A Pilgrim’s Digression

I did not watch the President’s speech last night. Lately, I’ve become so absolutely tired of politics, I’ve even been considering that my blog may be going in an entirely new direction, or it may be dying. Of my posts in January, few have been on my usual subject of politics and war.

But the reason I did not watch the President’s speech last night had mostly to do with my apathy towards him and my disgust for his foolish and incompetent opponents. I still read the papers. I still think about current events. Yet I find myself resigned, in laconic fashion, to a kind of mulish pessimism. What can I do? The world is in decline. So let it decline, then.

Reading about the President’s speech today, I have only a few thoughts. His admission that America is addicted to oil is welcome. I’ve said before that fighting wars in the Middle East while fueling our military on Middle Eastern oil is a bit like fighting Nazi Germany with Mercedes and Volkswagen-built tanks and jeeps. “Herr Hitler, may we place another order for 20 tanks? We have to assault the Bridge at Remagen this week.”

The problem is, considering the President’s ties to oil, I don’t really believe he is serious about tackling the problem. If he really wanted to, he could declare an “energy race” similar to the race to the moon in the sixties, and we could be energy independent within a decade. Despite his admission of addiction, he didn’t announce anything that amounts to an intervention. We are going to “increase our research” into alternatives, but we do that every year anyway. A 22-percent increase in clean energy research doesn’t sound like much of a commitment, in a time of war.

My personal dream is to see an America that can no longer be held hostage to the whims of medievalist Middle Eastern fanatics. I say cut off the demand for oil and let the Middle East determine its own future.

On Iraq and the war in on terror, I heard nothing new from the President. He continues to see the world in a manicheistic way, good versus evil, isolationism versus engagement. The latter came through most clearly. He spoke of the dangers of retreat and the “false peace of isolationism.”

The alternative to his policy of reckless preemptive war does not have to be isolationism. I honestly don’t know if his continual use of the either/or fallacy is pure sloppy thinking, or if he merely finds it rhetorically advantageous to frame the argument in a simple construction of binary opposites. I tend to think the latter.

Even if we are in a situation where we have gone too far to take an alternative route, he is the one who led us here. He should not be surprised that there may be some resentment of that fact. Some of us have a hard time letting that go.

Despite the fact that no one really questioned the morality of fighting World War II, there were nonetheless plenty of Republican men fighting the war who hated Franklin Roosevelt with as much passion as Democrats today hate George W. Bush. A good soldier can hate his CO but still do his duty. That’s the way I look at the sensible, if passionate, liberal opposition to Bush. People like Cindy Sheehan are another story.

I actually saw Sheehan yesterday. She and a group of about six people were walking along Constitution Avenue near the Sewall-Belmont House, towards Maryland Avenue. We passed close by on the same side of the street. One of her female followers noticed me looking at Sheehan and stood up straighter and smiled, as if deriving some sort of vicarious glory from my stare.

Sheehan was easily recognizable, and she is one of the few people I’ve seen who actually looks better in person than on camera. The camera always captures her looking like some sort of evil harpy. In person, she looks utterly ordinary. She was carrying a homemade poster-board sign that read “No More Wars.” She could have been any other protester I’ve seen hanging about Washington over the years.

Nevertheless, she has become quite a kook, squandering every bit of the moral authority she derived from the death of her son in Iraq. Her visit to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was proof enough for me that she has no more credibility than any other celebrity liberal. Her personal message has been totally co-opted by politics.

This is the true state of the Union however. We are led by a good, but shallow man carrying a big stick, to whom there is no viable alternative.

I want an alternative. I don’t particularly care who gives it to me: Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner, John Kerry…anyone will do. But for God’s sake, someone needs to come up with a plan that reasonable liberals can get behind. It can’t be healthy for our people and our politics to have one strong party leading our country down one straight and narrow road into the future. We need alternatives–alternative fuels and alternatives politics–if we are to make the best decisions about where we want the country to go.