THE NOBLE CAUSE

-by Mags


At some point in George Bush’s teeny life, he learned that you never speak the truth. His father being a politician, and his mother... well, we know what a mess her beautiful mind can get into, have overwhelmingly affected George’s perception of truth. Children learn what they see and what they do. There is no doubt, that Bush throughout his life observed subterfuge at multiple levels.

Thus, little George became a grown up who had no real regard for truth, an adult whose sense of reality is rooted in pretend. Only the power and money are real. That little bit of bad parenting is troubling, but the problems with his upbringing do not stop there. There is the issue of permissiveness. When you are the president’s son, your mistakes are easily swept under the rug of the Secret Service, political favors, and threats to buy silence. Boys will be boys, don’t you know? Strike two against George, and would that it stopped there. But, neither George nor we could be so lucky. What we must remember is that George has spent a lifetime of never being wrong. Just ask Barbara.

In the world of parenting techniques it would be difficult to find a more destructive one. I call on average parents to remember the last child you came into contact with who was someone’s little darling who could do no wrong. My cousin was raised that way by my grandmother. Believe me, he was an annoying child, but a devious adult. Little indiscretions become large ones. When I met him later in life, he was a frightening human being. A friend of mine has step children who were raised the same way. As adults, nothing is their fault. Relationships are all their way, and reality is bent into their skewed version of it.

Strike three for our hapless president.

Consequently, we are the ones stuck with the spoiled child of George and Barbara Bush. No matter how much they love their son, his tantrums and short comings are not quite so endearing to us. The sheer numbers of human beings who have died at this man’s whims is beyond disturbing.

Daily we are subjected to lies presented to us as truth. Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. Brownie did a fine job. We must stay the course in Iraq to avoid coming to the conclusion that George Bush is capable of error, gross error, willful error. George does not make mistakes. No matter how many gyrations must be undertaken, he has enough power and money to hire professional liars like Tony Snow to cover for him.

There is no shortage of power seeking greed mongers who have had a similar path of least resistance to their own public candy store. Tom DeLay, already building a corrupt machine, was only too happy to help cover for W. He was just another overgrown maladjusted child who never did any wrong and whose sense of entitlement outgrew his ability in reality to keep up. Others have already succumbed, Abramoff, Cunningham, Ney....others to follow.

Karl Rove whose own troubled childhood should be a red flag, enables his cash cow. The money in the Bush piggy bank allows Karl free reign to manipulate and create a reality which now outpaces even his ability to stay astride.

The surreal nature of our dilemma-- and it is ours-- is how obvious it is. The surreal nature of this experience is that we are reduced to fear that the nightmare will continue unabated. Even though the mental illness at the top is apparent, we know the mechanisms are in place that would allow the insanity to overflow into the very streets of our cities and our towns. The cognitive dissonance we experience is excruciating as this fiasco plays out in the media. We come to the awareness that we have never seen this before. We have seen Nixon. We have seen Reaganomics, Bush the elder’s Iraq excursion, but we have never seen this (Thanks, Barbara and GHW).

We can only hope that this invasion known as the Bush presidency is in its last throes. Throughout the war in Iraq George claimed to listen to the generals on the ground, but they have one by one come forward to tell us that he listened to nothing. Many good people lost their careers to save face for the petulant child that many call Mr. President. The capable, have been dismissed.

Experienced law makers have been silenced by the bullies of the House and Senate. The side kicks of our deranged leader were all too happy to cover their own sins by furthering his agenda. They took a whole country to war. They invaded a sovereign nation. They covered up the truth as our citizens in military service died. And, they continue to deny the hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent men women and children who only offense was living in their homes in their own country. They were in the way of George carrying out his oil war, his daddy war, his show war for worship and adulation.

We are passing through a veil here. No longer can the media or the people declare that they did not know. What is happening now transcends the tricks and manipulation of facts. What we have now is the very public denial of what we have all seen with our own eyes as fact. The room grows silent. Our jaws drop. This is the sort of spectacle that hits us in the gut. We know it isn’t real. We know that everyone else should know it isn’t real. And, yet we also know that it is conceivable that we cannot stop it. But, we must stop it. We will stop it.

We are at a point in our American experiment when we must understand what is at stake. We must not only vote, but we must guard that vote and insist that it be counted. And, in the face of them not counting it, it is time for us to stand up and solve the problems that come with a leadership run amok. It is time for us to go to the polls. We must turn out the vote, but we must understand that it may take more than that.

How we solve the problem of George Bush remains to be seen. But, that he is a problem, a problem that is plunging this nation into the insanity of despotism is apparent. In a way it is frightening, but in another way it is freeing. The obvious nature of the problem helps us move beyond the sidelines and into the mainstream. We are now the overwhelming majority.

So, stand up and stretch. Straighten up your spine. Don’t hunch over those keyboards, sit up straight. And, by all means don’t even consider giving up now. The lights are on. The boogeymen can’t hide in the shadows anymore. The effort to restrain the beast, the spoiled child who is George Bush begins daily to look more and more like a noble cause.