George H. W. Bush, some parting shots...

What’s that rustling sound? It’s the hedge I’m peeking over to see if sufficient time has passed to discuss the real George H.W. Bush: the rudderless operative, the corporate shill, the butcher. I learned something when I released my Reagan obituary the day after his passing and received 106 pieces of hate mail (death threats included), and that is is to let some time go by before issuing disparaging language about recently deceased beloved public figures.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (speak only well of the dead) invites omission. Which has been my strategy all week. It is a time to sit on your hands a while, and then collect and share your thoughts. It's poor form to boo the hearse, but public figures do merit and even require frank assessment, hopefully during their lifetimes, but also in times when their careers are in the public mind and that is, naturally, upon their passing. You can’t wait too long, as the hive mind’s appetite for mulling it over passes. It’s been a week. I hope that threads the needle adequately.

As a side note, on that blessed day when Trump at long last sucks down his last fast-food burrito and finally goes moobs-up with an esophageal hemorrhage, I can’t imaging not violating that conventional wisdom, and I expect I’ll join the rest of the munchkins in a few rousing choruses of “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead,” probably while the body’s still warm (if it ever was).

Bush earns at least that amount of deference, a respectful passage of time to a father and a soldier, but given his role as chief facilitator for the most domestically destructive president in US history, Bush the elder earns revilement both for his own atrocities, and also for carrying Reagan’s water through Iran/Contra, the Garn-St. Germain Act, the War on Drugs, prison privatization and myriad other policies and positions that exacerbated US economic and cultural disparity, and encouraged what I have always felt to be the United Sates' two greatest enemies—racism and materialism. While we’re still saying nice things about him though, and this is not surprising as a former head of the CIA, Bush was a guy who could really keep a secret.

One common take on 41’s ethics and belief system this past week is that he “recognized political realities.” A more apt description would be to say he had no code apart from political expediency. On a topic as quintessentially divisive as abortion, Bush’s policy positions swung from a zealotry that puts a gun against a pregnant teenager’s head to family planning position that practically has him escorting her to the clinic. 

Bush was as in on the joke of trickle-down economics as anyone, himself having referred to it as “voodoo economics,” but that was before he became its leading mouthpiece. And even though he knew it was a naked transfer of wealth to the wealthy, he sold the Reagan policies with his WASPy chin and grin as the divide between the haves and have-nots in the United States became a chasm. Even when he succeeded Reagan and had the opportunity to adapt what he knew were more sound fiscal policies, he deferred instead to his new owners and a decidedly un-presidential path-of-least-resistance pledge to be a third term of Reagan.

Many have made a compelling case that the invasion of Panama was an illegal war of aggression under International Law, and that bombing slum villages and killing thousands of peasants in order to capture a pineapple-faced narco-trafficker for not having supported his predecessor's Nicaraguan death squads falls outside the scope of presidential authority. Seems reasonable. It is likewise commonly asserted that Desert Storm was prosecuted against the standards of the laws of war. While you could say that according to my own imagined doctrinal oversight, every American president should be thrown in leg irons and dragged before The Hague (and that may be true) the cases against Bush have a ripeness all their own, most especially in Iraq.

What with the now defunct Soviet Union’s Russian leadership momentarily in retreat, caprices in Iraq became too much for oil lobbies and GOP colonialists to resist. In a conscious effort to disabuse US citizens from “Vietnam Syndrome,” or a broad distaste for war (that in itself a depraved goal), and as a means of making some vague statement of purpose about reshaping the Middle East, Desert Shield was launched along with a string of specious rhetoric about Iraq dipping its straw at a diagonal into Kuwait’s oil fields. Iraq moved troops to the Kuwaiti border over Kuwaiti oil production quota violations and Bush had everything he needed. After rejecting every backpedal Hussein made from this tactical error, Desert Shield was set up as a farcical drumroll of feigned restraint to the planned cymbal crash of Desert Storm. It was the beginning of an involvement that was completed by George W. Bush in the most disastrous foreign policy petard in my lifetime—a two-decades-long slick of blood and oil that has as its bumbling progenitor the grinning, hapless and thoughtless policy architect, George Herbert Walker Bush, about whom he himself said, doesn’t “do the vision thing.”

False causes aside, the prosecution of that war, notably the “Highway of Death” was an exercise in wholesale slaughter that impressed even hardened soldiers. “Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, was quoted as saying. Does ten thousand fish shot in a barrel merit a war crimes tribunal? How about strafing enemy lifeboats after sinking a trawler? That’s a thing you’d have to ask a twenty-something George H. W. Bush.

Bush's hands on the intelligence spigot resulted in the October Surprise to end all October Surprises in 1980. In a move eerily reminiscent of Nixon sandbagging Johnson’s Vietnam talks in 1968, Reagan campaign operatives were sabotaging Carter’s talks with Iran to free the hostages. William Casey, Reagan’s campaign chairman, was in secret negotiations with Iranian officials promising a better deal with Reagan if the Ayatollah would hang on to the hostages through the election, and Bush kept his thumb on reports to that effect. He ran interference for Reagan during and after this illegal process that like the Nixon case, invokes the Logan Act. Bush had his own unseemly entry into the presidency with the notorious Willie Horton ad campaign.

Bush’s political career of towering ordinariness and political cowardice stands in sum as a weight on the ankle of justice as it makes it tireless slog up a hill the United States keeps trying to make steeper. There is a lot more to say and to regret about the brief Bush presidency, but I’ll leave you with the Hunter S. Thompson’s description of Bush the elder with his most perfectly selected spirit animal, the hyena, from “The Fix is In,” a brief paean to the run-up of his son’s stolen election: 

“There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. ... Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were liars and dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory….The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's.”

First, hats off to the master, Dr. Thompson, but what he and I both want you to take away from all of this is that the Bushes are in a club you’re not in, and they’d like to keep it that way.

An empathic look at Kavanaugh's problems

I am a little older than Brett Kavanaugh and not quite as Irish (according to The Irish Times, he clocks in at 87.5%, out-Irishing me by 25%). We share an alma mater as well as boarding-school college preparatory experience. My guess is that we also share the Irish curse, so between these three items, I think I can offer some conscionable speculation and anecdotal observations on the Kavanaugh controversy. 

Alcohol affects Judge Kavanaugh in extreme ways. Old school Irish alcoholism management seems to be his method of handling it, though he could possibly be involved with a self-help organization that respects and preserves his anonymity. While he was figuring all of this out in high school and in college, he was simultaneously reckoning with his emerging sexuality, perhaps perturbed with his choir-boy impishness, which seemed to be dooming him to a lifetime of being cute rather than handsome.

 Having been groomed for greatness and raised for an open-arms welcome into the American elite, when cherchez la femme came to him far less naturally than writing history papers, the dissonance between these two realities infuriated him and belied the sense of privilege he had always presumed to be his birthright. That frustration manifest itself in developing a methodology for sexual conquest with the handicap due him over his button nose and being less than six feet tall. That handicap turned out to be booze, both for him and his targets; he was a creature of his nature, and also of his nurture.

I played in a rock band that made a little hay on the university circuit in the 1980s. It was common for the available free beverage, especially at fraternies, to be a crippling grain alcohol punch, often self-served from a 30-gallon Rubbermaid trash barrel. The sight of drunken, staggering teenagers was a common one at these gigs. In my late teens and early twenties, I eschewed alcohol entirely, so these recollections are clear and vivid.

I have also been aware of drunken gang rapes or “trains” that had taken place in other areas of the dormitories and frat houses where we played. It struck me as disgusting, and in retrospect, I wish I had taken it upon myself to find one and put an end to it with round-base straight microphone stand (still the finest on-the-gig weapon available to musicians). I had heard of this custom in more than one fraternity at the University of New Hampshire. My sense is that this was a common practice across many universities all across the country. That it made its way to Georgetown Prep makes perfect sense.

I know how it feels to be addicted to alcohol, I know how it feels to strike out with girls at an elite American prep school, and I’ve seen this kind of presumptive king-of-the-universe behavior in the Ivy environment. There’s your armchair psychiatry for the day, but I believe I have enough anecdotal exposure to parallel or identical environments to be able to offer a perspective born of familiarity with knowing the type, knowing the environment, and knowing the disease of alcoholism. In terms of a smell test, there’s a turd around here somewhere.