The Sketchy Rehabilitation of George W. Bush
The theory of history is that you should learn it to avoid the mistakes of the past,” billionaire David Rubenstein told an audience at The Washington Post Live yesterday morning. Citing the decline of history majors in the U.S. while plugging his new book The American Story: Conversations With Master Historians, he continued, “I think it would be better if we learned history.”
But on the Potomac not two miles away, in an art space that Rubenstein donated tens of millions of dollars to, hangs an exhibition that runs the risk of erasing one of contemporary history’s darkest moments: the invasion of Iraq and the killing of over 182,000 Iraqi civilians.
Former President George W. Bush’s paintings of wounded U.S. veterans are on display through today at the Kennedy Center, America’s premier tax-funded art space. Rubenstein, a private equity kingpin, has served as the Kennedy Center’s board chairman since 2010, and led the initiative to construct the Reach, a massive expansion devoted to contemporary art, performance, and film. The Reach carried a price tag of more than $200 million, achieved with help from the nation’s second-biggest defense contractor (Boeing), some unsavory governments (Qatar, the United Arab Emirates), and $50 million from Rubenstein himself. Bush’s works constitute the first show in the newly inaugurated space.
That an amateur painter such as Bush would lay claim to such a vaunted gallery has a whiff of cultural policy in a junta or autocracy. To have Bush’s Freudian enterprise on the walls of a new creative convening point suggests obvious preferential treatment for the former head of state; his wife Laura Bush is an honorary chair of the center.
Read more: https://prospect.org/power/sketchy-rehabilitation-of-george-w-bush/
(American Prospect)
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A million times over! 
