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I’ve been writing for some time about missing irony at the New York Times. Εδώ είναι another example of what I’m talking about. In the second article linked here (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “First Father: Tough Times on the Sidelines,” New York Times, 9 August 2007, pp. A1, A8), the Times reports some interesting front-page (the Φορές thought) news about George H.W. Bush (George Bush I).
Hold the presses: According to Bush’s I’s daughter Doro Bush Koch, the Φορές reports, the ex-president is “growing more emotional as he ages.” “He has a tender heart that is getting tenderer,” Mrs. Koch told Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
Last December, Stolberg says, Bush I’s growing “tenderness” was seen at an event honoring his son Jeb Bush in his final days at the governor of Florida. The ex-president “broke down crying at the memory of Jeb’s bitter defeat in 1994,” when the current president’s younger brother failed in an early bid for his current job.
The growing warmth of Bush I’s “heart” is making it harder, Stolberg writes, for him to “take the criticism” George W. Bush (Bush II) is receiving over the Iraq fiasco and other ongoing White House failures and/or crimes. It hasn’t been easy on the senior Bush to hear his eldest son disparaged across the land.
Late last year, at the christening of the U.S. Navy’s newest Nimitz aircraft carrier, "The George H.W. Bush," the elder Bush “made a point of saying he supports his son ‘in every single way with every fiber of my body.’”
“At 83,” Stolberg reports, Bush I “finds it tough to watch his son get criticized from the sidelines; often, he likens himself to a Little League father whose kid is having a rough game. Και όπως το proud father and angry Little League dad who cannot help but yell at the umpire, sometimes he just cannot help getting involved.”
Call me jaded, but I really have to wonder if the Φορές' Stolberg was able to write this story without succumbing to recurrent fits of hysterical laughter and/or tears.
Those of us who pay reasonably informed attention to recent history and current events can certainly think of many more relevant things to get weepy about than Jeb Bush’s election loss in 1994! So surely can the writers and editors of Οι Νιου Γιορκ Ταιμς.
If the increasingly “tenderhearted” Bush I is looking for a place to focus his emergent loving kindness, he can start by visiting some of the many thousands of U.S. soldiers who have lost limbs and/or sight, hearing and peace of mind while enlisted in his son’s criminal war of colonial aggression against Iraq.
He could also visit the homes of some of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families who have lost loved ones in that brazenly imperialist invasion. Bush I might want to have a look at the July 30th edition of Το Έθνος, where Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian report that his son and Empire’s bloody oil occupation is “a dark and depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.” Many of fifty U.S. occupation veterans interviewed by Hedges and Al-Arian have “returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the U.S. government and media.” By returning GIs’ account, the war on the ground includes the gratuitous killing and torture of Iraqi civilians, including children. The invasion involves the routine “indiscriminate” application of U.S. force and numerous “disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops.”
Bush I could also weep with the many Afghan civilian families who are losing children and other loved ones to indiscriminate air attacks being called in by U.S. Special Forces – participants in another and all-too forgotten mass-murderous invasion ordered by Bush II with Democratic support (Carlotta Gall, “British Criticize U.S. Air Attacks in Afghan Region,” New York Times, 9 August 2007, pp. A1, A5.)
I’m sorry, but Bush I’s edlest son (the former owner — thanks to family name and connection — of a Major League Baseball team) was hardly a Little League batter having a rough day at the plate when he put O.I.L. (“Operation Iraqi Liberation”) στο παιχνίδι.
He was the arch-criminal and messianic-militarist master of the world’s only Major League Empire.
Of course, if Bush Senior is looking for historical events to shed tears about he could also revisit his own imperial war on Iraq. He could review films and accounts of his military’s vicious slaughter of surrendered soldiers on the notorious Highway of Death, where American planes and helicopters pulverized defeated Iraqi troops attempting to return from Kuwait.
Speaking of Floridian electoral tragedies worth weeping about, the elder Bush could revisit Jeb’s pivotal role in helping Team Dubya steal the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
Bush I could also revisit:
– Bush II’s failure to act on intelligence that might have helped prevent the terrible jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001.
- Bush II’s determination to use 9/11 as a fraudulent pretext for launching the petro-imperialist invasion of Iraq and violating civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad.
– Bush II’s inability and/or unwillingness to act while hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens were marooned in flooded New Orleans
– His wife’s racist and classist claim that some of Katrina’s poor black victims were better off now that they were privileged enough to sleep on the artificial turf of the Astrodome
Truth be told, the list of terrible events that can be linked to George W. Bush and the whole blood- and petroleum-soaked military-industrial Bush clan goes on and on.
The harsh historical realities of oil, empire, hyper-militarism, class rule, false Christianity and dynastic politics mean that Junior’s “rough game” is no small or laughing matter. It’s a matter of life and death for millions at home and abroad.
It’s not for nothing that I always flash to the Bush crime family when I hear the following lyrics from Bob Dylan’s 1962 folk-dirge “Masters of War”:
Δένεις τις σκανδάλες
Για να πυροβολήσουν οι άλλοι
You sit back and watch
While the death counts gets higher
Κρύβεσαι στα αρχοντικά σου
Ενώ το αίμα των νέων
Ρέει έξω από το σώμα τους
Και θάβεται στη λάσπη
Επιτρέψτε μου να σας κάνω μια ερώτηση
Είναι τόσο καλά τα λεφτά σου;
Θα σου φέρει συγχώρεση;
Πιστεύετε ότι θα μπορούσε;
Νομίζω ότι θα βρεις
Όταν ο θάνατός σου παίρνει το τίμημα
Όλα τα λεφτά που έβγαλες
Ποτέ δεν θα αγοράσει πίσω την ψυχή σας
So go ahead, ex-President Bush, cry us a river. If your declared religion’s scriptures are correct, there’s nothing but tears and anguish where you and your oldest son are going when your deaths take their tolls.