What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he had wisdom? Bullshit man!... Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you"... I mean I'm no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...-Dennis Hopper (as the crazed photographer in Apocalypse Now)
And then he was gone….
A perfect metaphor for America, the fake cowboy, a dude ranch desperado who was afraid of horses (try to find a picture of him on one) born with a silver spoon in his mouth as the latest incarnation of the John Wayne hammerhead icon that has become the archetype for all that is American. When that helicopter lifted his mangy, war criminal ass off of the Capitol grounds to the cheers of hundreds of thousands, a boisterous many chanting of "Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye", the curses of many others throughout the land and a date with historical infamy, I personally felt nothing at all. No relief, no glee, no anger, no outrage…I just watched it fly away in the same way that I would watch a garbage truck driving down the street after a pick-up. I had run the gamut of every possible emotion for the last eight years of sorrow, stupidity and disrepute and long ago reached the point of being spent over the gross transgressions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and his cadre of Mayberry Machiavellis, his neocon conquerors and their appetite for global destruction and the portable Potemkin village that was rolled out to con the rubes and suckers that there was no bankrupt, crumbling empire behind the star spangled façade.
George W. Bush, like Colonel Walter Kurtz long ago reached the end of the river and he made us all insane and has now left behind a smoking crater that will very likely not be fixed until every reader of this post has died of old age if it ever is. The economy is in advanced deterioration, capitalism has failed and all of the pundits and Wall Street shills who are telling Americans that the worst is over….well, suffice it to say that they are the same ones that were saying that the economy was sound less than a year ago…they are full of shit. The next shoe to drop will be commercial property, the rampage of unabated greed after the Bush regime dropped all premises of regulation followed by putting a rabid fox named Henry Paulson in charge of guarding the henhouse has yet to fully play out. When you drive around and see all of the for sale or lease signs, popping up like those silly fucking yellow ribbon magnets did back in 2003 it is a sign of economic apocalypse that you don’t have to be fucking Nostradamus to predict. The dismal holiday season retail sales have only begun to be announced, the bankruptcies are forthcoming along with broken lease agreements that will then begin to take down shopping malls and creating ghost malls. I simply refer people to the great article by Dmitry Orlov on the fall of the Soviet Union: Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century on what to expect.
Tuesday there was hope throughout the land but as a hardened cynic friend of me used to say “life, work and shit are all four letter words”, you can soon add hope to that list but I’ll get to that in a little bit.
A lifelong fuckup, 9/11 made him the angry and vengeful God and it made us all the hunted in the bunting draped hell, shouted down as heretics and unpatriotic terrorist sympathizers as King George and his minions used the fear and loathing generated by those attacks as though they were a thousand pound sledgehammer to be repeatedly dropped on the heads of stunned Americans who didn’t march to the beat of the devil’s drummer Karl Rove. The greatest shame is that George W. Bush took credit for ‘protecting America’ from terrorism by dragging our ideals and morality through the darkest back alleys of some third world shithole torture state and was able to pull it all off by being able to convince a large portion Americans that the ‘terrorist’ attacks that happened on HIS watch were never his fault to begin with. What else could be expected from a gullible population of overindulgent, under informed, overfed, juiced up on Jesus sheep and lemmings? George W. Bush WAS America
Primping with plastic turkeys in heavily guarded Baghdad locations, strutting and preening in a Top Gun suit and industrial sized codpiece onboard the USS Lincoln, the man who cowered as the shadow government executed their dirty coup standing atop the pile of rubble at Ground Zero as the stench of burned and rotting flesh was still fresh in the New York City air, to Karl Rove and the rest of the America hating fascist scumbags it smelled like victory. Jackbooted fascist thugs like Rush Limbaugh and his angry army milked their cocks like turkey necks over the sadomasochistic sleaze and sexual torture of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, attached themselves like leeches to the emaciated breathing corpse that was Terri Schiavo, institutionalized torture and made Rupert Murdoch’s fictitious FOX television’s skull cracking Jack Bauer their Übermensch. The running of the pigs on Wall Street, the true damage of which is only now being seen with much worse to come turned what was once a prosperous society with a thriving middle class into Elois and Morelocks, it was fuck or walk, it was shock and awe and by God the bastard is finally gone and that he wasn't crazed enough to invoke martial law and appoint himself dictator for life.
Bush’s legacy is a degenerate and rotting culture, institutionalized criminality, the largest percentage of prisoners on the planet, looming national bankruptcy, capitalism become cannibalism like the guy in the Stephen King story stranded on a deserted island with a boatload of heroin who hacks off parts of his own body to eat and kisses the dragon to do so, the markets are not unlike heroin addicts, Goldman Sachs and the leeches on our back must be saved at all costs and each dollar destroying fix to the jonesing junkies on Wall Street only feeds the monkey for a bit longer while millions are thrown out of their jobs and homes as a result. It included a land where until this past November more traditional forms of democracy were replaced by American Idol, where the news was swapped out with state sanctioned propaganda, where Jesus was weaponized and unleashed to fly an F-14 and drop bombs on children on missions for the moneychangers and most of all, a place where ignorance was exalted in a sad country that was renamed “The Homeland”, or translated into Nazispeak “Der Heimat”.
The progeny of Nazi collaborator Prescott Bush was finally gone, the Bush family has been run out of power, one time heir Jeb has been left to become some perverse inversion of Billy Carter a beautiful topsy-turvy, Bizzaro world, through the looking glass figure that is so perfect for this rotten and befouled era in American history that it should induce nocturnal emissions amongst the cockroaches, ghouls, vampires and pathetic legions of the pathologically fucked and doomed here in Der Heimat. Ah…what could have been had the true heir to the meticulously planned Fourth Reich not been usurped by his dumb-assed, drug-addled, mentally deficient and downright mean idiot bastard brother who was chosen precisely because Cheney, Rummy and the neocons could push his buttons and play him against his old man. For that I suppose we owe the PNAC boys some debt of gratitude but it’s hard to be jubilant, keep a stiff upper lip as the shit rises to neck level or find treasure among the smoking rubble left behind by this grand scale carnival of perversion, ruination and historical infamy that the Bushreich has wrought like a biblical plague of flesh eating shit locusts with a mandate to paint this fickle and fucked country red like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter coming back to paint the town of Lago red, rename it Hell and turn the keys to the place over to the lumpen Republican dregs of society just for the sheer fuck all of it so that they may chase the citizenry around to be beggared and buggered for the sake of their amusement.
Whatever ruination we may suffer as Americans we can rest assured that if there is such a being as God that the pox upon us all of the George W. Bush years was a comeuppance. It was a vicious smiting, a celestial folly and ultimately a judgment on our failure as a nation to be the force for good and for peace that we all, given our unprecedented prosperity and global influence could have been had we not bought into the flag swaddled, four flushing fascist horseshit that has been allowed since the end of WW II. The United States could have changed the planet for the better coming out of the 'good war' but was diverted from any enduring mission to spread decency and promote peace abroad as the social compact as well as our very destiny was dragged through a pool of blood and shit by high-rolling Wall Street elitists, scions of the robber barons themselves and their own personal Gestapo, the CIA. That one chance was forever squandered and George W. Bush was our reward for completely blowing it.
As the saying goes and I paraphrase, those whom the gods destroy are first made mad, and we are madder than the wildest acid laced tea-party in the garden of the Queen of Hearts and the Mad fucking Hatter himself, we were seduced by the false god of capitalism, nibbled at the apple, got dumb, greedy and lazy and eventually were chased out of the garden by the false gods of our own making. Bush among all of his other dubious ‘achievements’ proved Mencken to be a prophet because it was he who once wrote:
"As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."As for President Barack Obama, neither I nor history suffer fools kindly and those who think that he is any sort of a savior need only contemplate that the REAL Jesus was brutally beaten, tortured, mocked and crucified and the nail gun bearing idiots in the red states would do the same in a Tuscaloosa minute were the to return to Earth on inauguration day preaching the same commie liberal bullshit. Perdition is where we are headed and for fuck’s sake it’s where we all belong for our complicity in this travesty. There will be no saving grace either, as Dylan once sang “the Titanic sails at dawn” and we have all had our tickets punched and been booked for passage in steerage as the high rolling pigs party and dance, celebrating because it is in their nature while they remain willfully ignorant of the tragic disaster coming.
Americans have become a tragic, low-minded, self-indulgent, mean-spirited and just plain uncouth people over the past two and a half decades and like an alcoholic or drug addicted the acknowledgement of this is the first step to recovery. Economic displacement may bring about the necessary soul searching (providing Sarah Palin Republicans don’t use the misery to catapult a typically supine Democratic Congress to regenerate) to come out of this morass of murderous war and mammon worshipping avarice a better and more mature people.
But in all fairness, due to the influence of George Bush and the GOP the country has changed a lot for the better. Look at President Obama, shit if you would have told me a black man would be president I would have said - BULLSHIT - it will only happen when hell freezes over or the Cardinals are in the Super Bowl....and it's going to be in the low 30s here in Tampa tonight. I do give Bush credit though, were it not for his magnificent success at fucking up every goddamned thing that he ever touched, a King Midas in reverse then we would have likely witnessed the spectacle of an orgy of jackbooted jellyfish yesterday, fondling themselves, prowling for libruls to beat, drinking blood and celebrating the inauguration of President Rudolph Giuliani.
And he never did incinerate the planet by allowing Dick Cheney to goad him into nuking Iraq, for that alone the idiot bastard son deserves credit.
Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
- Alan Ginsberg
Steam: Nah nah hey hey goodbye (and good riddance)
