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Politics : About that Cuban boy, Elian -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (8233)	7/10/2000 1:20:38 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9127

HI, Michael, I went and read the article again to see if it made more sense from your viewpoint of it being a commentary on the Elian saga, but I think that made it worse for me, because it is so fragmented and unfactual and subjective. I still think it is a very poorly conceived piece regardless of the content. Her point, whatever it was, was never made clearly. She also fails to acknowledge that there are many people who arrived at different conclusions in the Elian situation who are NOT ignorant, ill-educated, or morally inferior. By the way, when I click on the URL - ether.com--I get nothing-- or 'coming soon' or some message like that. How did you get to the article? Just to be fair I looked for other articles by her, and came across her online site, Femme Soul. I read the goal, and the mission, and then the archive of her articles. There is nothing new about what she is saying. She writes a great deal parroting Alan Bloom and the death of the classical education. Heck, most of us were agreeing with him when Closing of the American Mind first came out in '87. (When she was 14?) This is a rerun for us. She seems extremely proud of herself for being "different", and wrote a whole column that MAY have been intended to be amusing but that I found self-congratulatory, self-indulgent and jejune, all of which might be explained by her relative youth. From the article: When alone, I recharge my soul. I review my conscience, scanning it for hints of weakness, guarding it against the ever-encroaching veil of moral relativism that has enveloped so many others, and occasionally clouds my own flawed judgements. I draw the curtains and retreat behind my wall of Beethoven and William Butler Yeats. I stare at my print of Rosetti's Prosperine eating a passion fruit and begin meditating on the Lost Words: "nobility" "honor" "passion" "dignity" "soul" "humility" "modesty" "virtue" and "love". But I am careful to never use the Lost Words in conversation. It is a sure way to invite ridicule, to be discovered, ostracized and pitied. She sounds like - a bright college student who is just discovering herself and believes she is the first to ever do so. And you know what, I thought her comment about the Peace symbol being a chicken print and her nasty comments about hippies were as tasteless and out of line as she says Clinton's comments on Elian were (and I agree with her on that). She was BORN the year we withdrew our last troops from Vietnam. The peace symbol represented to my generation the belief of many that the war was wrong. Most of us had relatives and friends who died, many who were permanently damaged, physically or psychologically, many of us decided that this was not a war that we could in good conscience believe in. The peace sign, incidentally, was not a chickenprint, it was the symbol for nuclear disarmament developed in 1958. You probably know this as it was taken from the naval semaphore codes for N and D and used as the badge of the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War.

To: greenspirit who wrote (8233)	7/10/2000 10:09:02 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9127

In one of the first paragraphs she slam dunks the core issue here... "They cannot see beyond that fact that the issue is no longer "where does Elian belong" the issue is "do we follow the rule of law, or do we let our frustration with the court process sanction extreme force, by executive privilege?" The only thing she slam-dunks in that clumsy sentence is her own credibility. There is no conflict between the rule of law and executive privilege in this case, because the law places the resolution of this case squarely within the realm of the executive. "Frustration with the court process" was never an issue, because "the court" did not have jurisdiction. The law says that Elian was an illegal alien; an illegal alien on parole, but an illegal alien nonetheless. The law gives the INS exclusive and absolute jurisdiction over illegal aliens. If you have an illegal alien in your house, the law says the INS can order you to turn that illegal alien over to them, and if you refuse, the law says the INS can force you to comply with the order. You may disapprove of the degree of force that was used in this case, but there is no question at all that the INS has the legal right to force compliance with their legal order. The only people challenging the rule of law were the people who refused to turn over an illegal alien to the INS when legally ordered to do so. I thought the writing was weak and the thinking worse; the article may on some level succeed as poetry, though I can't see how, but it as an exercise in rhetoric it seems to me a dismal failure.