Summary: Watching TV news coverage of the opening of the George W. Bush presidential library tempted me toward an Elvis moment of shooting my TV, but while I had motive and opportunity, means were lacking. There are almost no words to describe the universe of contempt in which I hold George Dubya, his administration, and all their works. From the lies we were fed to support the invasion of Iraq to the divisiveness of his words and policies, right on through to the enthusiastic embrace of policies and practices that were, at best, hateful and un-American, I have nothing nice to say about George W. Bush, but find myself instead reduced to stuttering, spluttering, sputtering, splenetic, fulminant rage, the anger of which causes me to pile on the alliterative adjectives. During the eight bitter winters of his reign, and at his urging, America abandoned her view of herself as being “a city on a hill,” and instead joined the league of ordinary nations. Our national honor is in tatters, and I blame George Dubya Bush.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Writing in Facebook today, The Rev. Canon Susan Russell of All Saints Pasadena observed that she had found “all the news on the opening of the Bush Library very inspiring. It's inspired [her] to turn off the news and go fold that laundry [she’d] been ignoring on the top of the dryer.”
Reading Mother Susan’s post, I had to acknowledge a strong temptation when seeing the TV coverage of the event to want to pull an Elvis and shoot the television. Fortunately, while I had both motive and opportunity, I lacked the means. For want thereof, I found myself obliged to fall back on the default response of millions of Americans, and unburdened myself of a stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, splenetic, fulminant tirade, piling on alliterative adjectives, as if by heaping verbal abuse on my uncomplaining TV, I could in some way to communicate to George Dubya the universe of contempt in which I hold him, his administration, its personnel, and all their works.
It is not just that George Dubya and his administration lied us into an aggressive and unlawful war in Iraq. It isn’t just that he and his krewe blasted the top off the national debt, any more than that he and his minions chose to cheapen our political discourse in this country by governing to and in the interest of resentful white conservatives who feel themselves victimized every time an African-American has the temerity to sit at the front of the bus.
Names like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Viet Dinh, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle, to name just a few, have come to form a well known rogues gallery of neoconservative practitioners of what Time Magazine’s Joe Klein aptly described as “unilateral bellicosity.”
Indeed, so complete and systematic was the damage that George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers did to the national interest of the United States, that future historians may well find themselves asking whether George Dubya was even on our side.
Withal, the eight winters of George Dubya Bush’s tenure exerted in many ways a more corrosive influence on our American polity than most of us had encountered in our previous lifetimes.
George Dubya’s presidency seemed to be not only driven by a visceral desire to punish the United States for having had the effrontery to elect William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency in 1992, but also by a sense of privileged entitlement that played itself out brilliantly in the way George Dubya and his krewe managed to appeal to all of the worst aspects of American human nature.
Commenting recently on CNN’s coverage of the opening of the George W. Bush presidential Library, one anonymous poster observed approvingly that George Dubya had “punished the lazy and rewarded the industrious,” explicitly invoking Ayn Rand’s makers/takers narrative.
Indeed, the narrative that took root during George Dubya’s eight bitter winters was a simple, binary one. You were either a maker or a taker; you were “a loyal Bushie” or you were one of “them.” If you were a loyal Bushie, you subscribed to all the various harebrained notions to which the administration gave either explicit or implicit support, including climate-change denial, “intelligent design,” and the well-debunked notion that Saddam Hussein not only had had weapons of mass destruction, but that he had been the architect of the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001.
For 9/11 represented a godsend for an administration that, just months into its tenure was suffering a palpable crisis of legitimacy and popular confidence. While it might be a bit much to characterize 9/11 as a “Reichstag fire,” the Bush administration’s response to it was predictably paranoid and authoritarian. Watching Mr. Bush and his surrogates bang the drum for war and promulgate an insistent “if you are not with us, you’re against us” narrative left millions of Americans feeling an existential fear for the future of American democracy.
And if such fears may not have been misplaced. There is something fundamentally un-American about not merely using, but also celebrating, torture. The scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison not only embarrassed the nation but also damaged, perhaps irreparably, whatever support we had had among the communities of the Arab nation.
Indeed, the Bush administration managed to fumble the ball on Mideast issues within days after 9/11, when, in an address to Congress, Dubya described our effort to bring the terrorists to justice as “a crusade.” The word “crusade” may be unexceptionable in the zeitgeist of the Greco-Roman West, but in the Islamic community, it carries all manner of highly unpleasant baggage. Bush might as well have been channeling for Ann Coulter’s hyperventilating demand that we should invade their countries, “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
Such extremist talk, larded as it usually was by coded appeals to socially conservative evangelicals (sometimes known as “speaking Christian”) helped reinforce the right-wing narrative that American rightists were both a privileged people, God’s own elect, and also a quivering mass of victims under siege.
The concept of the privileged victim represents a unique and insidious form of cognitive political dissonance. It is a form of dissonance which George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers exploited brilliantly. Listen to an American conservative talk politics and you will hear on one hand a confident assertion of implicit (usually white or wealth-based or male) privilege, mixed with almost unbelievably whiny expressions of perceived victimhood. “They hate me because I’m white and wealthy and male and so they want to take all that away from me.” “I am a maker and all those takers are trying to victimize me.” “I’m straight and all those homos are gawking at me.” (Oh, please, honey! Not if you were the LAST man on earth!)
Indeed, so successful was George Dubya’s effort to build the base of militant, privileged victims that he was, to all intents and purposes, able to complete the transformation of our political culture that began in 1992, when Bill Clinton came to power and Bush loyalist heads began to explode. The Beltway Bourbons and Bush loyalists who took personally George H. W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 and the Gingrich “revolutionaries” of 1994 midwifed a new political culture of confrontation and insult. Where we had had a political culture of conversation and compromise, movement conservatives quickly embraced a new dispensation of taunts, bullying, and schoolyard insults. Listening to the sniping back and forth in Washington D.C. simply reaffirms the success of this new, childish dispensation in American politics.
Look at the way in which Americans inside the Beltway and beyond it in a more authentic America interact with one another. Instead of taking a moment to consider whether the other person in the conversation might have a point, we now default immediately to snark, insults, and general nastiness. Indeed, Clinton Derangement Syndrome and its current successor Obama Derangement Syndrome have led to excesses of which a prior generation of opposition-identified Americans would have been ashamed.
In early 2009, for example, when the International Olympic Committee chose Rio de Janeiro over Chicago to host the 2016 Games, conservatives throughout the United States cheered loudly, because Chicago happens to be Barack Obama’s hometown, and they certainly didn’t want anything good coming to the president’s hometown. I belong to a generation that was brought up to believe it shameful and dishonorable to root against your own country. Sadly, too many of my own generation seem to have lost touch with that basic patriotic truth.
For many of these enormities, I place the blame squarely on George Dubya Bush. The man epitomized, embodied, and personified the arrogance of privilege, of the callow frat boy who glides through life not his own merits but on those of his forebears.
He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the worst attributes of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism without displaying a single one of the redeeming features that kept bringing the British public back to the Iron Lady through multiple general elections.
He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the masculine insecurities of straight white-collar macho, with its ridiculous posturing, its penchant for calling people by demeaning names, and the swaggering, phony bonhomie that only reinforces the homely wisdom of American womanhood that “[straight] men are pigs.”
Worse, George Dubya Bush epitomized, embodied, and personified America’s self-sabotaging disdain for the life of the mind and for things of the intellect. To the extent that the man prided himself on being “plainspoken,” George Dubya Bush simply came across as foolish and tongue-tied. To the extent that he tried to dance around the question of whether Charles Darwin had been right, George Dubya came across as a bloody fool.
But finally, what makes the opening of his library such a rage-triggering event in my household is that for eight long winters, the honor of the United States of America was prostituted and ignored. On George Dubya Bush’s watch, this country embraced a whole passel of practices we had formerly eschewed, considering them dishonorable and unworthy of our ideals.
Under George Dubya Bush, we abandoned even the aspiration of being John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” and embraced, even eagerly, our descent into what West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has referred to as “the league of ordinary nations.”
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Riverside County Democratic Party, and they are certainly not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Angry Bush loyalists are free to vent whatever schoolyard insults they want, though they need to be cognizant of law of defamation in so doing.
