Morford on A New Hope(?)
San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford's column of today, titled "George W. Bush Gives Me Hope: The Astonishing Collapse of the Bumbling One Surely Means Healthy Change Is Imminent, Right?" (the links are Morford's, not mine):
Here's the good news: It really can't get much worse.
We cannot afford any more wars. The environment has been sold to the bone. The national spirit has been beaten like an Alaskan baby seal and the GOP has worked our last nerve, passed through the karmic blood-brain barrier, reached saturation to the point where even moderate Repubs and gobs of intelligent Christians are finally saying, Oh my God, what have we done, and how did it all go so wrong, and how much Prozac and wine and praying to a very disappointed Jesus will it take to fix it?
Which is why I'm here to tell you hope abounds. In fact, George W. Bush gives me hope. He gives me hope because he has led the country into a zone where the only way to go -- morally, spiritually, economically -- is up. Is out. He gives me hope because after it has all appeared so bleak and ugly and lost for so many years, it would now appear that all laws of karmic and poetic and moral justice still hold true. And how reassuring is that?
It is the eternal formula: When all is at its darkest, you cannot help but feel that some sort of transformational upswing must be just around the corner, one that maybe, just maybe contains the seeds of something resembling health and progress and revolution. Darkest before the dawn, baby, and don't you see the sky getting just a little bit lighter?
George W. Bush gives me hope. He gives hope because his narrow and myopic political ideology is right this minute being proved wildly unsound across the board, and his vicious leadership circle is revealing its true blood-stained colors and his party is crumbling at the center due to some of the worst policy decisions you will see in your lifetime.
Simply put, the collapse of BushCo represents the intrinsic unworkability of a war-hungry, thuggish ideology. It is the failure of the bully, the innate defect in any political philosophy that has at its heart dishonesty, and fiscal irresponsibility, and death.
See, Bush has run out of options, of mumbled half-excuses, and many in his own party are abandoning him as they fear huge losses in next year's congressional elections. Bush's nauseating pro-torture policies are appalling even his staunchest pals in Congress, not to mention just about every remaining international ally, and even "mastermind" Karl Rove is on the ropes and there appear to be no genius strategies to help Shrub recover. Yes indeed, hope drips from the boughs like honey.
I know, it ain't over yet. You could easily argue that there are three toxic years left and there are plenty of other countries we can vilify and invade (we'd be bombing Iran right now if we weren't fresh out of both disposable U.S. soldiers and cash reserves) and there will be plenty of opportunities in the next 1,000 days for Bush to suck up to his terrified fundamentalist base and cause even more damage as he hunkers down and pretends to know how to go about the business of running the nation.
But in many ways, it feels as though the most severe damage has been done (yes, Samuel Alito excepted), and there now appears to be a hint of a wisp of a spark of imminent upheaval. Can you smell it?
Do you feel the hope? Not yet? Look closer: It's been over four years now that the GOP has had it all locked down tight, the stranglehold to end all strangleholds, owned Congress and stacked the courts and shut down the media and demonized all voices of dissent and ran the president the way a pimp runs a prostitution ring.
No light escaped. They had masterminded one of the most brutal and mean-spirited and thoroughly effective subjugations of the American idea in 100 years, and it looked as though their power and reach knew no limits. It was astounding: No matter what atrocity or torture or war or violent abuse of nature, they would simply gloat and the media would cower and the people would merely look on, beaten and glazed and tired, and accept it as dark manna.
But now something has shifted. The iron grip is slipping, sooner and more quickly than any of the right's political architects predicted, surely sooner than Rove had strategized, far sooner than the 20-year master plan the GOP had in place.
What happened? Simple: The horrible policies, the lies and the lies on top of the lies (if "we do not torture" doesn't beat "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" as the impeachable B.S. of the century, we are lost) became just too much. The center could not hold. The atrocities are now paying their moral dividends. The GOP is now reaping what it has sown. Which is another way of saying: The system works.
After all, you cannot keep pumping junk food into the body and expect it to stay upright and functional. You cannot force so many toxins into the planet and not expect it to break out in rashes and pimples and heat waves and violent storms. Eventually, the body recoils. The spirit shudders and throws off. The disease runs its course and, barring any permanent scars and mental derangement, the fever breaks.
Look, I shall not argue that this hope, this light is coming from millions of people finally waking up to the progressive truth. I shall not be so foolish as to suggest that a grand anti-war pro-sex pro-intelligence happily spiritual but deeply nonreligious enlightenment is taking place. I am not so naive, and as I said, there are three treacherous years left. The reality is less pretty than that.
But there is a hint of a whisper of a possibility of a deeper change, of the pendulum swinging back, finally, to humanity and love and something resembling progress, which is more than we've had in five years, and certainly more than many of us expected, given the alleged strength of the GOP chokehold.
So thank you, George, for bringing such delicious sips of renewed hope. Thank you for reminding us all, through such a litany of painful and nauseating policies and lies, that the universe still repays such abuse with well-deserved slaps upside your aw-shucks head. You give us hope. Because as you and your administration careen and implode and sputter and stutter and fail, well, the world is only the better for it.
Mark Morford is one of those guys whom many suspect is gay but says he's heterosexual but should be gay if he isn't. He is among my influences where writers are concerned (my other influences include Ted Rall and Arianna Huffington). I will admit that my inspiration for my "BushCheneyCorp" was Morford's "BushCo"; since Dick Cheney is just as much a problem as Bush is -- if not more so -- and since Cheney's Halliburton is the No. 1 Vietraq War profiteer, "BushCo" seems lacking, and so I expanded it to "BushCheneyCorp." I like "Corp" better than "Co" because the word "corporation" these days pretty much means "evil entity" (and corporations have earned that reputation), whereas the word "company" remains fairly neutral. Thus, "BushCheneyCorp."
And great minds think alike: On Nov. 7 I wrote that Bush's claim "We do not torture" is "perhaps the biggest presidential lie since 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'" Morford makes that point in his column above. As I said, great minds think alike.
Anyway, I agree with Morford that the Bush regime is doomed.
However, a celebration is premature.
First of all, Americans have not had a Great Spiritual Awakening that I can see. They are pissed off about the price of gasoline and other economic matters. That's about selfishness and materialism and consumerism -- not about spiritual realization. Most Americans still don't seem to really give a shit that their nation's military has slaughtered thousands of innocent Iraqi cilivilians in the names of "freedom" and "democracy" -- in the name of Americans.
The United States of America never has been good at atoning. The U.S. has yet to seriously atone for what white conquerors did to the Native Americans (can you say "genocide"?) and to the Africans and their progeny, whom first were enslaved by rich white landowners and then routinely have been treated like shit even after the Emancipation Proclamation. So it's unlikely that the U.S. will ever seriously atone for the crimes that it has committed against the sovereign nation of Iraq, which never did anyfuckingthing to the United States. (Just because a country has a dictator doesn't make it OK to bomb the shit out of that country and then to occupy it. We Americans have a dictator named George W. Bush -- an unelected, bloodthirsty tyrant, an idiot, a hypocrite, a liar, a traitor and a war criminal -- but we Americans wouldn't be too fucking happy if Russia or China, say, were to "liberate" us of our dictator. [Well, OK, I might be... No, OK, all right, I guess I wouldn't...])
So I don't see a fundamental spiritual change in Americans.
They didn't give a fuck when the Bush regime launched its illegal, immoral, unprovoked and imperialist invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Indeed, at that time a majority of Americans supported the invasion. True, they had been lied to relentlessly by members of the Bush regime about Iraq's "threat" -- replete with warnings about "the smoking gun" coming in the form of "a mushroom cloud."
But anyone with at least an average IQ should have seen that the members of the Bush regime were lying through their fangs, that they wanted to invade -- and fully intended to invade -- Iraq no matter fucking what.
The reason that a majority of Americans supported the Bush regime's March 2003 invasion of Iraq, I believe, is that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- the common knowledge of which now is that neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq had anyfuckingthing to do with -- these Americans felt that the U.S. looked vulnerable and weak in the eyes of the world, and dropping bombs on Iraq would prove to the world otherwise. Nevermind that there was no logical, moral, ethical or legal reason to drop bombs on Iraq; we just wanted to kick someone's ass. And of course the fact that we chose as our victim a relatively defenseless victim shows that, when you really examine it, we're actually a bunch of fucking cowards. (I mean, when the hulking school bully picks as his victims the runty students, no one thinks of him as brave, do they?) Of Bush's three-member "Axis of Evil" (Iraq, Iran and North Korea), why do you suppose the Bush regime invaded Iraq? A: Because Iran and North Korea appear to be able to actually defend themselves, and can you really blame Iran or North Korea for wanting nukes now when Bush first named them in his hit list of three nations and then crossed Iraq off his list?
Anyway, the reason that the majority of Americans now oppose the Bush regime, I believe, is that with the shitty Bush economy they can't consume as easily as they could during the Clinton years.
It is Americans' spiritual retardation that allowed Team Bush to steal the White House in late 2000 and allowed Team Bush to start its bogus war on Iraq in March 2003 in the first place.
Because Americans' spiritual retardation is the root of the problem, until and unless the problem is solved at its root, we can't celebrate shit.
Yes, it's nice to watch Bush and the members of his regime go down in flames. However, as Morford points out, the members of the Bush regime, being evils piece of shit, easily could try to cause as much damage as possible on their way down and on their way out -- much like how Saddam Hussein lit the oil wells in Kuwait on fire as his forces withdrew from Kuwait during the First Bush Gulf War.
So no Ewok-like celebration that Evil Empire is dead, the Death Star exploded. Not yet.
I see no fundamental, basic, spiritual shift in the majority of Americans that is going to prevent another George W. Bush from seizing power sometime in the future. In fact, if you look at the series of our recent past presidents -- Nixon/Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush -- what seems to emerge is a pattern of Repugnicans fucking things up and then Democrats fixing things, or at least trying to fix things (hey, Carter tried).
We can be happy in the short term that BushCheneyCorp is crashing and burning, but in the long term will the pattern repeat itself? Will a Democratic president be elected in 2008, clean up yet another Repugnican administration's many messes, and then will the American people, forgetting how bad George W. Bush was, elect yet another Repugnican president, say in 2016 or 2020? (I suspect that a Democrat will be elected in 2008 and then re-elected in 2012.)
More succinctly: Will Americans ever learn?
We can hope.
Right now, hope seems to be about all that we have.
10:42:02 AM 
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