History Is The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

[seafan]

History Is The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

By David Michael Green
August, 24, 2007

We’ll never know whether Germanicus, the highly accomplished Roman general, was mortified by the actions of his spawn, the insane and insanely destructive emperor Caligula. Or whether he was even more humiliated that, on top of that particularly notable contribution to imperial history, his grandson Nero would later strive valiantly to best the family high-water mark for sheer degenerate depravity. We won’t know because Germanicus had the good grace or the good fortune to die before either of them came to power.

Not so George H. W. Bush. He’s still very alive, and there’s little he can do to avoid the shame of having fathered the boy who nearly ruined America, and may yet still do so in his remaining 17 months as the country’s emperor. Back in the day, of course, the shamed father would have removed himself to the garden shed or some other suitable location on the family compound and "done the right thing" to avoid the stinging stigma of responsibility for a mess now so large it makes the Exxon Valdez look like a stopped-up toilet in comparison. But I guess Poppy finds denial a more convenient route.
The Bushes and the Walkers, and certainly any fool dumb enough to carry the moniker George Herbert Walker Bush, are the bluest of American blue bloods. And so it is tempting to think that they have always been so completely in it for themselves that it doesn’t much matter to them that their progeny has single-handedly almost wrecked a republic two-plus centuries old, and one, moreover, that is the reigning great power of its day. As long as they can check out at the Carlyle Group cashier’s window on their way to Dubai, who cares if a country of 300 million goes down the toilet? .....
My sense, honestly, is that Poppy Bush is many things – with most of them on the political and fatherly fronts more than a little distasteful – but that he is nevertheless also a believer in America and a patriot. If so, ouch. That’s gotta hurt. Because that means he cares about the country, he believes in its tropes, and he must know at some level, a level hard to suppress sufficiently deep enough, that he is the guy who gave the world the guy who is wrecking it all.
In fact, we know he knows, because it was revealed in a recent New York Times article that people walk up to him all the time and say how much they appreciate and like him, but, um, er, uh, like what the fuck happened with your kid, man?

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And then there’s Boy George, himself. Clearly, he too has got the denial thing down to a fine art. No doubt a lifetime of practice will do that for you, especially when the stakes are so high. When you’re the black-sheep clown-prince child of a father and grandfather whose lists of business and political accomplishments (however skanky) run from here to China (pun intended), you better at least be excellent at fooling yourself, since you can’t accomplish anything else that remotely compares. The other alternative, honestly acknowledging what a disaster you are, is too horrible to contemplate. Most people don’t have the constitution to take a blow that big and get up off the ground again, least of all this perfectly pampered perennial punk of perpetual perfidy (Agnew lives!).

And, actually, such self-deception is not really all that difficult to pull off, especially when you’re president. What you do is surround yourself with people who always tell you what you want to hear, and then scream at and humiliate anyone who ever strays even slightly from that path. That will take care of just about everyone who’s a Republican (except for some of those selfish careerists in Congress who oddly value keeping their jobs over reinforcing W’s fantasy world, but they bought the whole package long ago, and there’s no going back). And, of course, for the odd staffer like Colin Powell or Christie Todd Whitman who are strangely only willing to bend over nine-tenths of the way, there remains the defenestration defense. There aren’t too many problems that a well ventilated room on the tenth floor won’t fix. Anyhow, then you make sure that you only speak at events with pre-selected sycophants and Kool-Aid Drinkers in attendance, or military personnel unable to candidly address their commander-in-chief. You also want to scare the crap out of the press (easily done) so that they’re afraid to ask you any questions even remotely relevant or challenging, and then do the same with the Democrats (even easier), so that they never seriously challenge your authority or power, even when your job approval ratings are in the mid-20s. And finally, hire Dick Cheney to always be around reminding you what a bad dude you are. Plenty bad man. The very baddest of the bad. That’s what Dick says, anyhow.

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"Patriotism", so Samuel Johnson famously argued, "is the last refuge of scoundrels". Turns out he was wrong. It’s actually the second-to-last. Without question, we’ve seen a lot of scoundrels these last years, a lot of scoundrelism, and a whole lot of the use of patriotism as a refuge from the fallout to these scoundrels’ scoundrelism. And for four or five years, it actually worked pretty well. Problem is, it’s worn mighty thin, and something else is now required – a last, last refuge of scoundrels.
Enter history. What a perfect alibi. The only one potentially better is religion – this nightmare has been god’s will all along, doncha know? But most Americans aren’t yet angry enough at their deities to buy that one, though it has already been discreetly run up the flag pole more than a few times. Hardly anybody saluted, though. Quite a few hurled. So that leaves history instead, which – like religion – has the wonderful attribute of complete unfalsifiability, at least in this lifetime.
Here’s how it works. The public, world opinion, historians uncharacteristically willing to comment before a half-century has gone by, even members of his own party – they’ve all got it wrong. Only George W. Bush – you know, the guy who got gentleman’s Cs in college, the guy who spent forty years as a drunk, the guy who invaded a deeply divided Muslim country without knowing that there even was such a thing as Sunnis and Shiites – only this wise seer across the millennia got it right. Only this prophet (or is it profit?), unheralded in his own time, this erudite scholar of Big Picture History, was able to see this biggest of big pictures.

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"Couldn’t I just buy some historians?", W is no doubt wondering. Don’t doubt that the thought hasn’t more than once crossed the mind, such as it is, of this ultimate child of privilege, who has had everything in his entire lifetime handed to, if not stolen for, him.
Indeed, perhaps they’ve already begun the process. After all, there are a whole lot of "scholars" at the Heritage Foundation and similar institutions who will soon be badly in need of some work, now that their previous theories have crashed and burned and angry lynch mobs will soon be prowling the capitol, on the hunt for regressives foolish enough to have strayed from the rapidly thinning herd.

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[seafan]

1. More

From Green's very incisive piece:

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Beyond the many disasters enumerated on the very partial list above, he has essentially four arguments by which he believes that his presidency is ultimately vindicated. None of these, of course, are legitimate, and three of them are minor league (Bush League?) anyhow, compared to the fourth.

One is that he delivered a great educational package, No Child Left Behind, and in so doing reformed America’s ruined public system of pedagogy.
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Bush’s second great claim to fame is that his tax cuts (actually tax transfers – from the wealthy to the rest of us, and from this generation to the next) have created a robust economy during his tenure.
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A third ‘success’ that the administration claims, rightly so, is that they’ve loaded up the federal bench with as many über-class legal neanderthals as they could find.
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But at the end of the day the Bush presidency has really staked its entire reputation on just one claim, a fact that even they might admit to. This is the "war president", remember?

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That said, it is more clear than the space between Bush’s ears that the administration has been a complete failure on this front. The big bad guy and his pals who supposedly did 9/11 roams free to this day, six years after the attack. Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan is going the same direction as that other war. The US military has been crushed in Iraq, a country which had as much to do with 9/11 as did, say, Kyrgyzstan or Burkina Faso, and which posed the equivalent (non-)risk to American security. Our border patrol is so vigilant that a known carrier of tuberculosis can waltz right in. Our ports and chemical and nuclear facilities remain almost no less completely vulnerable than they were six years ago, because the industries’ desire to avoid spending a nickel on security bests all other government priorities. Our alliances have been left in tatters by an administration whose arrogance was only ever trumped by its hubris. Our friends in China and Russia laugh at their good fortune to have keystone cops for rivals, watching as we shoot ourselves simultaneously in both feet with an insanely massive arsenal, while they rapidly rise in economic and military – and therefore also political – power.

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Bob Woodward once asked Bush, "How is history likely to judge your Iraq war?" His response? "History, we don't know – we'll all be dead."
Notwithstanding that this is perhaps the most honest sentence ever to pass across this sorry Caligula’s perpetually lying lips, he might also have mentioned, while he was at it, that one hell of a lot of us are already dead because of his lies and aggression.

Like about a million Iraqi civilians, so far. And counting.

Yeah, you’d think he might have mentioned that part. Unless you’re the Bush administration, that is, for whom not counting is just yet another way of lying and aggressing.

Welcome to History, regressive style.