Bush Bash
It is after all election year, and I feel obliged to write something political. Since I have already confessed to the dreaded liberal label, clearly I could not be expected to write in praise of a conservative president. But my two cents worth is not so much about politics, it's more personal than that. I want to write about an issue of character. I have never been very interested in the great Inside The Beltway game of character assassination, aka The Pot v. Kettle ritual. I long ago came to the cynical conclusion that if our leadership required clean hands, most of the positions would go unfilled. My blanket expectation was simply that the Republican leadership couldn't keep their hands out of the till, and the Democratic leadership couldn't keep their hands off their zippers. This soapbox session is about the character trait of courage. Sound leadership cannot exist without courage, and I don't see any evidence that George Bush has enough of it to fill a thimble.
In order to back up a bit and re-enter the subject in as civil a manner as possible, I will compare the behaviors of a couple of other recent presidents with those of our current president. At the funeral of President Ronald Reagan, his son Ron sent the spin doctors scrambling for their weasel wording thesauruses to explain away what seemed to many to be a criticism of Bush's faith in comparison to Reagan's. Later, during an interview with NBC's Chris Matthews, he was asked to clear up any ambiguities about his comments, and responded only with the clearly loaded phrase "if the shoe fits." Ron later said that he resented the White House efforts to draw parallels between Reagan and Bush. During Reagan's reign I disagreed with damn near all his domestic decisions, but I never doubted his realness, and I never doubted his courage. In a dark and fearful time during the cold war, President Reagan stood on his own two feet before the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Germany and challenged the Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev, "if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan met Gorbachev mano-a-mano and together they put the charge to nuclear war machine in reverse. Reagan was a true man of courage, both on and off screen.
Then there was that mild mannered gentleman peanut farmer President Carter. On March 31, of 1979, America's closest brush with nuclear disaster began at Three Mile Island. In the ensuing days the danger of core meltdown dominated the front page of the national and international media. Confusion, contradictory expertise reigned. President Carter knew full well the dangers posed at Three Mile Island and knew that many of his own nuclear experts predicted that meltdown was imminent. But President Carter was also conscious that the American people were looking to him for leadership. President Carter weighed the conflicting expert opinions and made the decision that the greatest danger was over. Five days after the accident started Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter personally inspected the damaged plant. The Mayor of Middletown Pennsylvania praised the morale boosting value of President Carter's visit. Mayor Reid said of his constituents "People weren't talking to one another. They were cooped up in their homes, and when he came, it seemed like everyone came out to see the president and it was really a shot in the arm." President Carter's staff, his secret service agents, and many of the nuclear experts he consulted were concerned about his safety and advised him not to go, but the mantle of leadership was not on their shoulders, it was on President Carter's, and he bore it heroically.
If Big Brother could really rewrite history, his account of 9/11 would read:
Just minutes after the planes hit the towers, the skies over New York and Washington were filled with F-16's flying in formation. Soon thereafter, astonished citizens of New York and then Washington looked up to see the familiar sight of Air Force One circling low overhead. The president's plane dipped its wings and the sight of that brought renewed hope and courage to those who witnessed it. They squared their shoulders and returned to their appalling tasks.
The digital age has made Big Brother's ability to totally eradicate information virtually impossible. Them little bytes is slippery devils, and you just can't keep all of them in line, but lordy how they do try! For example, one of the most revealing, and ultimately chilling, photographic records of a president caught right in the middle of crunch time occurred in the Emma E. Booker Elementary School on September 11, 2001. A complete video of the minutes around the time when Andy Card, President Bush's Chief of Staff, walked over to the President and said (Bush quote) "A second plane has hit the tower. America's under attack", exists. It can still be found here and there on the web. No one from the White House, the Congress, or the media questions the authenticity of the tape. The best view of that time is in Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, who uses his high tech equipment to zoom in on President Bush's face in amazing detail. Never mind how Michael Moore interprets Bush's expression. And never mind the White House (or at least one of them) version that "[t]he president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening," Look for yourself. Judge for yourself. If you aren't sure about how to interpret facial expressions, consult a non-verbal communication book. Just to be on the safe side, consult one that was written before 9/11. [When you are finished with your evaluation, write down your results, pass your answer sheet to the front of the class, and sit quietly until everyone else is finished. Your analysis counts as ½ of your grade.] Neither in the classroom or for the next several hours did our President demonstrate for a single instant the degree of leadership courage shown by Reagan and Carter in the examples I used earlier.
Long before 9/11, I had become a student [read dilettante] of communication, particularly non-verbal communication. One of the characteristic modes I developed was called the Texas Bar Bunch Belligerence Hierarchy Scale. While I did not develop the scientific terminology until the late nineteen eighties, I had often observed the mode attributes during my 10 years of hanging out in Texas honky-tonks. Whenever a small bunch (usually a table full) of good ole boys would assemble at a table, typically the loudest one, and the first one to start trouble, would be the lowest one on the group toughness scale of that particular group. In other words the show of courage and toughness was something the smart ass demonstrated directly only when he was in the company, and under the protection, of those he was hangin with. These fellas did develop certain patterns of behavior to signal their pretend toughness, but they would back down in a second outside the protection of their group. Those patterns were the first thing I observed about Bush that I didn't like. Watch him walk. Elbow cocked ever so slightly, hand held away just slightly from the hip in exactly the same place it would be if he was packing a six gun, and walking down a dusty street in Waco for a high noon showdown. Then watch how he punctuates his sentences, and the more outrageous the statement the stronger the gesture, by pushing his face forward in aggressive manner, and with a half smile, half sneer expression that dares anyone to disagree. But the force behind the threat is always his backup, never his own courage.
You may have seen his response to questions about the threat of violence by the Iraq citizens against our troops. "Bring 'em on" he said, safe in the knowledge that the actual physical attack would not be against him personally, or even any member of his family, but in the person of someone else's son or daughter whose lives he treated as his budget items, just like money.
One evidence of that sham courage is the elaborate lengths he will go to in order to present an appearance of genuine courage. See his carefully orchestrated, and perfectly safe, trip to the USS Abraham Lincoln in a Navy S-3B Viking. See him stand tall and confident beneath the "Mission Accomplished" banner, and declare victory. 'Course I have to admit Bush did look a lot more believable in his flight suit than Michael Dukakis did with his head sticking out of that tank. And then there was the more secret than top secret so much so that if even a whisper of real danger came up it would have been aborted trip to the "front lines" to visit the troops on Christmas. Great for a morale boost for those soldiers at the occasion , and a brilliant photo op move. But again, its purpose was to engineer an appearance of courage that Bush and his crew know he does not have.
It is not just physical courage that Bush lacks, it is courage at any level. While it is something that could never be proven, and I caution that I have no expert qualifications to support it, I think that one of the driving forces behind his invasion of Iraq was to show his father he was not a chicken. I am particularly disgusted with his practice of hiding behind the boys and girls of other parents by equating support for the troops with approval of his policies. He even hides behind God in claiming that God wants to use him to make changes in the Middle East. Bush and crew have seized on 9/11 to create an atmosphere of fear. They use this fear as a shield to protect their own quest for power, control and wealth, hiding behind the western equivalent of a holy jihad; steam rolling over our own constitution, international law, longstanding treaties, and all the while self righteously condemning those foolish enough to think the atmosphere of above the law cloak of immunity they hide behind applies to the behavior of anyone outside the cabal. The last thing we have come to expect from Bush is an attribute called the courage of his convictions. His motto seems to be "I didn't do it- the CIA (etc.,etc.) misinformed me, I am not responsible for any bad results that stems from the atmosphere I create".
I have never been in the oval office, never expect to be, nor have I seen a detailed plan of the space. There must be closet space in the room, and some of those closets must contain a few items left behind by preceding presidents. One of those items needs to be found, dusted off, and placed back on the President's desk. It should be in the Harry S. Truman box of relics, and it is a paper weight with the message "The Buck Stops Here".
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