administration for any number of wrongdoings. A different Attorney General, however, might.

Even though the Attorney General is a Presidential appointee, the appointee must be approved by the Senate, and our current Senate is not going to approve a candidate who does not demonstrate a basic willingness to investigate the Executive office independently of Presidential influence. So, if Gonzales were to resign, an extremely contentious nomination/approval process would begin for his replacement, and since this nation cannot survive long without leadership in the Department of Justice, some compromise candidate would have to eventually be approved. This new Attorney General could prove very hazardous for the Bush White House as our Congress and Senate continue to conduct aggressive investigations into the workings of the Executive office.

This is what’s at the core of the Alberto Gonzales showdown: our government is somewhere near a state of constituional crisis, similar to the constitutional crisis of 1973-74. Remember Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre? This was one of the most critical turning points of the Watergate scandal, and it all revolved around the Attorney General’s office.

I’m not sure why so many journalists aren’t stating this clearly to the American people, but the Alberto Gonzales case is all about the viability of the Bush/Cheney administration. And I don’t believe it for a minute when Gonzales says he’s made his own choice not to resign. He’s not resigning because George W. Bush is begging him not to, and I bet he’d zoom out of Washington DC like a rocket if Bush let go of his arm. Gonzales has nothing to gain and nothing to lose at this point, but George W. Bush needs him sitting in that chair.

The news keeps coming so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Some thoughts for a Friday afternoon:

1. I wonder if it’s possible to stake out a moderate position on abortion rights. I guess the conventional wisdom will offer a resounding “No”, but in the light of recent news I’m going to continue to try.

I am personally opposed to abortion, but I believe abortion must remain legal within the United States because the practical consequences of state or federal laws against it would be disastrous. Look at these statistics: about 1.3 million Americans get an abortion every year. In case anybody wants to pretend that these 1.3 million Americans are all godless liberals from bad families, note this item:

Women identifying themselves as Protestants obtain 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women account for 31.3%, Jewish women account for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation obtain 23.7% of all abortions. 18% of all abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as “Born-again/Evangelical”.

I’m sad to learn that my own state has the highest percentages of abortions in the country, but this state-by-state breakdown shows us that every state has significant abortion numbers. A pro-life friend with whom I engaged in a long debate about the subject last year told me that 35% of Republican families have a family member who’s had an abortion. Maybe this is supposed to demonstrate that Republican families show lower numbers than non-Republican families, but all I can say is “that’s a lot of Republican families”.

My conclusion from all this is that any attempt to make abortion illegal will simply result in the immediate emergence of black markets, inter-state “abortion railroads” and (most dangerously) illegal amateur operations. Why can’t the pro-life movement focus on practical and results-oriented approaches to reducing the incidence of abortion in the United States? Why is legality the sole rallying cry, when there is no reason to believe that allowing certain states to outlaw abortion will significantly reduce the amount of abortions that occur?

I’d love to see a moderate front make its presence felt in this debate. Hasn’t happened yet.

2. I don’t do a whole lot of agreeing with the National Review, but an article called The Culture of Passivity by Mark Steyn says everything I was trying to say here.

3. There was once a time when I respected John McCain. Maybe there will come a time again when I respect John McCain. But right now, he just needs to shut up, because he’s embarrassing himself and everybody else.

Diplomacy, McCain, not bombs. Diplomacy. It’s been known to work.

This is a hard post to write, because everybody who’s watching the terrible tale of mass murder on the Virginia Tech campus can sympathize with the devastated students and faculty members who lived through the horror. I have nothing to say that will compare with their statements and their memorials, and with the journalistic coverage of the professionals who are close to the scene.

But I was baffled by the report I watched on yesterday’s NBC Nightly News, in which two college students described hiding under desks with the rest of their class as Cho Seung-hui shot, reloaded and shot some more. One of these students had been hit by a bullet, the other hadn’t, and both described themselves as terrified. That’s quite understandable, but I can’t be the only one wondering why a roomful of students did not try to overpower a lone gunman.

I thought this was the lesson of September 11, the lesson of United Flight 93: in the face of any type of murderous rampage, whether a carefully planned act of terrorism or a random act of insane violence, a crowd’s ability to overtake an attacker might offer their best chance. Sure, it takes incredible bravery to rush a guy with automatic weapons, even when the gunman is reloading, and there would have been casualties. But with ten or more students in a room, there is no question that the crowd could have prevailed within a matter of seconds.

I truly do not wish to cast dispersions on the suffering students who did not attempt to overpower Cho Seung-hui in Blacksburg. I am sure it was a lack of decisiveness, rather than a lack of courage, that led them to attempt a passive path towards survival. And, of course, I wasn’t there and I do not have the information to understand why this disaster played out the way it did.

But I do think it’s important for people all over the world to ask themselves the question: in a situation like the one in the Virginia Tech classrooms, can a crowd work together to overpower an armed attacker, and how can we all improve our chances of controlling situations like this?

I don’t want to get all survivalist at this moment, but I will say this: if I ever find myself a potential victim in this type of situation, and I truly hope I don’t, I will vote for “Let’s Roll”. I like the odds better.

I hope this posting is not offensive or wrong-headed. My sympathies go out to everybody who suffered directly from the horrid act at Virginia Tech.

I was away on a very refreshing vacation for a few days, which means I didn’t watch the evening news (or my regular favorite, Keith Olbermann, or my regular un-favorite, Bill O’Reilly) for about five days in a row. Here’s what I found on my return, when I checked in on the TV sound bites:

1) It’s impossible not to feel sorry for George W. Bush at this point, despite the incredible damage he has done to our country’s security, our country’s budget and our planet’s progress towards international understanding. It’s a telling fact that he has failed to follow the longstanding Presidential tradition of opening the baseball season by throwing out the first ball at a chosen stadium. The reason is obvious: there is no stadium of baseball fans in America, not even in Texas, that wouldn’t boo him off the pitcher’s mound.

But the President did address a captive audience of soldiers at California’s Fort Irwin yesterday, and the tapes show a tired, confused man straining to infuse his own words with conviction. Please watch his body language the next time you catch this politician on TV, and I think you will notice the same thing I’m seeing: Bush barely seems to believe his own words about Iraq anymore. My guess is that there are massive internal divisions plaguing the Bush/Cheney team at this point, and I wonder if the President might be smart enough to start realizing (a few years too late) how badly he has been duped by his closest advisers. The front man is starting to falter, and when I say “front man” I’m not talking about Tony Snow.

2) I’m pretty disgusted at all the talk about Democratic 2008 Presidential candidate fundraising. As I’ve said before, I really don’t give a fuck who’s raised $26 million and who’s raised $25 million. I’ve got one dollar and one vote to offer to any candidate who promises to manage our country’s future responsibly and intelligently, and all this talk of tying up the nomination with big-money bonanzas just makes me feel like we don’t live in a democracy at all

I’m also disgusted at the thought that three senators — Obama, Clinton and Edwards — are spending so much time campaigning for 2008 when there is so much important work the Senate needs to do now. My mind is not yet made up who I will support in this race, but my big one dollar and one vote just might go to the one politician of the three who convinces me that they are working hard NOW to help our country by their actions in the Capitol. Let’s live in the moment, candidates, okay? This type of electoral shenanigans is more palatable in peacetime — in time of war, it’s really very offensive.

3) I’m also sick of our nation’s romantic notions of a savior celebrity President. Most democracies on this planet are led not by their Presidents but by their Prime Ministers, who correspond most closely to our Speaker of the House. As far as I can tell, the most important elected official in the United States government right now is Nancy Pelosi, and I am very impressed by her focus, her cool unflappability and her resolve to forge her own path towards solving our problems. Why the hell shouldn’t I support Nancy Pelosi for President? She’s working hard to run our country, while the rest of these celebrities are working hard to look good on TV. Screw that nonsense — we’ve got problems to solve.

There’s my Spring Break catch-up. Go, Nancy, go!