My cousin Andy sent me the concluding excerpt from a Rudyard Kipling poem, regarding our adventure in Afghanistan.
And the end of the fight
Is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased
And the epitaph drear,
A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East
I have been sensing a certain coming together of the supposedly polarized, ignorant U.S. masses. Republicans support escalation in Afghanistan, for the most part, but many do not, including influential conservative opinion makers, like George Will and Pat Buchanan and my cousin, who comments as coy66ote at the Washington Post and many other fine publications. Many Democrats support it as well, out of Party loyalty, and the desire to demonstrate their war-like manhood, but many more Democrats are really not into it.
Obama is a living symbol of this bipartisan schizophrenia. My continuously arguing brother, cousin, and I, exquisitely sensitive to the zeitgeist as we all are, have also muddied the partisan divide lately, over the AfPak policy. They are more or less against it. I am more or less for it.
In addition, concerns about government deficits and corruption and incompetence, these days, are basically non-partisan. Regardless of party affiliation there is growing anger and cynicism about the fecklessness of the government, Congress especially, but now even affecting the numbers of the risen President.
People were already fed up. That’s why they voted for Obama. He promised to do something about it. He lied. He’s not even trying to do something about it. “It” is just fine with Obama the way it is. He just wanted to get his hands on the levers. Fine. That’s how it works. That’s how it usually works, with brief intervals of courage and vision, which, so far, in the current Presidential incarnation, have not been apparent. Oh well, it’s only been a year. Maybe one is coming up. But you know, it’s been awhile now, and if it’s comin’, it better hurry up.
I think it took courage for President Obama to deliver the speech, and more importantly the policy, in the “enemy camp” over there at West Point, and I agree, I think (maybe, who knows?), with the policy. But any conceivable policy that he announced about AfPak would have taken courage, some options much more courage, such as coy66ote’s alternative cut-our-losses, admit defeat proposal. All-out or greatly-prolonged war would, likewise, doubtless have demanded even more public pluck than the chosen path.
Lately, surprisingly, my sympathies are with Barack. He is misguided, unschooled, excessively diffident, young, but he is not the Communist Party’s Manchurian candidate. How’s that for faint praise? He is the President we have. Breaking with his friend Bill Ayers, as he has in Afghanistan, is to be applauded.
Perhaps the intransigence of the problems we face, foreign and domestic, and the universal anger and disgust at the way our government is functioning, will transcend our differences and bring us together at last.