Mistakes Were Made
Subject: Author Jane Smiley on Bush
This excerpt expresses exactly what I believe about the legacy that George W. Bush will leave for the American people.
By Jane Smiley
1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. No degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no longstanding friendly intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no essential importance (Tony Blair, American voters) makes any difference.
There is nothing you have to offer that makes Bush want to know you once you have come to disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a world entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush. You are now just one of those "polls" that he pays no attention to. When you were on his side,you thought that showed "integrity" on his part. It doesn't. It shows an absolute inability to learn from experience.
2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by hishandlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is indifferent to whatyou now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure and a quagmire? Bush
doesn't care. Is global warming beginning to affect us right now? So what. Have all of his policies with regard to Iran been misguided and counter-productive? He never thinks about it.
You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question? It doesn'tmatter how much you know or how passionately you feel or, most importantly,what degree of disintegration you see around you, he's not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to him. You cannot change his mind.Nine percent of polled Americans would agree with attacking Iran right now.
To George Bush, that will be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it,because...
3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, evenpolitely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a "sense ofentitlement". Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never doneanything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to acertain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him,bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his ownexperience to a sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to reciprocate? He's never had to before this.
4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court
humiliated
itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the
justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did
not
object.
When the Bush administration adopted an "Anything but Clinton" policy
that
resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist
attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush.
When the Bush administration allowed the corrupt Enron corporation to
swindle California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to
balance their books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and
ignored the
links between Enron and the administration.
When it was evident that the evidence for the war in Iraq was cooked
and
that State Department experts on the Middle East were not behind the
war and
so it was going to be run as an exercise in incompetence, you
continued to
attack those who were against the war in vicious terms and to defend
policies that simply could not work.
On intelligent design, global warming, doctoring of scientific results
to
reflect ideology, corporate tax giveaways, the K Street project, the
illegal
redistricting of Texas, torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the Terry
Schiavo
fiasco, and the cronyism that led to the destruction of New Orleans
you have
failed to speak out with integrity or honesty, preferring power to
truth at
every turn. Bush does what he wants because you have let him.
5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and
inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last
generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980.
Whenever I
asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China, he said
"Mistakes
were made". He could not believe that Marxism itself was at fault,
just as
you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has
created the world we live in today.
You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have been made", but in fact,
psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes have been made. The
unregulated free market has operated to produce a government in its own
image. In an unregulated free market, for example, cheating is merely
another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces might
eventually
"shake out" of the system. Of course, anyone with common sense
understands
that cheaters do damage that sometimes cannot be repaired before they
are
"shaken out", but according to the principles of the unregulated free
market, the victims of that sort of damage are just out of luck and the
damage that happens to them is just a sort of "culling". It is no
accident
that our government is full of cheaters--they learned how to profit
from cheating when they were working in corporations that were using
bribes,
perks, and secret connections to cheat their customers of good
products,
> their neighbors of healthy environmental conditions, their workers of
> workplace safety and decent paychecks. It was only when the
> corporations
> began cheating their shareholders that any of you squealed, but you
> should
> know from your own experience that the unregulated free market as a
> "level
> playing field" was the biggest laugh of the 20th century. No successful
> company in the history of capitalism has ever favored open
> competition. When
> you folks pretended, in the eighties, that you weren't using the
> ideology of
> the free market to cover your own manipulations of the playing field
> to your
> own advantage, you may have suckered yourselves, and even lots of
> American
> workers, but observers of capitalism since Adam Smith could have told
> you it
> wasn't going to work.
>
> And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance
> to gain
> and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the party of
> Lincoln
> and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a
> backlash
> against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of
> you has
> been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in
> this
> country, but you kept it alive with phrases like "welfare queen" and
> your
> resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs to help
> people in
> our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the
> moral
> high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off
> without
> racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions
> for the
> sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit.
>
> You have used religion in exactly the same way. Instead of strongly
> defending the constitutional separation of church and state, you have
> encouraged radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take
> power
> in the US and mold our secular government to their own image, and get
> rich
> doing it. The US could have become a moderating force in what seems
> now to
> be an inevitable battle among the three monotheistic Abrahamic
> religions,
> but you have made that impossible by flattering and empowering our own
> violent and intolerant Christian right.
>
> You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the
> Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or
> far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances were
> instituted by
> Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of them not because of some
> abstract distrust of power, but because they had witnessed the
> screw-ups and
> idiocies of unchecked power.
>
> You yourselves have demonstrated the failures of unchecked power--in an
> effort to achieve it, you have repeatedly contravened the expressed
> wishes
> of most Americans, who favor a moderate foreign policy, reasonable
> domestic
> programs, a government that works, environmental preservation, women's
> rights to contraception, abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow
> you
> thought you could mold the imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess
> what--that's what an imperium is--one man rule. If you fear the
> madness of
> King George, you have no recourse if you've given up the checks and
> balances
> that you inherited and that were meant to protect you.
>
> Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed,
> short-term
> solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces
> of
> children and denied the existence of a "common good". You have
> disdained and
> denied the idea of "altruism". At one time, our bureaucracy was full of
> people who had gone into government service or scientific research for
> altruistic reasons--I knew, because I knew some of them. You have
> driven
> them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses.
>
> You have lied over and over about your motives, for example, making
> laws
> that hurt people and calling it "originalist interpretations of the
> Constitution" (conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have
> increased the powers of corporations at the expense of every other
> sector in
> the nation and actively defied any sort of regulation that would
> require
> these corporations to treat our world with care and respect.
>
> You have made economic growth your deity, and in doing so, you have
> accelerated the power of the corporations to destroy the atmosphere,
> the
> oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and the climate. You have
> produced
> CEOs in charge of lots of resources and lots of people who have no more
> sense of reciprocity or connection or responsibility than George W.
> Bush.
>
> Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks
> of a
> loser.
>
> Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's
> made
> mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and
> demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even
> suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of
> yourselves because not only have your ideas not worked to make the
> world a
> better place, they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have
> served to cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits
> of
> those who profess them.
This excerpt expresses exactly what I believe about the legacy that George W. Bush will leave for the American people.
By Jane Smiley
1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. No degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no longstanding friendly intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no essential importance (Tony Blair, American voters) makes any difference.
There is nothing you have to offer that makes Bush want to know you once you have come to disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a world entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush. You are now just one of those "polls" that he pays no attention to. When you were on his side,you thought that showed "integrity" on his part. It doesn't. It shows an absolute inability to learn from experience.
2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by hishandlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is indifferent to whatyou now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure and a quagmire? Bush
doesn't care. Is global warming beginning to affect us right now? So what. Have all of his policies with regard to Iran been misguided and counter-productive? He never thinks about it.
You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question? It doesn'tmatter how much you know or how passionately you feel or, most importantly,what degree of disintegration you see around you, he's not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to him. You cannot change his mind.Nine percent of polled Americans would agree with attacking Iran right now.
To George Bush, that will be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it,because...
3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, evenpolitely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a "sense ofentitlement". Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never doneanything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to acertain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him,bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his ownexperience to a sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to reciprocate? He's never had to before this.
4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court
humiliated
itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the
justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did
not
object.
When the Bush administration adopted an "Anything but Clinton" policy
that
resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist
attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush.
When the Bush administration allowed the corrupt Enron corporation to
swindle California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to
balance their books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and
ignored the
links between Enron and the administration.
When it was evident that the evidence for the war in Iraq was cooked
and
that State Department experts on the Middle East were not behind the
war and
so it was going to be run as an exercise in incompetence, you
continued to
attack those who were against the war in vicious terms and to defend
policies that simply could not work.
On intelligent design, global warming, doctoring of scientific results
to
reflect ideology, corporate tax giveaways, the K Street project, the
illegal
redistricting of Texas, torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the Terry
Schiavo
fiasco, and the cronyism that led to the destruction of New Orleans
you have
failed to speak out with integrity or honesty, preferring power to
truth at
every turn. Bush does what he wants because you have let him.
5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and
inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last
generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980.
Whenever I
asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China, he said
"Mistakes
were made". He could not believe that Marxism itself was at fault,
just as
you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has
created the world we live in today.
You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have been made", but in fact,
psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes have been made. The
unregulated free market has operated to produce a government in its own
image. In an unregulated free market, for example, cheating is merely
another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces might
eventually
"shake out" of the system. Of course, anyone with common sense
understands
that cheaters do damage that sometimes cannot be repaired before they
are
"shaken out", but according to the principles of the unregulated free
market, the victims of that sort of damage are just out of luck and the
damage that happens to them is just a sort of "culling". It is no
accident
that our government is full of cheaters--they learned how to profit
from cheating when they were working in corporations that were using
bribes,
perks, and secret connections to cheat their customers of good
products,
> their neighbors of healthy environmental conditions, their workers of
> workplace safety and decent paychecks. It was only when the
> corporations
> began cheating their shareholders that any of you squealed, but you
> should
> know from your own experience that the unregulated free market as a
> "level
> playing field" was the biggest laugh of the 20th century. No successful
> company in the history of capitalism has ever favored open
> competition. When
> you folks pretended, in the eighties, that you weren't using the
> ideology of
> the free market to cover your own manipulations of the playing field
> to your
> own advantage, you may have suckered yourselves, and even lots of
> American
> workers, but observers of capitalism since Adam Smith could have told
> you it
> wasn't going to work.
>
> And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance
> to gain
> and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the party of
> Lincoln
> and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a
> backlash
> against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of
> you has
> been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in
> this
> country, but you kept it alive with phrases like "welfare queen" and
> your
> resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs to help
> people in
> our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the
> moral
> high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off
> without
> racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions
> for the
> sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit.
>
> You have used religion in exactly the same way. Instead of strongly
> defending the constitutional separation of church and state, you have
> encouraged radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take
> power
> in the US and mold our secular government to their own image, and get
> rich
> doing it. The US could have become a moderating force in what seems
> now to
> be an inevitable battle among the three monotheistic Abrahamic
> religions,
> but you have made that impossible by flattering and empowering our own
> violent and intolerant Christian right.
>
> You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the
> Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or
> far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances were
> instituted by
> Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of them not because of some
> abstract distrust of power, but because they had witnessed the
> screw-ups and
> idiocies of unchecked power.
>
> You yourselves have demonstrated the failures of unchecked power--in an
> effort to achieve it, you have repeatedly contravened the expressed
> wishes
> of most Americans, who favor a moderate foreign policy, reasonable
> domestic
> programs, a government that works, environmental preservation, women's
> rights to contraception, abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow
> you
> thought you could mold the imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess
> what--that's what an imperium is--one man rule. If you fear the
> madness of
> King George, you have no recourse if you've given up the checks and
> balances
> that you inherited and that were meant to protect you.
>
> Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed,
> short-term
> solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces
> of
> children and denied the existence of a "common good". You have
> disdained and
> denied the idea of "altruism". At one time, our bureaucracy was full of
> people who had gone into government service or scientific research for
> altruistic reasons--I knew, because I knew some of them. You have
> driven
> them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses.
>
> You have lied over and over about your motives, for example, making
> laws
> that hurt people and calling it "originalist interpretations of the
> Constitution" (conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have
> increased the powers of corporations at the expense of every other
> sector in
> the nation and actively defied any sort of regulation that would
> require
> these corporations to treat our world with care and respect.
>
> You have made economic growth your deity, and in doing so, you have
> accelerated the power of the corporations to destroy the atmosphere,
> the
> oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and the climate. You have
> produced
> CEOs in charge of lots of resources and lots of people who have no more
> sense of reciprocity or connection or responsibility than George W.
> Bush.
>
> Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks
> of a
> loser.
>
> Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's
> made
> mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and
> demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even
> suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of
> yourselves because not only have your ideas not worked to make the
> world a
> better place, they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have
> served to cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits
> of
> those who profess them.