Obama Obicycle (Art) Therapy

If you are like me - which I sincerely hope is not the case - you struggle at times to continue to hold your fellow citizens in even modest regard. Being subjected to daily sound bites from the refrigerator-magnet word salad that masquerades as a Sarah Palin campaign speech makes that struggle even harder.

But take heart, dear friends! Hope is at hand for sufferers of TCCS (Terminally Cynical Curmudgeon Syndrome), like me. The Obama Obicycle has now been demonstrated, in limited clinical trials, to drastically reduce the symptoms of TCCS. It is rumored that a full-fledged cure will be announced the first week in November.

Honestly, it continues to be throughly therapeutic for me to bike around Atlanta with my Obama bike-trailer rig. The first bicycle trip of the day took me to the High Museum of Art to attend a member preview of The Louvre and the Masterpiece, which opens Sunday and runs through September of next year. (The photo accompanying this post is a subtly altered version of Johannes Vermeer's The Astronomer which, in my mind, is the highpoint of the exhibition.)

As has become customary with the Obicycle, I was serenaded by the tooting of horns and exhorted with the waving of hands as I pedaled my way to the museum in Midtown. When I arrived there I intentionally made a circuit of the wonderful plaza created with the completion of the Renzo Piano addition to the High a few years ago, before moving on to find a less conspicuous place to lock up. My showy entrance on the scene had the effect of attracting a bit of attention, so, as I walked up to the Weiland Pavilion to tender my admission ticket, a number people - visitors and staff - approached me to congratulate me on the Obicycle, to share their hopes and concerns about the election, and to request photo opportunities with me and the bike.

As I had promised the admiring fans, after I finished viewing the exhibit, I fetched the Obicycle and returned the plaza to be photographed. Since I needed to retrieve my messenger bag from the check counter, I left the Obicycle unattended for a few minutes while I ran inside. (I imagine that its conspicuousness makes it relatively theft-proof, at least for short periods of time, although I do worry about McCain-Palin saboteurs.) When I returned, much to my surprise, a small group of tourists had gathered to take turns photographing each other posing with the Obicycle.

What a kick I got out of that display! Maybe my days of TCCS suffering are behind me, after all.

Cheering Throngs Greet Maiden Cruise of Obama Obicycle

The newly christened Obama Obicycle made its inaugural voyage yesterday with Captain Marc Merlin at the helm and first mate - and photographer - Hillary Felker at his side. They came up to speed as they exited the tranquil waters of Lake Claire harbor Tuesday morning and carefully steered their way through the narrow, but not treacherous, straits of the City of Decatur, with the Dekalb Farmers Market as their intended destination and first scheduled port of call.

The weather was near perfect and there was nary a suburban frat boy pirate to be seen, as they navigated the waterways of E. Ponce de Leon Avenue, basking in the toots of horns from admiring fellow seafarers passing by.

Nautical metaphors aside, it was, in fact, difficult to pedal more than a block or two on the Obama Obicycle without being greeted with a shout-out of approval or a hearty thumbs up. People in Atlanta are really pumped about the prospect of an Obama victory in the upcoming election and they are happy to share their enthusiasm.

On our return home from the market, Hillary and I paid a call at the Dekalb Obama office - 2752 E. Ponce de Leon Avenue - and rousted the workers and volunteers there to come out and take a look at our bicycle convoy. Needless to say, they were impressed, although it does remain to be seen whether the photo they took of us will find its way to the national campaign website. We can only hope.

Since this morning I have taken the Obama Obicycle out on a number of trips, and I can honestly report that I receive enthusiastic shows of support wherever I go. This kind of encouragement tells me that maybe - just maybe - we will soon have national leaders and national policies that we can be proud of once again. That is, of course, only if we remain focused these last few weeks of the campaign and only if we remain determined to make sure that our votes - and those of our friends and families - are both cast and counted.

Jimmy Olmert? Ehud Carter?

Apropos the once-again moribund Middle East peace process - if one can in fact call this kind of endless churning of diplomatic activity a process - the New York Times chimed in with this editorial on Saturday, Mr. Olmert's Belated Truth's. It seems that the Times is grudgingly appreciative of the fact that the exiting Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had screwed up the courage to speak out about the reality behind his nation's conflict with the Palestinian people and to outline how it could be resolved.

Ignoring for the moment that the Times had dragged their feet for decades in coming to the very same conclusions that Mr. Olmert did, it was gratifying to see that the editors and the P. M. were finally on the same geopolitical page in recognizing the following:

• that an Israeli peace with the Palestinians requires the full withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlements from all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,
• that the return of the Golan Heights must be on the table as part of peace negotiations with Syria,
• and that it would be a foolhardy adventure - megalomania, according to Olmert - for Israeli to undertake unilateral military action to thwart Iran's development of nuclear weapons.

As encouraging as it is that Olmert has finally come to see the light, or more accurately, come to speak these inconvenient truths, in the waning days of his scandal-plagued administration, it should be noted that both he and the New York Times have reluctantly become proponents of the idea that peace in the region, and, ultimately, Israel's security, can only be achieved by the return of the West Bank - with small adjustments of territory excepted - to Palestinian control.

One international figure, it turns out, has been championing just this position for years, and, in spite of winning a Nobel Peace Prize, has met with much disdain from the American public and not infrequent accusations of antisemitism from the American Jewish community. That man, of course, is former president, Jimmy Carter.

In his 2006 book, "Peace Not Apartheid" Carter reviews the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict focusing his attention specifically on the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. He and, interestingly enough, the Labor leadership of Israel at the time of the hostilities, concluded that the occupation of Palestinian lands would inevitably interfere with Israel's aspirations to remain a Jewish state, one living at peace with its neighbors within secure borders. Carter's stance was a principled one, rooted in the system of international law that had come to maturity with the establishment of the United Nations following the devastation of the Second World War. His stance was also both a practical and a personally compassionate one, as well.

Sadly, the influx of North African Jews and refugees from the Soviet Union, helped transform the Israeli political landscape in the 1970s and brought to power a right-wing government that harbored ambitions for a "Greater Israel", a notion derived from Biblically-based claims that were never part of the secular, internationalist vision of the Labor Party founders of the Israeli state. Thus work was frustrated on further exchanges of land-for-peace, like the one between Egypt and Israel, which Carter had helped to secure with the Camp David accords and which he saw as model for similar agreements between Israel and other parties to the conflict.

Well, at long last, it appears that Carter's even-handed approach to resolving disputes in the region, often characterized unfairly as "pro-Palestinian" and irrationally as "antisemitic" by those who brook no criticism of Israeli policies, is finally being widely adopted. (Oddly enough, Carter's fringe point-of-view - fringe relative to that of his fellow Americans, that is - has long been considered centrist in western European political circles and well within the bounds of reasonable discourse within Israel itself.)

Carter has, to say the least, suffered the slings and arrows which come with staking out a principled position and defending it over a long period of time, in the face of withering and unwarranted personal attacks. He must be gratified finally to see an Israeli prime minister, even a departing one, affirming his own long-held prescription for an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

I, for one, I am grateful that Carter has stuck to his guns and has never stopped reminding us, as he did while he was president, that solutions to conflict must always be founded on a respect for human rights and that the rule of international law must everywhere be fostered and observed.

Given all that hangs in the balance in the Middle East and given the havoc wrought by an American administration which sees respect for human rights as discretionary and which regards international law often as no more than an impediment to their freedom to act unilaterally, it is now more important than ever to be reminded of Jimmy Carter's not-at-all belated truths.