Shoot the Moon!! Not literally, of course.!
I am grateful that Lynn Woolsey represents my district, and that I
continue to have the opportunity to vote for someone worthwhile.
Shoot the Moon and Forget about the Bell Curve
By
Elizabeth de la Vega
I have to admit that some of the responses to my
recent article The White House Criminal
Conspiracy (published in the Nation and posted at
Tomdispatch.com), in which I argued that the Bush administration should be
brought to account in Congress or a court of law for defrauding the American
people into war, kept me up at night. No, not the ones that questioned my sanity
or sobriety. The letters that have given pause are from people who
wholeheartedly agree that the Bush administration lied about the war. Yet
there's "zero chance," these writers contend, that a completely
Republican-controlled government will ever do anything about it, so it's
pointless to pursue the matter. While lying awake beside my sleeping husband
with my dog staring up at me in the dark, I've wondered, is that true? Is it
futile, or foolish, to act when there is little apparent chance of
success?
It was five years ago this month that George W. Bush received
his best Christmas gift ever -- the presidency -- from the United States Supreme
Court. And around this time every year, I've thought about the night of December
13, 2000, when he made his formal acceptance speech. I remember it well: Bush
speaking from the Texas House of Representatives about a bipartisan foreign
policy and his plan to reunite the country. It's not that I was particularly
interested in the President or even the election at that point. I wasn't. I had
taken a leave of absence from my job as a federal prosecutor in San Jose and
flown 3,000 miles across the country to be with my sister. So I watched the
speech while sitting on a portable cot, looking at a hospital TV suspended from
the ceiling -- and my sister was lying in a bed next to me amidst a tangle of
tubes. She was dying.
Kathy was thirty-eight, a small-town doctor with a
three-year-old son, when she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer. Her
prognosis was grim. Statistically, the majority of patients with her diagnosis
live for only about six months. But some patients, those represented by a tiny
fraction at the far edge of the bell curve, outlived the odds, and Kathy was
determined to join that group. So what did she do? Everything. She had a
mastectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy; she vomited, lost her hair, and
her eyebrows. She took drugs that threw her into menopause, steroids that made
her face swell up like a balloon, and herbs that tasted like dirt. She went to
acupuncture, mind-body seminars, and Reiki treatments. She endured a cell
replacement procedure that kept her isolated for 30 days. In other words, she
shot the moon.
By the day of Bush's speech, Kathy's organs were failing.
Her liver was, by then, so damaged that her doctors were astounded she could
even talk coherently. Not only could she talk, but she had a lot to say about
Bush's speech (mainly expressing her irritation that it preempted The West
Wing.) She died three days later, six years after her initial
diagnosis.
Throughout her ordeal, one of my sister's persistent concerns
was what other people would think. Would her medical colleagues consider her
irrational, if not crazy, to pursue treatments that were so uncomfortable and
painful, not to say unproven or improbable in terms of success? And what would
her patients think? Kathy would call me regularly and ask just these
questions.
In the end, though, she answered them herself. As long as
there was uncertainty, the slightest possibility that she could land at the
odds-defying edge of that bell curve and have a longer life, it made sense to
her to do anything she could bear to do, regardless of what others
thought.
I don't know Lynn Woolsey, the Democratic congresswoman from
Petaluma, California, but I think she would agree with my
sister.
Representative Woolsey opposed the invasion of Iraq from the
outset. She first called for a U.S. withdrawal from that country in April 2004.
Since then, she has stepped onto the floor of the House of Representatives 128
times to talk about the deceit that led us to war, the lies and incompetence
that keep us there, and her plan for an exit. Certainly the odds have been
steeply against her; she has often been speaking to an empty chamber. In January
2005, when she proposed legislation calling for a withdrawal from Iraq, she was
joined by only 14 House Democrats. But by the spring of 2005, what had seemed
like a thoroughly futile exercise began to look somewhat different. By June, she
had garnered support from 127 other representatives in the House, including five
Republicans, for a proposed amendment to the annual defense spending bill that
required Bush to set a timetable for withdrawal. And now, of course, the
momentum for withdrawal continues to build.
Woolsey has been able to
bring people around not merely because of her courage and commitment. Equally
compelling has been the evidence she cites. In April 2004, she talked about 700
American soldiers dead; by March 2005, 1,500 American troops had died and 11,000
were injured; and on October 22, 2005, she said:
"Earlier this month, I
traveled to Iraq where I received extensive briefings from military commanders
and toured our state-of-the-art facilities. But nothing was more informative
than sitting down to meals with enlisted soldiers from California. Many of these
soldiers are on their second or third tour of duty. I talked to fathers who have
babies back home they have never seen. There were mothers who deployed mere
months after giving birth…
"With the casualty count of U.S. military
personnel in Iraq nearing 2,000 and $1 billion in tax monies spent in Iraq every
week, the American people are justifiably demanding -- and our troops deserve --
a plan, a strategy, something more than an open-ended military
commitment.
"If victory is the goal, what, exactly, defines
victory?"
In short, Representative Woolsey has, against all odds and the
measured opinions of her doubting or dismissive colleagues, persistently focused
on reality -- just the facts; and it is reality that most powerfully counteracts
the mass anesthetic that the Bush administration has used to keep people from
questioning the war. While masquerading as hard-headed realists, the President
and war hawks from both parties have been, at best, determined illusionists.
They have shrouded the war in abstractions -- victory, freedom, the spread of
democracy -- all of which are, ultimately (to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway in his
World War I novel A Farewell to Arms), obscene, especially when
juxtaposed against the concrete names of soldiers killed, Iraqis bombed, towns
destroyed, and children maimed.
That is why the Bush administration has
tried so mightily to keep us from thinking about the funerals of the American
dead and the amputees at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Administration
officials went out of their way to hide the evidence of the return home of dead
soldiers by prohibiting photographs of the coffins as they arrived back in the
United States; while the President, Vice President, and others carefully avoided
attending any of the more than 2,000 funerals. But it's been those funerals and
the amputees at Walter Reed that have convinced die-hard war supporters Walter
Jones (R-N.C.), and John Murtha (D.-Pa.) to denounce the war. Murtha's
plain-spoken critique of the war was so threatening to the administration that
it resorted initially to accusing him of joining forces with Michael Moore,
rather than responding to his actual arguments.
The truth is that the
closer you get to the reality of the war against Iraq and the lies that brought
us there -- and these are quite literally matters of life and death -- the
easier it is to know what to do: Shoot the moon and forget about the bell
curve.
As Congresswoman Woolsey has known all along, the most potent
antidote to the obscenity of abstraction is fact. Focus on the facts. Make sure
you get them right and don't overstate your case. Talk about the lies that sent
us to Iraq. Talk about the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis slaughtered, the
soldiers killed and wounded, the families they've left behind. Don't play the
administration's word games about torture: talk about waterboarding,
humiliation, and beatings. Write letters, demonstrate, make calls, send e-mails,
wear t-shirts, campaign for candidates who oppose the war, join groups, organize
groups, talk to anyone who will listen and even people who won't. Advocate
impeachment, push the Senate to analyze the administration's use of pre-war
intelligence, call for a special prosecutor -- and tell Congress it's time to
bring the troops home. Don't worry about the odds.
What good does any of
this do? The answer is we don't know -- which is exactly why we have to do
it.
Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than
20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized
Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's
Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the
Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for
Tomdispatch. She may be contacted at
ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.
Copyright 2005 Elizabeth de la
Vega
continue to have the opportunity to vote for someone worthwhile.
Shoot the Moon and Forget about the Bell Curve
By
Elizabeth de la Vega
I have to admit that some of the responses to my
recent article The White House Criminal
Conspiracy (published in the Nation and posted at
Tomdispatch.com), in which I argued that the Bush administration should be
brought to account in Congress or a court of law for defrauding the American
people into war, kept me up at night. No, not the ones that questioned my sanity
or sobriety. The letters that have given pause are from people who
wholeheartedly agree that the Bush administration lied about the war. Yet
there's "zero chance," these writers contend, that a completely
Republican-controlled government will ever do anything about it, so it's
pointless to pursue the matter. While lying awake beside my sleeping husband
with my dog staring up at me in the dark, I've wondered, is that true? Is it
futile, or foolish, to act when there is little apparent chance of
success?
It was five years ago this month that George W. Bush received
his best Christmas gift ever -- the presidency -- from the United States Supreme
Court. And around this time every year, I've thought about the night of December
13, 2000, when he made his formal acceptance speech. I remember it well: Bush
speaking from the Texas House of Representatives about a bipartisan foreign
policy and his plan to reunite the country. It's not that I was particularly
interested in the President or even the election at that point. I wasn't. I had
taken a leave of absence from my job as a federal prosecutor in San Jose and
flown 3,000 miles across the country to be with my sister. So I watched the
speech while sitting on a portable cot, looking at a hospital TV suspended from
the ceiling -- and my sister was lying in a bed next to me amidst a tangle of
tubes. She was dying.
Kathy was thirty-eight, a small-town doctor with a
three-year-old son, when she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer. Her
prognosis was grim. Statistically, the majority of patients with her diagnosis
live for only about six months. But some patients, those represented by a tiny
fraction at the far edge of the bell curve, outlived the odds, and Kathy was
determined to join that group. So what did she do? Everything. She had a
mastectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy; she vomited, lost her hair, and
her eyebrows. She took drugs that threw her into menopause, steroids that made
her face swell up like a balloon, and herbs that tasted like dirt. She went to
acupuncture, mind-body seminars, and Reiki treatments. She endured a cell
replacement procedure that kept her isolated for 30 days. In other words, she
shot the moon.
By the day of Bush's speech, Kathy's organs were failing.
Her liver was, by then, so damaged that her doctors were astounded she could
even talk coherently. Not only could she talk, but she had a lot to say about
Bush's speech (mainly expressing her irritation that it preempted The West
Wing.) She died three days later, six years after her initial
diagnosis.
Throughout her ordeal, one of my sister's persistent concerns
was what other people would think. Would her medical colleagues consider her
irrational, if not crazy, to pursue treatments that were so uncomfortable and
painful, not to say unproven or improbable in terms of success? And what would
her patients think? Kathy would call me regularly and ask just these
questions.
In the end, though, she answered them herself. As long as
there was uncertainty, the slightest possibility that she could land at the
odds-defying edge of that bell curve and have a longer life, it made sense to
her to do anything she could bear to do, regardless of what others
thought.
I don't know Lynn Woolsey, the Democratic congresswoman from
Petaluma, California, but I think she would agree with my
sister.
Representative Woolsey opposed the invasion of Iraq from the
outset. She first called for a U.S. withdrawal from that country in April 2004.
Since then, she has stepped onto the floor of the House of Representatives 128
times to talk about the deceit that led us to war, the lies and incompetence
that keep us there, and her plan for an exit. Certainly the odds have been
steeply against her; she has often been speaking to an empty chamber. In January
2005, when she proposed legislation calling for a withdrawal from Iraq, she was
joined by only 14 House Democrats. But by the spring of 2005, what had seemed
like a thoroughly futile exercise began to look somewhat different. By June, she
had garnered support from 127 other representatives in the House, including five
Republicans, for a proposed amendment to the annual defense spending bill that
required Bush to set a timetable for withdrawal. And now, of course, the
momentum for withdrawal continues to build.
Woolsey has been able to
bring people around not merely because of her courage and commitment. Equally
compelling has been the evidence she cites. In April 2004, she talked about 700
American soldiers dead; by March 2005, 1,500 American troops had died and 11,000
were injured; and on October 22, 2005, she said:
"Earlier this month, I
traveled to Iraq where I received extensive briefings from military commanders
and toured our state-of-the-art facilities. But nothing was more informative
than sitting down to meals with enlisted soldiers from California. Many of these
soldiers are on their second or third tour of duty. I talked to fathers who have
babies back home they have never seen. There were mothers who deployed mere
months after giving birth…
"With the casualty count of U.S. military
personnel in Iraq nearing 2,000 and $1 billion in tax monies spent in Iraq every
week, the American people are justifiably demanding -- and our troops deserve --
a plan, a strategy, something more than an open-ended military
commitment.
"If victory is the goal, what, exactly, defines
victory?"
In short, Representative Woolsey has, against all odds and the
measured opinions of her doubting or dismissive colleagues, persistently focused
on reality -- just the facts; and it is reality that most powerfully counteracts
the mass anesthetic that the Bush administration has used to keep people from
questioning the war. While masquerading as hard-headed realists, the President
and war hawks from both parties have been, at best, determined illusionists.
They have shrouded the war in abstractions -- victory, freedom, the spread of
democracy -- all of which are, ultimately (to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway in his
World War I novel A Farewell to Arms), obscene, especially when
juxtaposed against the concrete names of soldiers killed, Iraqis bombed, towns
destroyed, and children maimed.
That is why the Bush administration has
tried so mightily to keep us from thinking about the funerals of the American
dead and the amputees at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Administration
officials went out of their way to hide the evidence of the return home of dead
soldiers by prohibiting photographs of the coffins as they arrived back in the
United States; while the President, Vice President, and others carefully avoided
attending any of the more than 2,000 funerals. But it's been those funerals and
the amputees at Walter Reed that have convinced die-hard war supporters Walter
Jones (R-N.C.), and John Murtha (D.-Pa.) to denounce the war. Murtha's
plain-spoken critique of the war was so threatening to the administration that
it resorted initially to accusing him of joining forces with Michael Moore,
rather than responding to his actual arguments.
The truth is that the
closer you get to the reality of the war against Iraq and the lies that brought
us there -- and these are quite literally matters of life and death -- the
easier it is to know what to do: Shoot the moon and forget about the bell
curve.
As Congresswoman Woolsey has known all along, the most potent
antidote to the obscenity of abstraction is fact. Focus on the facts. Make sure
you get them right and don't overstate your case. Talk about the lies that sent
us to Iraq. Talk about the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis slaughtered, the
soldiers killed and wounded, the families they've left behind. Don't play the
administration's word games about torture: talk about waterboarding,
humiliation, and beatings. Write letters, demonstrate, make calls, send e-mails,
wear t-shirts, campaign for candidates who oppose the war, join groups, organize
groups, talk to anyone who will listen and even people who won't. Advocate
impeachment, push the Senate to analyze the administration's use of pre-war
intelligence, call for a special prosecutor -- and tell Congress it's time to
bring the troops home. Don't worry about the odds.
What good does any of
this do? The answer is we don't know -- which is exactly why we have to do
it.
Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than
20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized
Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's
Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the
Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for
Tomdispatch. She may be contacted at
ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.
Copyright 2005 Elizabeth de la
Vega