May the Road Rise to Meet You in the Face, You Treasonous Son of a Bitch

A couple of weeks ago I posted up a site that allowed you to post your goodbye letters to Bush.

This is mine: 

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

As you ride off into the sunset of whatever life is left to you, I find myself wishing many things. I wish, for example, that I believed in the afterlife described by my childhood priests, so that I could imagine the orderlies in Hell preparing you a bed. Which would be chained to the wall by the way, and you chained to it, as a hurricane bore down upon you.

I wish I believed in the courage of Congressional Democrats to investigate and prosecute the wrongs you directed be done in America's name.

I wish I thought we'd figured this out, and would be smarter the next time some shallow snake-oil salesman comes by to tell us government sucks and we should elect him so he can prove it. 

I wish I could cling to some notion of cosmic justice that would give you yours threefold back again, so that at least you wouldn't get to stand around and smirk that once again, you lazy, fratty asshole, you've gotten away with something.

Most of all, though, I wish you had been a better president. I wish you had done the job well. Contrary to the arguments made by your defenders, I didn't root for you to fail. I never did. I greeted your installment by the Supreme Court with exhaustion and resignation, and your first few months in office with general skepticism, but I never thought, "Boy, I hope he just falls on his face and kills a lot of people and wrecks our economy and blows holes in the sand for five years." I thought, "Maybe it'll be okay. Maybe it won't be so bad."

And when 9/11 happened I said to myself and those around me, Democrats all, "Well, let's see what he does now." My life has not been devoid of stories about unlikely heroes arising from feckless halfwit princelings, so I was prepared for that to happen. Hopeful, even. Who doesn't want everything to be okay? Who doesn't recognize that you being a terrible failure would hurt us far more than it would hurt you?

I wish you had done the job. I wish you had found and tried and executed Osama bin Laden, and rebuilt Afghanistan the way we should have decades ago. I wish you had given us real security, not this dance of removing our shoes and putting lotion in a baggie. I wish you had told us to conserve and sacrifice, not spend and eat. I wish you had listened to those in the armed forces and those in Congress and those on the street when they said, don't invade Iraq. I wish you had listened to Iraqis, afterwards, when they said, help us stop the looting and violence.

I wish you had listened to the Gulf Coast's people when they called out for help. I wish you had listened to the sick and their doctors when they asked you to grant research to cure their disesases. I wish you had listened to women when we said, we value our autonomy.

I wish you had listened to us all when we said we are more than this, we are better than this, ask us and there's nothing we won't give you. I wish you had had faith in us equal to that which we placed in you. And I wish you had been worthy of what we wanted from you, and from ourselves.

I wish you had done and been all of this, but you didn't and you weren't, and so what we're left with are the memories of the dead, the horrors of the living, with boarded-up houses and empty streets, a place so broken we barely recognize it anymore. It's hard to imagine punishment fitting for that. It's hard, having wished all this for you, to wish anything more, but I do:

May you live a life of quiet contemplation of every single one of your failures. May you live a life hemmed in by those you hurt, in a cell physical or otherwise, papered with the faces of your dead. May you be  sheltered from the rain of rotten tomatoes and sour heads of cabbage by a small, broken umbrella. May you be gnawed upon by the hunger you fostered in the poor, chilled by the cold from which you refused to shield the homeless, beset by the illnesses you refused to help cure, subjected to the indignities you inflicted upon others.

May your life be long, and healthy, and full of everything you gave to America and the world. May you come to know exactly who you are. May you come to recognize the face in the mirror each morning.

May it give to you a fraction of the nightmares you deserve.

No love at all,

A.

As we do bid Bush farewell, however, Echidne reminds us that it isn't just Bush to whom we need to say goodbye:

Of course the real blame must be shared. Shared by voters who wanted a leader who would never, ever change his mind for any reason whatsoever, and who confused that with leadership. Or voters who wanted a godly man as a leader, which turned out to be a man who thinks that god talks to him in private. Or voters who decided that they would never vote someone smarter than themselves into that office and that beer and hot dogs was the way to judge someone's suitability in leading the so-called free world.

The blame must also be shared by those in the Republican Party who let a fanatic and out-of-touch neoconservative faction take over all practical policies, thus turning them into one the greatest engineered social and political experiments of our times, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands (at least). That fanatic and out-of-touch neoconservative faction, with its free-market religion, also had its hands in kneading the dough from which our current recession was baked. So when we don't get our daily bread, remember why not and avoid that same mistake in the future.

And the blame must surely be shared by the Democratic Party, too, those who sat quietly, triangulated furiously and cowered helplessly in the shadows while trying to save their own political careers from oblivion. Never mind that the country itself has turned towards Oblivion on its arc through history.

Last but not least, the media (with few exceptions) has spent the last eight years pressing Bush's head against its collective bosom, instead of alerting us to the dangers of the heedless policies of the government. It took several major disasters for any of that to change. I hope the media stays on their toes and aggressive in the future, even though it will look as if Obama is getting a shabbier treatment than Bush did. Indeed, I hope that all future presidents will get a shabby treatment from the press, if by 'shabby' we mean a vigilant and critical stance.

An informed, engaged, empowered, energetic citizenry would not have allowed this to happen. Could not have allowed this to happen. I'm not calling everybody lazy; I'm calling the club of the most of us paralyzed, so unaccustomed to such staggering incompetence that when it came, all we found ourselves able to do was stand open-mouthed in shock at the brazenness of it.

And when the shock wore off, when it became "okay" to express doubt again, to express opposition again, to say things like Bill Maher and Natalie Maines said, well, by then it was too late, wasn't it? By then they were dug in, and those of us who did stand up, who did yell and scream, who did march and write and call, who did actually vote, especially in 2004, who did try to stop this from continuing, didn't stand a chance. Understand I'm not saying I'm not glad we did it, because people, on balance you're gonna get screwed anyway so you might as well act like grown-ups if for no other reason than you need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror in your cell, but we were pushing against the granite cliffs of the earth trying to move it, by the time we tried at all.

I hesitate to make lessons out of the Bush presidency. I don't think horrific things that happen are supposed to be assigned a purpose that makes them okay. That's cheap, and exculpatory, and gross, when those who truly paid for Bush's folly are still coming home in boxes, still trying to rebuild their houses, still learning how to walk again. I don't think I get to tell them, "Here's what you suffered for, this greeting card I'm about to impart." But if we do not learn, then why go on? Why keep working and fighting and marching and calling and writing if we do not change and grow and push upward?

If there is a lesson here, it is that hesitating, even for two seconds, in the aftermath of a crisis and granting extraordinary deference to those who we should always regard with skepticism, to hold back even for a moment, is to hold back too long. To talk even for a moment about political expediency in matters of lives and war, imprisonment and torture,  to talk even for a moment about it being unwise to speak out against injustice, to advise anyone even for a moment to hold his or her tongue because it would upset people, is to blight the soul of this country, no more, no less.

There have been examples of great courage in the past eight years. Examples that I cannot forget. I remember the week before the Iraq war began, and protesters shut down Lake Shore Drive here in Chicago, stopping traffic with their bodies to try to stop what was coming. I remember being jammed into the Cook County Clerk's office, covering the marriage equality march that had begun outside and ended with people sitting on the floor, holding hands, quietly insisting, "Marry us, or marry no one." I remember standing outside a polling place in 2004, having cast my vote for John Kerry, thinking, "This man has taken a lot of crap on our behalf and I do not feel like we deserve it." As it turned out, we didn't. I remember watching Richard Clarke testify before the 9/11 commission. I remember hearing Chris Dodd stand up against FISA. I remember readers of this blog slamming hammers into drywall. I remember Denver and Grant Park and Washington, DC. I remember this.

But the examples that will stay with me are those of great cowardice. Great hatred. Great fear. Smallness. Divisiveness. Rage. Contempt.

I remember watching, horrified, as Katrina struck on the Gulf Coast, and as Bush strummed his guitar and ate cake with John McCain. And I remember driving around in a van with Scout and Mr. A and the First Draft Krewe, around the streets I'd seen on television, two years after the storm, and I remember how quiet it was. I remember asking someone, are you allowed to take down the markings on the doors, that say if bodies were found inside the houses or not, and a man who lived there responded, "allowed?" and laughed, because there was no one to tell anyone the outlines of this world anymore.

I remember pulling a fax off the machine, at my newspaper, that said the Bush administration's legal argument in an INS case was that the judicial branch of government had no jurisdiction to "second-guess" the decisions of the executive in matters of national security. I remember handing it to a colleague to read, asking, "Does this say what I think it says?" I remember it being 2003, and nobody caring all that much that the administration was breaking the law. I remember it being 2005, and suddenly everyone discovered separation of powers and the administration's lawlessness, and I remember thinking, "This has been going on so much longer than you think it has." I remember that being the beginning of the end of it, for me, the end of being able to convince myself it was going to be okay.

I remember hearing Michelle Malkin and John Hinderaker call journalists murderers and terrorists. I remember Liberal Hunting Permits. I remember Rope, Tree, Journalist. I remember the Freepi calling me an ugly whore. I remember all the fights I had with people I thought were my friends. I remember all the fights I had with my family. I remember how it became okay to say that war heroes shot themselves, families of the dead were hookers and pimps, interfaith marriage was weird, gays and atheists were evil, poor people were whiners, and most of all how there was nothing, literally nothing, you couldn't say and get away with it, so long as it was meant to silence somebody trying to speak out.

The heroism doesn't erase that. It doesn't salve or soothe it. It doesn't make it okay, and you know why? Because we barely know who the heroes are yet. There are stories that haven't been told because they can't be and won't be, for years. My grandchildren will be hearing the recently declassified tales of all those who were silenced and stifled these long eight years, and coming home from school and saying, "Did you know?"

Did I know? No. I hoped. I believed. But I didn't know the full fury of what had been done in my name. These things stain forward in time, discoloring everything. We can't absolve anyone today. Bush may be getting on a helicopter and he may be flying away from us, but what he's leaving behind we hardly know about yet. I am not happy, today. I am not relieved, today. I am still enraged. I am still afraid. I am still jumping every time the national phone rings, still jerking away every time somebody reaches out, still sure that, like the last eight years, the next eight will be a trick of some kind.

If Bush leaves a legacy, at all, that is it: The after-image of fear and suspicion, like the ghost of a light bulb lingering in the darkness after you close your eyes, like a national retina burn. 

A.

Comments

[BuggyQ]

I'm hanging on to that anger as long as possible. Because I want to use it to drive myself to keep going, to fight the fuckwits who elected the sonofabitch in the first place. He may be gone, but they're still here, still capable of voting for another fuckwit down the road. I will NOT stand by like I did in 2000 again. I blew it then, and I have regretted it ever since. Maybe my efforts wouldn't have changed anything, but at least I would have had the comfort of knowing I'd tried.

I never want to feel like I felt in January 2001 again. Never again.

[CodpieceWatch]

While I would love nothing more to blame Bush and his supporters, I must also blame people like myself. While I didn't vote for him or cheer on the atrocities, I stood by while they were occurring. Oh sure, I wrote to my senators (what good does that do living in a red state?), signed every petition that came my way, tried like hell to get people to pay attention (which is impossible living in Utah Mormon Land), and and participated in a protest once. I don't know what else I could have done, and yet I don't feel I did enough - that any of us did, really. While I want to feel hopeful about Obama, I don't think anything is going to change really, given our current Congress. I'm afraid I am as disgusted with the Democrats (why did we get stuck with Reid and Pelosi, and how do we get rid of them?)as I am with the Republicans. We need term limits, campaign finance reform so average Americans can be considered for office, more than 2 political parties, and to do away with lobbyists completely. Until any of those things happen, Congress will not represent 'we the people', but instead will do things to forward their own agendas and those of their rich friends. Sad, really, that I have to feel guilty for doing nothing, when in fact there was nothing that I could have done that would have made a difference.

[BlakNo1]

Heck, my utter venomous hatred of Reagan still continues unabated after all these decades, and he's wormfood.

One thing Reagan didn't do though, was allow terrorists to kill thousands of Americans in the name of fulfilling a political agenda. At least he didn't do that.

[spocko]

BuggyQ and Blak1.

I hear you. And CodpieceWatch, I understand you.

Great piece A and E (Oh! A&E, that could be the name of a tv channel or something!)

One thing that I guess I want, that I think would make me feel better would be if I could find the supporters of Bush and then rub their noses in the failures of Bush and the conservative movement.

But then after their noses are rubbed in it they need to acknowledge they were wrong, change their ways, denounce the party and the movement and actively work to help others see the light. Kind of like Saul/Paul. (and I think that David Brock falls into this category).

What galls me is the insta-forgetting and the "Let's move on" with the SAME PEOPLE pontificating who got it all wrong.

One one hand I want to embrace positive things going forward but I don't want the people who go fat and happy for 8 years of attacking us and trashing the country to skip into the future without an understanding that what they did was wrong and they need to atone.

[virgotex]

And now this: W's gonna help out NOLA now that he's got the time.

http://tinyurl.com/8hooxv

[pansypoo]

meh. WHERE'S OSAMA?

[doog]

I have to THANK our outgoing president. He so thoroughly energized the entire left that politics has once again become fashionable and average people are talking about it. He swept away the apathy that has paralyzed the Dems for so long. Yes, we should praise this departing Caesar since his presence has wrought so much bad AND wakened the long-sleeping giant. America needed a good, hard kick in it's fat complacent arse and our soon-to-be-gone fratboy, in true bully fashion provided it. To see thousands of young people standing up, getting involved right alongside the 'old dogs' was inspiring to see. I hope this energy continues throughout this Presidential term and we re-elect Obama so we can right the ship of state... now that we've jettisoned the bilge.

[flawedplan]

I keep coming back to this, simply the most beautiful summation I've read.

[Aaaargh]

Fuck goodbye.

This asshole and his gang of loons installed hundreds of True Believers into lifetime judiciary appointments and countless thousands into civil service positions that are the next best thing to a lifetime appointment.

Obama will have his hands full with them subverting each and every thing he tries to do.

If this is goodbye, it's going to be one long goddamn goodbye.

[TehCrim]

So how long do we have left before everyone can find something new and shiny to hate and piss on? The Bush thing is pretty old.

[jessica]

you are truly stupid. go to hell. GOD BLESS BUSH! kick that obama out on his tushie so the next republican can come and lead the country! you all make me vomit