Michel.Evanchik.Net

Here are my executive cabinet choices for a pretend Michel Evanchik presidency. Making these choices was a good thought experiment to define my own political preferences in some specific and tangible ways. It’s a fun intellectual exercise that my readers should try as well.

These are largely symbolic choices, and a final choice might be changed in consideration of administrative ability (and the candidate’s willingness to serve). As we have painfully seen in the forty-third President’s administration, enthusiasm is no substitute for competency:

• Agriculture: Willie Nelson, country singer and friend of the small farmer
• Interior: Robbie Cox, President of the Sierra Club
• Commerce: Cory Doctorow, free software advocate and corporate copyright skeptic. I’d let him clean up the Patent Office.
• Justice: Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU
• Defense: Wesley Clark, the last successful American general
• Labor: Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer, Mrs. Evanchik and I, en famille et avec les enfants, enjoyed a simple day at nearby Flushing Meadows park. The U.S. Open tennis tournament was going on at the time, and we were in the park during Andre Agassi’s final match. We heard the cheers from Arthur Ashe stadium, and saw the tennis spectators being bussed through the park on the way to the stadium. We enjoyed ourselves watching the Latin American soccer clubs play ball at professional levels, while our son Jack kicked a soccer ball with another little boy. We wondered, as we ate some delicious empanadas bought ata park vendor’s stall, how much the tennis spectators were missing of this vibrant, exciting park, and we were amused that the soccer players and their fans couldn’t have cared less about the tennis tournament.

Mrs. Evanchik was so struck by the disconnect of the tennis tournament to the regular full life of the park, that she decided that it should be documented, so working with video wizard Mathew Orr at the New York Times, that is what she set about to do.

Here is the product of their work, a great video about the life of the park outside of the fancy gates of the U.S. Open.

Michael Vick, Atlanta Falcons quarterback, has plead guilty to charges of illegal dogfighting, and as part of that action, the more than fifty pitbulls on his property were seized by the government. Now it is likely that these dogs will be euthanized.

So how is this better for the dogs? I’d rather have a brutal chance at survival than to be hopelessly sent to the gas chamber. Vick is charged with, among other things, killing some of the dogs in his possession by hanging and drowning. Now the state is about to do the same thing to these dogs that Vick did, albeit in a more constrained and sanitary fashion. But death is death and killing is killing. So they’re sending Vick to jail because he didn’t kill the dogs nicely enough?

There is a great concern that the military is being stretched thin in Iraq.  The war against the insurgency is lasting much longer and the fighting is much harder than the war’s planners ever envisaged.  Troops are serving longer tours in country and getting less time recuperating out of country.  National Guard and Reserve troops are playing a much greater role than planned, putting a particular strain on these formerly “weekend warriors”.  Yet a significant and loud minority in this country persist in supporting a large American military presence in the war.  The problem is that the troop levels necessary to carry on the large-scale engagement insisted upon by the war-hawks are not sustainable in the long run, not without a draft or a great increase in voluntary enlistment.

I do not support the war.  I have a very simple test for determining my support –  would I fight in it myself?  I will not call on other men to fight when I will not.  My reasons are simple.  Firstly, I have a healthy fear of death.  Secondly, to overcome this scruple over staying alive with all my body parts intact, the cause must be sufficiently important for me to risk my life for it.  Iraq is simply not important enough.  When President Bush recently compared actual failure in Vietnam to possible failure in Iraq, I shrugged my shoulders.  While the U.S. might have suffered emotionally from losing the Vietnam War, from a practical point of view, no real U.S. interests were harmed.

So I will not support a war that I will not fight in.  But as the fight is going on, I encourage all those who would fight, to volunteer.  If you support the war, and are between 18 and 42 years of age, and are not enlisted in the military, then please shut up.  Don’t ask others to fight your battles.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary “working” men. They are a race apart–outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men “work,” beggars do not “work”; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not “earn” his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic “earns” his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course–but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout–in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? –for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honor; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

– George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), end of Chapter XXXI

I was talking to a retired army medic last night. He had been shot three times (with one bullet still in him), served in three wars (Vietnam, Panama, and Gulf I), and yet he did not regret his army career.

In response to my noting that nurses tend to be very touchy-feely, perhaps due to the physical nature of their work, he told me of the greatest benefit to being an army medic. Being shot at is no fun, but during peacetime, medic battallions are often sent out on field exercises, for weeks at a time. Five hundred nurses all alone in the woods, with nothing to do at night. Of these five hundred nurses, maybe thirty would be men, and as my friend put it, “about twenty of these guys didn’t really care for women.” So that makes for a ratio of about forty five lonely female nurses for every straight guy. Four hundred and seventy nurses, healthy, young and horny, all alone in the forest with only ten fellows to keep them company at night. There was never a porno movie made with such an exciting premise. And this man lived it.

Beyond the salacious sylvan romps, I learned some other things about being an army medic. After college, he joined the army in 1974, as they would train him to become a full registered nurse (he had not gone to a nursing school, but to a regular college on a basketball scholarship). He figured he was safe, because the Vietnam War was winding down. He was mistaken. His whole graduating class got sent to Vietnam in 1975 to mop up the dead and wounded. Of his medic battallion, half were killed. No-one had told the Viet-Cong that medics are protected by the Geneva Convention. As all the fighting troops had gone home, he and his fellow medics worked unprotected, as he described it, “while we matched body parts and put them into body bags.” Retired, at the age of fifty one, the Army tried to talk him into going back into service two years ago for the Iraq War, ostensibly to train and teach. He laughed and refused when they asked him. When I noted that, had he reenlisted, the Army could have reneged and sent him anywhere that they wanted, including the war zone, he agreed that, “they have a way of doing that.”

It is worth noting that he found one shared trait among the surviving nurses — they all played army as kids, so had honed the instincts of acting smart and staying low under fire, even in play.

This man loved his career as a nurse and medic, with the good and the bad. So for the young man looking for his way in the world, eager for adventure and female attention, go out into the woods, play war, and dream of being an Army medic.

Todd Seavey’s recent comment on his blog on why he saw Brokeback Mountain, “it was a lady’s idea,” prompted me to write these long-simmering thoughts.

I think that there is a whole little volume waiting to be written on the phenomenon of women pressuring straight men into seeing Brokeback Mountain. Here’s my contribution. Read the rest of this entry »

I am writing to tell you about an abuse of power in Asheville, NC by a police sergeant.

I occasionally stand on an interstate overpass near my place of work in the mornings and hold a sign that says ‘IMPEACH BUSH / CHENEY’.

On Wednesday August 15, I was standing alone with my sign for about 10 minutes, when I was approached by Police Officer Russell Crisp. He asked me how long I was planning to stay there and I told him just a few more minutes because I had to go to work at 8:00. He asked for my ID and I obliged. I asked him if I was doing something wrong, and he said that his Sergeant was on the way and he was going to wait for him. SO, I went back to my sign holding over the interstate. <more…>

After reading this account of a peaceful and cooperative protester being arrested in North Carolina, I am shocked and dismayed. For peacefully and unobtrusively displaying an “Impeach Bush/Cheney” sign on an Asheville sidewalk, this man was cited, handcuffed and arrested. This outrageous behaviour by the police is a dangerous and chilling impediment to free political speech. It is my sincere hope, that when this matter is resolved, if the above account is true, that all the police officers involved, and any other officials that gave then their marching orders, are fired and put on trial for their unconscionable actions.

The very essence of democracy is the ability to speak your mind and express your views without fear of reprisal.  To slander this right is an egregiously infamous act repugnant to all believers in a free and democratic republic.  This is not a politically partisan issue, except to the most corrupt and bloody-minded miscreants.  While one may strongly disagree with the views stated by this protester, one must vociferously support his right to speak if one is to consider oneself a good citizen.  Only by keeping officials accountable, like these officers, for such outrageous actions, can we hope to maintain a free and just civil society.

And, uh, oh yeah, impeach Bush/Cheney.

Here’s another item for the “American Decline” file.  Apparently, there are well-connected people out there who would support a fascist America.

An article encouraging President Bush to declare himself President-For-Life was posted on the conservative web site, “Family Security Matters“.  A cached version of the article is still available online, though the original has since been taken down.  The website’s principal advisor, Barbara Comstock, was a former Justice Department spokeswoman under John Ashcroft, and familysecuritymatters.org is a front for an influential conservative think tank, or so it is said on the blogosphere.

The article was quickly taken down and  may just be a harmless aberration, but one has to wonder how many conservative fifth-columnist are really out there, ready to turn the United States of America into a banana-republic style military junta.  The list of advisors and directors for Family Security Matters has some recognizable public names on it, and they really should reconsider the company they keep.  Even worse, maybe they have considered the company, and decided that they liked it.

I wonder if I’m putting myself on a secret enemies list just by writing about this.  What’s most frightening is that it is not an idle thought.  Something is going very wrong with this country.  There is an air of fear and paranoia that has no proportion with the pipsqueak terrorists that we are supposedly being protected from.

I’m just hoping that we make it to free elections in 2008, that we get some good and honest national leadership, and that enough of the country is courageous enough to demand a return to a free and civil society.   I like to think everything will be okay.  I believe that the bad guys are just incompetent and paranoid, not brave or evil enough to ruin this country.  But I’m not one-hundred percent sure, and it bothers me to lack confidence in the integrity of our government.  I’ve never been struck with such angst over our country’s future.

from the very funny xkcd.  (the original comic is here)