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Tomgram: Elizabeth de la Vega on Shooting the Moon in 2006

Consider this latest piece by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, who writes regularly for Tomdispatch on the Plame case and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation, as my way of signing off with good cheer until the New Year. In our embattled American world, De la Vega suggests just the kind of optimism that seems both possible, and possibly fruitful, to adopt. This is about as close as I can imagine to an attitude, if not a politics, that I might stand behind. It's a way to think about 2006 with hope (of a sort) and even perhaps grace. I offer my best wishes to everyone who has read Tomdispatch this year, and especially to all those of you who have taken a few heartfelt moments to write in, even when critical, in a kindly and encouraging spirit. Thank you and have a good holiday. Tomdispatch will return -- count on it --! January 2nd or 3rd. Tom


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.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 11:09 PM