Last week, I got the chance to hear the president speak in person. To be honest, I have never to this point had any interest in being within spitting distance of George Bush (unless, perhaps, that access offered unfettered opportunity for loogie launching). But the speech was at the White House, which, sullied by his term or not, is still the White House. I mumbled something about respecting the office, not the man, as I cruised through the security gate.
I had little time to further my illusion. In the swamp-like humidity of a burning September DC day, I wormed my way through similarly excited people and edged about ten rows back from the president.
On a few occasions, I’ve brushed close to celebrity—shook hands with Michelle Obama, cornered poor Anthony Hopkins and made him sign an autograph, squinted bloodshot eyes at David Schwimmer in an airport. On all occasions, I have had the composure you might expect from a small-town Ohioian.
If I weren’t, by nature, such a silly person, it would be embarrassing.
So when I got to go to the White House, I assumed that regardless of who was standing at the podium, I would be riddled with nervous energy and some degree of excitement.
Instead, I was simply surprised by how small he looked.
Our president never spoke with the conviction of true leadership, never emboldened the best in people with the strength of his own character. Even at his height of popularity, he charged the country toward action (regardless of its moral justification or potential for disaster)—but he never inspired.
Now, when he is openly hated by so many; when the economy is crumbling and even the wealthy wonder what we’ve gotten ourselves into; when the war rolls on with some success (measured in drops in casualty rates, not the bribes we pay to keep it that way); when collectively, we hold our breath to be rid of him, finally, he looks as broken as he has made all of us feel.
The president’s speech itself was unarousing and included a brief mention of his dog Barney that only delivered pitiable laughs after an uncomfortably prolonged pause, with the president desperately, expectantly, awaiting approval.
When the speech fluttered near policy recommendation, his pleas for federal funding of faith-based organizations left my head light as my boiling blood drained into a familiar knot of anger in my stomach. The speech ended with a blunted, mis-delivered conclusion, and then Michael W. Smith took the stage and strains of his Christian brand of easy listening music echoed across the White House lawn.
As those standing around me broke collectively into the wavering chords of “Friends are friends forever, if the Lord’s the Lord of them,” I recognized that my special day of political revelry could quickly disintegrate into an alter-call. I disentangled from the crowd to pace uncomfortably in heels across an empty section of the lawn.
Everything has been so focused recently on the election that up til now I have tried to black out the reality of George Bush. My years of rage have simmered, then cooled into a solid space of disappointment.
But George W. Bush deserves much more than that.
It reminded me of the absolute and justifiable rage we all should still be feeling.
I imagine that if I had scooted 10 rows forward that day at the White House, had even gotten to look the president in the eye, that I still couldn’t have stomached speaking to him. He looks so damaged, and I hope that this is a result of remorse for the breadth of his bad decisions. But I recognize that unpopularity can have a similar draining effect on those who focus their best insight on personal needs.
Not to mince words here, the president’s speech pissed me off and Michael W. Smith irked me bad. Admittedly, I have a certain sensitivity for public displays of religion. Despite my discomfort, Bush’s blending of the fundamentalist and political spheres has been the least of our problems.
School children can’t read and the standardized testing system is forcing more of them behind. Those who make it to high school then give up, drop out and often go to jail. The good ones struggle with minimum wage jobs, and spend the rest of their lives squeezed by poverty, wringing dimes paycheck to paycheck.
Abroad, our troops and thousands and thousands of innocent people die in a boondoggle that will forever spiral between chaos and disaster.
Our land of liberty sanctions torture.
Our people end up homeless, broken, sick and go untreated, while every promise of a great nation is dangled before us. The dream is still there, but only actualized for those who could get there on their own.
And as of late, we’ve let politics become reduced to squabbles about silly analogies and what it means to put lipstick on pigs.
Well, as a nation, we have certainly painted over the ugliness of this one. In broad strokes that really measure how desperate we are to move on, we talk change. It is as though so often hearing “we need change” has had a certain sort of numbing effect. Thirsting for new leadership, we’ve forgotten the moral drought that got us here.
We’ve not yet stared down the dark nature our president has come to personify, or what it means that he has represented us without an overwhelming protest.
Rather than oust or even debate, we have resorted to ignoring Bush into the cobwebs of those histories we’d rather forget.
And the details, the gory mess of his time in the White House may well be forgotten. But for the families who have lost young soldiers in their prime, the people who have been criminalized for their Muslim faith, those whose city flooded and were left to starve, others who have lost homes to foreclosure, and the rest of us who have come to sink into the reality of collective guilt and culpability—his legacy will live on. Bush will be remembered in the lasting damage he’s left in his wake.
The Bush Doctrine, for all its recent press, deserves a bit more reflection than its puzzling of Sarah Palin. Attack first, think through the consequences later is a dangerous MO in war. But the president’s blind storming of the globe deserves a proper postmortem. With the tragedy of Bush’s reign awash on all our hands, I would love to spray a bit back into his dull, lost eyes.
