Hologram Man: The Sad, Weird Twilight of George Bush
- From: ww <lbt006@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 19:30:01 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-eskow/hologram-man-the-sad-weir_b_102569.html
John Eskow
Hologram Man: The Sad, Weird Twilight of George Bush
Posted May 20, 2008 | 10:32 AM (EST)
I've been thinking a lot about George Bush lately. About those strange
tics and contortions he makes with his face, like a Neanderthal Man
playing Grand Theft Auto. About the fact that you and I still pay his
salary. And about what, exactly, his real job is. He's not "president"
in any meaningful sense; more and more it seems as if all his energy
goes into pretending to care about other human beings. And he used to
do a better job of that.
It must be a soul-crushing gig, this business of pretending to care;
of constantly being forced, simply for official reasons of state, to
pantomime concern about human life, about the death of innocent
people, about the education of children, about the hunger of the poor
-- to even act like you're paying attention to other people at all --
when in your heart you know better than anyone else that you're only
the designated front-man for a criminal business-syndicate. Sometimes
he must envy those actual mafia dons, of whom only a willingness to
murder and a minor flair for maintaining order is demanded. It's taken
a lot out of Bush, this awful burden of pretending to care; you can
see it in the way he moves, the way he stands -- so insubstantial now
as to be little more than a walking hologram, a man consisting only of
colored dust-particles floating around in the shape of a man. He's The
Hologram Man. Heh-heh.
Of course, there's mercy in being George Bush, too. It's a dull-witted
kind of mercy, to be sure, a kind of ignorance-is-bliss, permanent
opiate high. He will never even sense, for one millisecond, the
infinite well of disgust he creates in the stomach of every decent
American. He will stumble off into his own personal twilight as stupid
as when he started, building libraries as monuments to his own
illiteracy, scoring an endless string of six-figure speaking-fees for
scripted gigs full of dimwit one-liners. Sure, there'll be a few minor
blips along the way, like being universally reviled as the worst
president in American history; but Being George Bush means you never
have to know what you've done. And if by chance the cold fact of his
Absolute Worstness does penetrate, even for a moment? So what, screw
it, you were The Decider and other folks wasn't, and them's the
breaks. Heh-heh.
And for this -- for George Bush's ability to spit at history -- we
have our sterling American media to blame. The enablers. The ones who
put on tuxedos and gowns and cologne and false smiles and laughed at
his monstrous jokes about not finding weapons of mass destruction --
as if countless thousands of Iraqi bodies had not been ripped to
shreds by that stumblebum comedian behind the podium. The network
anchormen who foamed at the mouth with a soapy, patriotic froth when
their Big Presidental Man-Crush strode onto the deck of that destroyer
in fighter-pilot drag and told them the war was over. Looked good,
didn't I? And y'know what? They bought it! Heh-heh.
How could a man, even a simulacrum of a man, like Bush, grow so wildly
detached from all known reality? Lately, it's more like watching some
poor demented soul who thinks he's President than an actual head of
state. OK, granted, he never had much capacity for thought, that's all
too well-documented, but you would've thought he might've picked up a
few insights by now, if only by mistake, or by ricochet. But nope,
there he goes, making a speech again, stuttering over every
unanticipated word, clearly not even bothering to read his lines in
advance, knowing that he can just go out and wing it because the press
will always cover for him.
In a sane world, of course, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the others
would already be sitting in a funky courtroom docket somewhere in
downtown Washington, wearing orange jumpsuits with DC Jail emblazoned
across their backs. They'd have to ask a judge's permission to speak
or take a leak. And they'd be ordered to sit and take it while 4,000
American families stood right in front of them and gave their Victims'
Testimony -- as in any other murder trial, prior to sentencing.
But no. They'll just get richer, profiteering from innocent blood.
.
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