I took a stroll through the newly renovated Washington Square Park yesterday afternoon and was relieved to find things as they had once been: kids were playing in the fountain; folkies were banging on their guitars while conga drummers boogied to a different beat; and while the pot dealers were not yet plying their wares, they seemed to be waiting on the sidelines. The new grass (not that kind) was adorned with signs that read: ‘Passive Lawn: No Sports, No Dogs.’ Frisbee catching canines were a double no-no. Instead lovers and loafers were spread out on the sod in a tableau right out of Seurat. 

The whole scene was alarmingly tranquil — until the silence was broken by a high-pitched shriek and the cry of several bystanders. I looked to the branches above to see what the fuss was and was amazed to see a spectacle worthy of the Nature Channel taking place in the heart of Greenwich Village: A hawk had swooped down and grabbed an unsuspecting starling and, after a quick hop to another branch, was now feasting on the hapless bird with that predatory indifference that says: What are you looking at? 

When I got back to Brooklyn, cable news coverage was devoted to Obama’s speech — in which he tried to explain his increasingly contorted approach to the terrorist suspects at Gitmo — and Dick Cheney’s rebuttal, in which he warned (yet again) that anything less than torturing these people and locking them away forever would make make America less safe.

While it’s easy to say that Cheney is stepping into a void — the Republican Party has no leader now save Rush Limbaugh and no one else is rushing to defend the Bush war record — it seems that Obama is speaking from within a void of his own creation. After vowing to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Obama has hit resistance from his own party, in part because he has no plan for what to do with these Jihadists and in part because he is wavering in his commitment to break with the past. 

He called the climate that condoned torture and throw-away-the-key justice a “season of fear,” as good a description of the Patriot Act days as any. “And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists and citizens — fell silent,” Obama said. “In other words, we went off course.”

Though I like the fact that our new president can change his mind when presented with new information (and maybe some of these guys should be locked away forever), he is in danger of appearing off course himself. The Washington Post and the other major dailies cast the “dueling speeches” as “a national security debate” and there was a campaign feel to the back-and-forth, with Cheney gnashing his teeth and trying to scare people while Obama went for nuance. But as in the campaign, nuance may not play with the hoi polloi. They want to know: torture, human rights abuse — are you for it or agin it? If he appears too qualified he runs the risk of being eviscerated by the hawks, filled with terrible certainty, as citizens look on from the passive lawn below.