It Was So Much Easier with George W Bush

Earlier this summer, I was having coffee with an old friend of mine, and the conversation turned to American Presidents. I remember specifically when he asked me to compare George W. Bush and Richard Nixon. A few years ago, at the height of the second Iraq invasion (the ‘successful’ one), I would have put them on about the same level. But now, I’m not so sure.

Through the twisting webs of facebook, I discovered a blog post on Psychology Today written just after the Republican National Convention meeting officially ratifying John McCain and Sarah Palin as their Presidential nominees. Despite a hopelessly provocative title, the post described a high quality study of what psychological traits were most common among conservative thinkers. The study discovered paranoia, fear of death, fear of change, intolerance of ambiguous situations or answers.

It actually made a lot of sense to me. I no longer see a firm disconnect between one’s personality and one’s political beliefs. One’s political attitudes are shaped by personal thoughts about what people are, and how different groups of people interact. So the conservative thought patterns of hostility to foreigners, anti-pluralism, conformity, the retention of the status quo despite inequality, poverty, or counter-productive economics are the political articulations of these personalities.

I’ve been thinking about W lately because American conservatives today are so very different from him. When I compared W to Nixon in that conversation, I realized that W actually wasn’t so bad. He surrounded himself with advisors who brought out the worst in some of his policy positions, like the invasion of Iraq for the sake of ‘democracy.’ But W actually believed in democracy. He believed Islam was a religion of peace, having met people in his alcoholism programs who healed themselves through faith in Allah, while he chose Jesus.

And W understood that the repressive governments of the Middle East provoked the very radicalism they fought so violently. Of course, he completely screwed up any possible success he might have had, because the Iraq invasion was a ham-handed piece of political idiocy operated at almost every level by morons. But he was doing it for democracy, or at least that’s what he always believed.

What Cheney believed was another story altogehter.

W was never anti-immigrant in the racist way a lot of major conservatives are today. In a recent article on The Daily Beast, they quote W from his days as Texas governor speaking about Mexican illegal immigrants in a humanizing way. W understood that Mexican immigrants were sneaking across the border because Mexican workers are egregiously underpaid, and that jobs in the USA would bring much more income back to their families. It’s a far cry from Jan Brewer’s paranoid shrieking about invasions of Mexican coke mules onto every suburban street corner in Phoenix.

What fascinates me about W are the contradictions and paradoxes that inform his personality. He was a political idealist at the centre of a corrupt administration. He saw the good in many people, even though his campaign machine was based around polarizing Americans and provoking conflict among them. His universals were black and white, good and evil. But when you sat down to talk with him as a singular person, he listened and tried to understand.

The real tragedy is that the hateful American conservatisms on the rise are so much more poisonous and poisoned than the poster boy for twenty-first century conservatism. Enjoy your retirement, George.

The Love of Richard Nixon

A conversation I had last week reminded me of how much I really hated Richard Nixon. My friend Jeremy and I ended up discussing politics, particularly the policies of various US Presidents. I expressed my somewhat ambivalent opinion of George W. Bush: If it had not been for September 11, he would never have been able to invade Iraq, would have passed immigration reform, and go down in history as a moderately successful one-term President. I have more respect for the person Bush had the potential to become, rather than the person that the situations of his time made Bush.

There was also a pretty funny joke about how William Henry Harrison probably should be left off any qualitative ranking of US Presidents, as he was dumb enough to die of pneumonia within a month. And I learned quite a few interesting and unsavoury things about Andrew Jackson and what could have been the Five Nations Autonomous Indigenous Region in the state of Georgia.

Then Jeremy asked me about Nixon. An initial comparison to Bush was possible, but I quickly dismissed it. Bush jr may have done some awful things in office, and made some terrible decisions. But I still believe that he was doing what he thought was best, and that he is actually a genuinely morally decent individual, at least regarding intentions.

Richard Nixon never made a decision that was not driven by resentment, spite, and hatred. He ran the Presidency as a personal fiefdom, purposely setting out to ruin and destroy anyone who opposed him. He took every political conflict personally. He was the major political motivator in crushing the liberatory ideals of the 1960s, if not in direct causation, then in inspiring and organizing the conservative, reactionary vanguard against them. If he had been elected in 1960 instead of Kennedy, he would have done what Curtis LeMay told him and started a nuclear war with Russia that would have destroyed at least half the Earth.

There has never been a democratic leader in the West more harmful to his people and more disgraceful to the status of his office than Richard Milhouse Nixon. I said to Jeremy that I don’t believe in God, but if there is a God, I hope that he invented a special hell worse than any that had already been established, to send Nixon to. He would probably have been strapped to a chair and forced to hear Allen Ginsberg poetry, recitations of atheist humanist essays, and Doors records for the next billion years before behind annihilated, dispersed into the sweet release of entropic oblivion.

What I'll Miss About George

George W Bush had his last press conference as President of the United States today, and his entire paradoxical fascinating character was on display. The man and his life is unequivocal proof that consistency has no place in political, social, or ethical philosophy. My own wish for sane government in one of the most powerful countries in the world makes me glad that he's gone, and that someone with as much potential as Barack Obama is replacing him next week. But one thing is clear: There will never be another person like George W Bush.

What I'll miss most about him, though, aside from the intriguing paradox of his own career and personality, is how funny he is. He's one of the few American presidents who have introduced a new word to the English language: Bushism, for that peculiar, yet sometimes savant-like, fumbling of speech. I think my favourite is "There's an old saying in Tennessee that says, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . you won't get fooled again." Maybe it's just because I'm a Who fan.

I still say, perfectly seriously, that all most people want to do with their lives is to be able to put food on their families.

And let's not forget, he breaks new ground when it comes to terrible dancing.



We certainly did misunderestimate him.

Moments that Define an Entire Life

I was going to write a slightly more date-appropriate post about this on September 11, but I never had time on Thursday, so I'll be late. When those buildings actually fell down, my mind was quite literally blown. It was an inconceivable event happening right in front of me, and I was swept up in the moment. I wasn't swept up to the point where I believed what the Bush-Cheney Administration eventually said about Iraq. But there was a moment where everything I thought about politics, society, and possibly ethics changed completely.

I was watching on live television a few days after the attacks when George W was touring the rubble at Ground Zero, and he was giving a sort-of-impromptu speech through a megaphone, a series of fairly mundane platitudes that are barely memorable. A male voice shouts just loud enough for the microphones to pick it up, "We can't hear you!" George shouts back through the megaphone, "But I can hear you!" And the crowd goes wild, and I went wild. That answer was worth more all the next four years of speeches about security and safety. Those speeches showed the incredible hypocrisy of Republican policy regarding global security, and their outmoded, foolishly simplistic moral approach to the world, "Axis of Evil" concept included.

But for that one moment of connection, of calling and answering, George W Bush amazed me. For at least a few days in September 2001, I supported George W Bush because of the power of this moment. I was astounded that this idiot could understand the transformative power of this moment. That one exchange I think was the greatest point of George W's entire presidency. I don't consider it hyperbole to say that September 11 and the immediate aftermath in New York is a single event that defines me as a person more than any other.

I have since realized that George W Bush is still an idiot, still misguided as to the nature of the world, still insular, and still barely able to think. Yet he remains a fascinating character, probably the most fascinating person in American political history of at least the past hundred years. I think George W Bush the person will be the focus of mesmerized scholars, historians, students, politicians, truck drivers, bureaucrats, activists, ministers – pretty much everyone who bothers to look – for centuries. How did this drunken lout become the president of the United States of America? How did he feel being the public face of Dick Cheney's disguised dictatorship? Did he even know he was a patsy?

This is why I'm looking forward to Oliver Stone's new film, W, which seeks to tell the story. The trailer is mesmerizing, and the film looks like a genuine exploration of this man. Stone's politics veer left, and so do mine. But I don't think politics is really the driving force behind this film W. Instead, it's that question from the trailer – Why this man? Of all people?


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Here is a moment of pure professional jealousy. Hanging out in a hotel room are various music industry people in 1965, including Donovan and Bob Dylan. They're talking and smoking and decide to trade songs. Donovan sings one he's working on, a nice enough little song. Then Bob Dylan sings "It's All Over Now Baby Blue." You will rarely see a face that seethes with more resentment than Donovan's listening to that song follow up his own.


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A small update since my post last week about the St John's music scene. In an article on the AE Bridger band in the first Muse of the semester, they discuss exactly the same problem that the structure and geographical isolation of Newfoundland creates for a working musician.