The Cherry Orchard

British author and social critic Martin Amis recently wrote a book called The War Against Cliche; it’s a pretty good book, and it’s a great title. As an author of fiction and poetry trying to turn my head towards the controversial topics of the day, I can relate to the title. When I write about world events I often feel myself fighting the war against cliche, and sometimes losing it.

What’s a writer to do? I am filled with disgust and anger towards a few world leaders whose decisions and statements seem too banal for tragedy and too predictable for comedy. I want to write about this, but I can come up with nothing to say that hasn’t been said before. But if I don’t write what I feel, I find myself unable to write anything at all. My anger is a clot, a clump.

So, let’s dive in. I have two subjects today, two influential global leaders who claim to be each other’s philosophical opposites: one is a religious fundamentalist and populist politician who embraces military solutions to human problems, whereas the other is a religious fundamentalist and populist politican who embraces military solutions to human problems. I’m speaking of George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Bush administration has begun a new public relations initiative aimed at keeping Republican seats in the US Senate and Congress during the November midterm elections. Their speechwriters have now put the phrase “Islamic fascism” into regular rotation, and Vice-President Dick Cheney recently delivered a speech comparing the anti-war movement in the USA to the appeasement of Hitler before World War II.

As many before me have already said, the Bush administration does not have the credibility to make comparisons like this pass any type of inspection. The horrific results of the war in Iraq, begun in March 2003, betray a more obvious truth: this war was hastily planned and badly executed. The good citizens of the USA know that their current leadership is frighteningly incompetent, and many of us dread the damage that may be done in this administration’s remaining two years. As far as I’m concerned, Bush and Cheney are already lame ducks, and I earnestly plead that they cease delivering speeches. They have already insulted America’s honor with their reckless foreign policy; I beg that they stop insulting our intelligence.

The administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no less reckless. Cartoonists and comedians in the USA like to portray the earnest fanatic as a clown, a madman, but in fact he is a career politician with over twenty-five years of experience in Iranian politics. It’s all too easy to laugh him off when he convenes a panel of academics to study whether or not the genocide of six million Jews in mid-20th Century Europe is a myth. We know that the Holocaust was all too real, as were other holocausts of modern times from Russia to China to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia to Darfur. How shall I react to a politician like this? Ahmadinejad is all over the news: he is famously beginning a program of nuclear enrichment, he has declared that Israel has no right to exist, he has called for a purge of liberal intellectuals from Iranian universities. I believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a familar character from history. I don’t intend to bore my poor readers by beating this subject to death, but I do plan to use this site to watch his activities in the future.

Cliches? Yeah, I’ve got nothing but cliches to offer today. I hate when the world seems simplistic, but I’ve got to call the shots like I see them.