It’s a strange spring.
The cherry blossoms came out too early this year–the second-earliest blooming in recorded history. They really should have known that the sun wouldn’t be ready for them yet, so there they are around the Tidal Basin, in all their pink and white wonder, facing a dreary March sky.
Meanwhile, it sometimes seems that nobody’s home in official Washington this unresolved campaign year. The president is off in India, the secretary of state in Europe, the secretary of defense was in Vietnam and Hillary has moved to New York. (Some cynics are saying that the city works better without them.)
Nor are the terrorist beavers, who frightened the city so badly last spring, anywhere to be seen. Even the busy beaver family, which came out of nowhere last spring to attack the vulnerable cherry trees and actually chew several of them to the ground, apparently finds this spring in the nation’s capital not to their capricious liking. We don’t even know where they are, not since park district agents captured them and spirited them away to some still-unknown location under (apparently) their animal witness-protection program.
A mood of irresolution and waiting hangs over the city–and the cherry blossoms, since l9l5 the very symbol of the clarity and beauty of this capital city, are reflecting the present confusion. It’s spring break, a time to think and reflect and try to figure out how we got here.
President Clinton, for instance, is not coming to Saturday’s Gridiron Dinner this year. Usually it would be high heresy for a president not to come to the annual dinner, which is a clever satire on politics and journalism (and just about everything else). He says it is because he is in India, but journalists suspect he planned the trip NOT to be there because of the pointed humor. (Hillary came only once, which tells you something.)
As Washington waits and ponders, the problem is that the world is meanwhile creating new second and third acts.
In fact, this spring in particular, one can begin to see ever more clearly the outcome of the administration’s poorly thought-out foreign policies of the last seven years, with its refusal to use effective power and its reliance on winning the hearts and minds of totally antithetical regimes.
After Saturday’s Taiwan elections, China continues, although at lower decibel, to threaten to attack the “renegade” island, which so clearly spurns its advances. (A tough-minded American policy, making clear what we would do in such a situation and holding back technology trade with China, would surely have lessened or even prevented that lethal possibility.) Russia goes to the polls Sunday to elect a hard-nosed KGB man who is everything the Clinton administration believed it was preventing with its pretensions to be able to “change” and “reform” Mother Russia. (Here, too, tough-minded policies recognizing Russia’s historical characteristics and idiosyncracies, and acknowledging that even post-Soviet Russian interests could not conceivably be identical to ours, would have made all the difference.)
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Friday, meanwhile, marks the first anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Serbia, with Slobodan Milosevic still fully in power in Belgrade and the NATO and UN missions in Kosovo falling apart on multiple levels.
Policies of defeating Milosevic–instead of coddling him as the “only man who can make peace,” and of recognizing that the administration’s precious “reconciliation” is an impossible chimera in places such as Kosovo–and of using power effectively from the moment he started these new Balkans wars in l99l, would have solved this ongoing, gnawing crisis long ago. Instead, Kosovo has the added effect of illustrating to the world, day after day, that the West, led by the United States, is truly an incapable warrior.
So, we can see the results of these last seven years–but not what will come next. Will it be a leader who will continue these policies? Will it be a refurbished ship of state? Do the American people–lulled by an economic boom while our civic culture, our sense of our own history, and our public culture are eroded as surely as those cherry trees last year–really care?
That is my sense of this spring, with the cherry trees rushing into confused bloom before the sun is ready for them and with the beavers gone but not forgotten.
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