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.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Diversity, debate, Online, The Cherry Orchard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.