Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The end of a subprime administration
By Tom Engelhardt
quote from the world of Bush that caught the deepest nature of the president
and his core followers, it was offered by an "unnamed administration official"
- often assumed to be Karl Rove - to journalist Ron Suskind back in October
2004:
He said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based
community", which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality". I nodded and murmured something
about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the
way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality
- judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities,
which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
"We create our own reality… We're history's actors."
It must for years have seemed that way and everything about the
lives they lived only reinforced that impression. After all, the president
himself, as so many wrote, lived in a literal bubble world. Those who met him
were carefully vetted; audiences were screened so that no one who didn't fawn
over him got near him; and when he traveled through foreign cities, they were
cleared of life, turned into the equivalent of Potemkin villages, while he and
his many armored cars and Blackhawk helicopters, his huge contingent of secret
service agents and White House aides, his sniffer dogs and military
sharpshooters, his chefs and who knows what else passed through.
Of course, the president had been in a close race with the reality principle
(which, in his case, was the principle of failure) all his life - and whenever
reality nipped at his heels, his father's boys stepped in and whisked him off
stage. He got by at his prep school, Andover, and then at Yale, a C-level
legacy student and, appropriately enough when it came to sports, a cheerleader
and, at Yale, a party animal as well as the president of the hardest drinking
fraternity on campus. He was there in the first place only because of who he
wasn't (or rather who his relations were).
Faced with the crises of the Vietnam era, he joined the Texas Air National
Guard and more or less went missing in action. Faced with life, he became a
drunk. Faced with business, he failed repeatedly and yet, thanks to his dad's
friends, became a multi-millionaire in the process. He was supported, cosseted,
encouraged and finally - to use an omnipresent word of our moment - bailed out.
The first MBA president was a business bust. A certain well-honed, homey
congeniality got him to the governorship and then to the presidency of the
United States without real accomplishments. If there ever was a case for not
voting for the guy you'd most like to "have a beer with", this was it.
On that pile of rubble at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, with a bullhorn in
his hands and various rescuers shouting, "USA! USA!" he genuinely found his
"calling" as the country's cheerleader-in-chief (as he had evidently found his
religious calling earlier in life). He not only took the job seriously, he
visibly loved it. He took a childlike pleasure in being in the "theater" of
war. He was thrilled when some of the soldiers who captured Saddam in that
"spiderhole" later presented him with the dictator's pistol. (He really liked
showing it off," said a visitor to the White House who had seen the gun. "He
was really proud of it.") He was similarly thrilled, on a trip to Baghdad in
2007, to meet the American pilot "whose plane's missiles killed Iraq's al-Qaeda
leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" and "returned to Washington in a buoyant mood".
While transforming himself into the national cheerleader-in-chief, he even kept
"his own personal scorecard for the war" in a desk drawer in the Oval Office -
photos with brief biographies and personality sketches of leading al-Qaeda
figures, whose faces could be satisfyingly crossed out when killed or captured.
He clearly adored it when he got to dress up, whether in a flight suit landing
on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003, or in front of hoo-aahing
crowds of soldiers wearing a specially tailored military-style jacket with
"George W Bush, Commander In Chief" hand-stitched across the heart. As earlier
in life, he was supported (Karl Rove), enabled (Condoleezza Rice), cosseted
(various officials), and so became "the decider", a willing figurehead (as he
had been, for instance, when he was an "owner" of the Texas Rangers),
manipulated by his co-president Dick Cheney. In these surroundings, he was able
to take war play to an imperial level. In the end, however, this act of his
life, too, could lead nowhere but to failure.
As it happened, reality possessed its own set of shock-and-awe weaponry. Above
all, reality was unimpressed with history's self-proclaimed "actors", working
so hard on the global stage to create their own reality. When it came to who
really owned what, it turned out that reality owned the works and that
possession was indeed nine-tenths of one law that even Bush's handlers and his
fervent neo-conservative followers couldn't suspend.
Exit stage right
The results were sadly predictable. The bubble world of Bush was bound to be
burst. Based on fantasies, false promises, lies and bait-and-switch tactics, it
was destined for foreclosure. At home and abroad, after all, it had been
created using the equivalent of subprime mortgages and the result,
unsurprisingly, was a dismally subprime administration.
Now, of course, the bill collector is at the door and the property - the USA -
is worth a good deal less than on November 4, 2000. Bush is a discredited
president; his job approval ratings could hardly be lower; his bubble world
gone bust.
Nonetheless, let's remember one other theme of his previous life. Whatever his
failures, Bush always walked away from disastrous dealings enriched, while
others were left holding the bag. Don't imagine for a second that the
equivalent isn't about to repeat itself. He will leave a country functionally
under the gun of foreclosure, a world far more aflame and dangerous than the
one he faced on entering the Oval Office. But he won't suffer.
He will have his new house in Dallas (not to speak of the "ranch" in Crawford)
and his more than $200 million presidential "library" and "freedom institute"
at Southern Methodist University; and then there's always that 20% of America -
they know who they are - who think his presidency was the greatest thing since
sliced bread. Believe me, 20% of America is more than enough to pony up
spectacular sums once Bush takes to the talk circuit. As the president himself
put it enthusiastically, "I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol'
coffers." With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million,
Bush added, "I don't know what my dad gets - it's more than 50-75 thousand
dollars a speech, and [Bill] Clinton's making a lot of money."
This is how a legacy-student-turned-president fails upward. Every disaster
leaves him better off.
The same can't be said for the country or the world, saddled with his "legacy".
Still, his administration has been foreclosed. Perhaps there's ignominy in
that. Now, the rest of us need to get out the brooms and start sweeping the
stables.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial.The
World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire(Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative
history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published.
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