Dear American Liberal,
Listen, I know you think you’re a good person who consumes the right media, votes for the right candidates, believes the right things. You’re looking back at the last 4 years with dread and now in the plague year, that has been ratcheted up to a thousand percent.
You can do a lot of things: you can phonebank for your creepy old sex pervert you’ve nominated, you can start a food bank with your town, or do as little as checking with your elderly neighbors to see if they need anything. You can do anything your heart desires! Rise and grind, let’s bake this sourdough bread!
But what you don’t get to do is rehabilitate George W. Bush. You just don’t.
There’s nothing in this video that you should be able to object to. It must feel like a cool splash of water on a hot day; exactly what you needed at the moment. There’s somber music straight out of a Saving Private Ryan montage, stock photos, some shots of people doing performing basic human dignity. The words compassion and care and all the things that make us feel human are there.
Wow, that’s such a sharp difference from the current ogre in the White House who seems happy to blame everyone, praise himself endlessly, downplay the serious threat, and throw us all back into the meat grinder as soon as humanly possible. This is what a real President should sound like: providing comfort and stability, and hope for the future! Certainly miss that don’t you?!
Congrats on being successfully propagandized to. Trust me, this isn’t the first time you’ve fallen for it. You experience 8 years of optimism propaganda during the Obama years, but he was the cool black President that could give good speeches. For a group of people who claim to be America’s intellectual elite, the smart ones, you fall for the one of the easiest emotional tricks in the book: nostalgia bait.
I know, it’s hard. You really want your party to accept its destiny as the political organization for upper middle class professionals who don’t want to appear too racist. The Democratic Party is quickly becoming the home for wayward cosmopolitan conservatives. You want your brutal imperialism to resemble a college recruitment photo, with your Marvel movies being ads for an Air Force that murders children. You want to communicate directly with slay kween gifs. You celebrate the Battle of Hogwarts, not mourn the massacre at Kent State. For you, reality must be a difficult place when everything you believe in so deeply is being proven to be false.
Like I said, my job is not make you feel better.
I get why this is happening. The Democratic Party is, by and large, an instrument of capital. It’s another brand, the Coke to the Republican Pepsi, a lot of the same ingredients but slightly different taste. Every third party feels like a store brand: slightly less good, cheaper, on a lower shelf, and only drains your brand’s luster. You really love money, you love the power that wealth gives you, but most importantly, you love winning. You love victory.
And you have a very short memory consisting of superficial cultural signs. George W. Bush has miraculously escaped both a Hague trial and public exile.
My job is not to make you feel better, quite the opposite. My job is remind you. And I shouldn’t have to, because all of the shit Bush did and you’ve ignored happened in your lifetime. You were most likely old enough to remember and process what was happening around you. You’ve either drank too much kombucha and shit your brain out, or you’re just intentionally ignoring all the horror and death and destruction he created. A bit of column A, a bit of column B.
You just want to be part of a winning team. Trump’s defeat of the most qualified human being that has ever existed but somehow the vast majority hate has irrevocably broken your mind in twain and the world seems so chaotic and insane because you’re online all the time and you’re watching the news all the time and why can’t things be simpler oh god why does everything like this keep happening all the time when WE SHOULD BE AT BRUNCH.
It’s okay to feel confused and lost, maybe even a little hopeless. Your party is dying, quite literally considering the majority of your voters are dropping like flies. Your candidate has a not very good chance of making it through any first term.
Here is the unblemished truth: George W. Bush was the most destructive, tyrannical, and murderous President of the post Vietnam era. His body count is only topped by one living American: Henry Kissinger. What Bush did to the world is impossibly to quantify except in the cold calculus of dead bodies. What happened to this country after 9/11, which Bush so poetically describes as a national coming together, I would describe as the radicalization of an international mass shooter looking for revenge in the school hallways of the world. A deranged lunatic firing tax-payer funded rounds into classrooms, simply for the pleasure of spilling blood, and then rifling through all their pockets for loose change. Then the school is sold to an international corporation who spend billions to turn it into an empty mall.
America lost its fucking mind after 9/11, fresh off the heels of the most controversial election in history. A fancy lad son of privilege who could barely talk, used the office to enrich his friends, and killed thousands to satiate his ego and thirst for empire. Sound familiar? History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
Then you watched as a surveillance state, militarized police, mass deportation infrastructure, torture, a severe curtailing of civil liberties, a fear and hatred of the other: the opening stages of a totalitarian state which Obama happily perpetuated. You watched with a mixture of fear and hope that you could reclaim the White House and turn this imperial machinery to protecting the world or whatever. All it took was the right person, the myth of the good king was all it took to sustain you.
And then there’s the wars. There’s multiple wars, one of which is still going on. The Iraq War was based on a lie, pure and simple. They wanted control of the Middle East and Iraqi oil and a permanent American empire, so they fabricated a false media narrative based on your racist fears to sell it to the American people and liberal America lapped it the fuck up. 67% of you thought he made the case. 40% of House and 58% of Senate Democrats voted for that disaster.
The catastrophic amount of bloodshed that the American empire unleashed under Bush changed the course of history. The War on Terror set the tone for the 21st Century: war without end, for no purpose other than to do it.
If Al-Qaeda wanted to destroy America from within, it succeeded with flying colors. ISIS grew like a tumor from the power vacuum the invasion caused. Mass starvation, plague, impoverishment, a lack of accountability that lets American drones murder people worldwide without a much as an afterthought. The modern alt-right and white nationalist movement are its birthchild: widespread fascism openly expressed because if you can invade a country and murder thousands of brown people overseas, if people are so willing to give up their freedoms and values for empire, why stop there?
You like him because you’ve decided to ignore the torture and psychopathic murder for profit because he is able to present a public face that isn’t a cartoon of a 1980’s movie corporate villain lighting a cigar with a hundred dollar bill. The Obama White House’s wimpish refusal to prosecute any of the previous crimes, along with his continuation of nearly all of Bush’s policies, were the first steps in forgetting. They spray their minds with sanitizer, because if the Democratic Party was going to become the new Republicans, they needed to clean their own countertops first.
Bush knows how to play the part of Statesman. He loves to play dressup, remember, either a cowboy or a fighter pilot sometimes! Since your politics are all about appearance, not material conditions, this is enough. You don’t have to rehabilitate George W, Bush, but you will anyway. You’d much rather have a quiet torture prison, a respectful disagreement with a war criminal, than to actually stand for anything that might share power with someone from another social class. That is called a class enemy, and history will not remember you very fondly.
When the rightwing call you cowards for being afraid of guns, for having double standards about Joe Biden, for being obsessed with appearing to do good and being recognized for it, they’re not exactly wrong. That accusation of hypocrisy will stick to you like tar, mainly for the reason that you actually care about being seen as a hypocrite, a problem they don’t share.
The bare minimum Bush had to do was wear a plastic bag on his head, get some candy at a funeral, and lightly criticize the current administration. Just appear in public and get a hug from Michelle Obama and all was forgiven.
All is not forgiven.
All is not forgiven for warrantless wiretapping of American civilians, the drowning of an American city, for torturing innocent people in a gulag, for attempting to gut Social Security, for slashing taxes for the rich, and on the way out the door, tossing a molotov into the economy, leaving us with a pathetic, zombified Uberconomy that is now is tatters.
This is not a country; this is a nation-sized trauma center, with some so eager to forgive their abusers who gave them Tylenol for $10 a pill, that they’ll forget they were beaten in the first place. You are participating in a national gaslighting campaign to make us think we were ever crazy for wanting someone so compassionate and caring in the Hague for the rest of his life.
Sincerely,
Someone who remembers Marine Lance Cpl. David Mendez Ruiz, killed on November 12, 2005; a good guy who didn’t deserve to die so far from home for a lie.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.