I didn’t think that it could get worse than Reagan, telling us that the way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons was to make more of them. That trees caused air pollution. Phoning in his scripted one liners that substituted for speeches. And of course, trading weapons in return for the release of prisoners, letting others take the blame, then denying it to his death. But I was wrong, it could get worse.
A life long second banana/yes man in the person of George Bush Senior, sincerely tried and always failed to relate to non millionaires. A competent servant with no one to serve made an incompetent leader. A painful public speaker who puked on himself while scolding the Japanese for making better cars then we did. Take that!
Could it get worse? Well yes but in different ways. Bill Clinton was a likable and bright guy who could lie his way out of almost anything. Almost. In the end, just an ambitious redneck who couldn’t keep his dick out of places it didn’t belong. He simultaneously undid his pants and his career. A politician and lawyer from the sticks of Arkansas, should we have expected something else?
Could it be more embarrassing? The answer is so much more so that no one could have ever seen it coming. George W. Bush’s rise to power was almost as amusing as Chauncy Gardener’s in Being There. It would have been that good if it weren’t for the facts that he wasn’t as innately wise or charming as the imbecile Chauncy, and that it was really happening. He rose to the top like a turd in a swimming pool, everyone getting out of the way and no one trying to stop it. A malicious cretin, a consummate, serial failure without a conscience whose only purpose was to win his father’s approval. “He tried to kill my dad” is still the only statement about why we went into Iraq that has any resonance with the ring of truth. Economic collapse for the country, epic scale profit for the oil industry, mission accomplished indeed. The civilized world doesn’t like us? I guess they just hate freedom. “Elected” to two terms, this is the meaning of shame.
So now the biggest mess in history is laid on the desk of a true leader, one with a brain and a conscience and perhaps the ability to affect real change for the better. I greatly admire and respect Barack Obama. I’m glad he’s in office but I will reserve my pride in America for the days when things have truly begun to turn around as a result of mostly sensible and sometimes daring policy. As for now, the best I can come up with is a slightly decreased sense of embarrassment at being a citizen.
Something to think about on the fourth of July: This country was built with high ideals, ingenuity, slave labor, and genocide of the natives. Our independence from England was strictly legal. We held and still hold tightly to the racism and classism that built that empire. I think we’ve done well so far, considering.
A pox on all the advertising that appears below this post. Someone seriously wants you to fly Air France. Great idea. At least we know that they'll spare no expense looking for your body. Perfoming their due diligence. Just stay home.
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Comments
I won't take up the other issues that interest me here. I have seen your face! :)
I'm within you on the Bush 43 critique. If anything, you've understated the ridiculousness of it. Just today, I was talking to my wife about the issue of slavery enshrined in the original documents of the nation, and I was referring back to my blog post from April on heroism in which I remarked on the “messiness of heroism” and the fact that heroes are people that do well even at the risk they don't solve a complete problem, they may just be able to make it better. Or they may just be able to try. The point is their decision to do so is often not able to consider a perfect score as an option. Bush 41 was someone I disagreed a lot with politically, but I have great respect for his decision not to pursue “Saddam” because he willingly took heat for seeming incomplete on the matter, yet he really did all he could do. Bush 43 was not willing to quit, but the cost of his attempt was high. (We don't even know yet how successful it was in military terms, but it veritably bankrupted us in economic terms, and that lost the cold war for the Soviet Union, so that's no small detail.) I regard any criticism of the founding documents as either creating, endorsing, or perpetuating slavery as not telling the complete story. The institution existed regardless, and they put in place a system that ultimately overcame it because they believed (we hope correctly) that there was power in a democracy. We have seen, in fact, the strengths of democracy over the years. As we address things like climate change and a gigantic national debt, we'll find out how resilient democracy is, or whether the desire of the people to vote out people who tell the truth will prevail.
I mostly agree with what you wrote about Obama, including that he is a real ray of hope, and yet all the results are not in. Still, in relative terms, I am as close to 100% sure as one can get in a world where nothing is ever certain that we are better off with him than we would have been with McCain. And so measured against that, I think Obama's doing fine.
I have a few other thoughts that will follow shortly.
I largely disagree with the thrust of your last paragraph, particularly the penultimate sentence. (I nevertheless concur with the final sentence, in the sense that I might utter those literal words sometimes, but the things I'd be “considering” would not be the elements alluded to earlier in that same paragraph.) I think one should be careful about attaching emotional intent to groups of people. Individuals have thoughts and reasons, groups only have formalized decision procedures for pragmatically selecting among often-conflicting points of views held among the individuals of the group.
Our laws offer considerable protections from racism, even if those laws are difficult to apply. As a country, as a matter of policy, we are not racist. Is it widespread? Yes. Does that mean more people are racist than not? I doubt it. But it needn't be a majority position to be regarded as common. Still, there's a big difference between saying that "a lot of people do X" and "we hold tightly to X", since the latter sentence might be regarded as a statistical observation or might be regarded as a collective intentional state of mind. I don't think the latter is true, and I would urge you to avoid wording that might be misconstrued by those with a motive to disparage the US and to claim that even US citizens agree. The US system specifically tolerates repugnant points of view out of protection so that if the country ever falls into the wrong hands (some of us would say Bush 43 and Cheney are an example, but I think I mean even worse hands than that), it doesn't become a crime to say things against it just because those people might find statements against themselves to be repugnant. So to say that some people hold to ugly points of view is to say the nation is working well. Of course we hope that actions will be dealt with, but see my piece What is a Right? for an analysis of the complexities related to that.
Classism is more complicated since it's harder to define and address, but in fairness there probably isn't a society on earth nor one you can build in practice (not just in theory) that doesn't have some degree of classism in it. I think that's about human nature. So I'd be careful about attributing it as an ill of the US specifically.