Bush on The American Experience

Part 2.

George Herbert Walker Bush is strangely remembered as a good President. One reason is obvious: anyone standing next to his son George W. is bound to look good. But another reason is the forgiveness we offer over time to celebrities, drunks and Presidents of the United States. Nixon, for instance, went from utter disgrace to a reputation of "good at foreign policy" or "he just got caught doing what they all do." Jimmy Carter, the everyman's candidate in '76, but repudiated four years later by a 10 to 1 electoral vote spread, is now revered as an American moral example.

Another reason, as I wrote earlier, is that worshipful biographies like Austin Hoyt's from The American Experience: The Presidents give Bush an uncritical free pass. His life becomes exemplary in this program, a man whose vision and values heroically tussle with the uncouth realities of an unenlightened world. In the end, he's a guy like you and me, only better. Obviously—he could not possily have become President otherwise.

The problem with such a shallow portrait, in Nixon's case, is that the destructiveness of his years in office can be sidestepped. Fortunately, there is enough in the public record to keep such a whitewash at bay: Nixon was a venal man whose ambitions were unsatisfied even as Leader of the Free World. It's safe to say that Nixon, even had he wiped away all opposition, would still have been unsatisfied. For a guy like Carter, a rhapsodic biography as Bush got on The American Experience would emphasize his high character, but probably overlook his inability to organize an effective executive team and act, an unfortunate side effect of moral nobility.

There are two troubles, then, with Austin Hoyt's hagiography passing as portrait. First, it glosses over Bush's weaknesses as President; second, it gives him an aura of goodness that he simply does not have. He was a wholly deficient President, dismissed like Carter after a failed term. And he is a man who gleefully bathes in the blood of innocents, and has throughout his grownup life.

Bush came to the Presidency after a sterling career of appointments. He was elected to Congress in the early 60s as a moderate Republican—meaning, in those years, business friendly, spend a little on infrastructure and resist Civil Rights at all costs. To his credit, Bush challenged his constituency when he voted for open housing; he turned a livid public meeting in his Texas district completely around by appealing to their sense of fairness and modernity, no small feat in the Jim Crow South. Nevertheless, his Presidency was won in 1988 by appealing to the very same intrinsic racism he poetically waved away in the 1960s. His "Willie Horton" ad continued the scurrilous tradition of coding racism within capaign messages. Plainly, Bush's plea for racial equanimity 20 years earlier was not sincere. If it was, that basic decency was trashed in 1988.

In 1970, Bush gambled away a secure House seat to run for the Senate at Nixon's urging, and as Nixon's man. He lost, but was made Ambassador to the United nations, then Chairman of the RNC (responsible for fundraising and getting others elected). When one juxtaposes his devotion to Nixon in one circumstance, and to Johnson in the Civil Rights cause, one wonders about Bush's predilection for pleasing men in power. During Gerald Ford's 15 minutes in office, Bush was sent to China, then headed the CIA while a Senate investigation punished it for spying on Americans. Bush's first-hand experience as Director probably helped his descendants reinvigorate illegal spying on domestic targets.

When in the 1980 Republican primaries it became clear that Ronald Reagan would be the party's champion, Bush as Reagan's loudest critic became his running mate instead and served Reagan with devotion for the next eight years. If for position or security, or because of his penchant for serving Presidents, Bush was continuing to get as close to the top as he could. This had served Gerald Ford well: it could serve an observant Bush in turn.

As Commander-in-Chief, Bush rounded up a coalition of world partners to turn back the "naked aggression" of Saddam Hussein's Kuwait invasion. Conversely, after young activists in Tiananman Square had demanded democratic reforms, embraced an American model of government and even erected a statue of liberty in homage to ours, they were steamrolled in the middle of the night by a totalitarian Chinese government.

Bush's response was total silence—not a word of acknowledgement of the movement, nor of regret over the loss of life. As a former (momentary) envoy to China, Bush insisted that allowing the murder of an organic democracy movement in a totalitarian state was the best response for all concerned. Within weeks, Bush family operative Brent Scowcroft was sent to Beijing to toast fascists in the name of the American people.

The tally: On one hand, a moralised world response to a small-scale economic skirmish; on the other hand, a secret and supportive response to the immoral, wanton murder of people begging to ally with our ideology and traditions. More simply, oil tussle expanded to world event; tectonic shift in human history averted. This in brief is the Presidency of George Herbert Waker Bush.

But the life in brief of George Herbert Waker Bush is more...well, ordinary, thus more purely evil. The "banality of evil" thesis is that great evils are not generally executed by sociopaths, but by regular people who accept certain basic truths and do horrible things with the view that their actions are normal. Germans in the Nazi era, for instance, went along with atrocities because they were simply following orders. This thesis works aptly in Bush's case, and is supported by Hoyt's mash note to him in The American Experience. Bush was born an aristocrat and therefore above the law just enough, because laws don't exist to limit aristocrats: laws exist in the main to protect aristocrats from ordinary folks. When and if ordinary folks attain aristocracy, they too will enjoy immunity from limitation. So in essence, aristocrats like Bush have no legal restraints on them, except those agreed upon amongst themselves.

Now to be fair, spending one's life in such a protective zone as this might preclude understanding it as unequal, as privileged. But all these cats do go to good schools and get classical educations, where the great questions and concepts of the world are studied. They know what they're doing. So in this entitled sphere, being better than you is simply how it is when you wake up each day as Bush.

In this sphere, then, it is not cynical to appeal to the patriotism and racism of the masses because these are simply fuels that power voting behaviors. What ordinary people do and think is simply the landscape in which Bushes work through their lives, activate their higher calling. Using Willie Horton ads, or emphasizing oil wars over deomocracy movements is the means of doing business. Advancing the interests of the Bush family is automatically in the best interests of the United States, because, well, they're Bushes and that's that.

There's your banality of evil—just doing business. This is why George Herbert Walker Bush has no compunction about allowing his son to become President of the United States, even while it's clear that the son is retarded. Because even as that son destroys the known world, there is world enough left for Bushes and their kin to inhabit. Comfortably, too.

Bush was an ineffectual President because he had too little talent. He is an historical monster because he is unable to see the cruelty and irresponsibility in standing by while a fool has dismantled America. Bush could not have been a good President, even if he were a good person, and he cannot be a great person because he was President. He does not understand the humanity in people he sees as a lesser species, really, whether through his upbringing or through some other callousness. He has allowed the greatest tragedy in modern history, the Presidency of George W. Bush, by not ably fathering son or country.

There is nobility in a father sacrificing the world for his child. But that nobility comes from recognizing the consequences and taking the punishment. George W. Bush became President because his father ignored the obvious consequences of his son's incapacities. Likely seeing the world as belonging to the child, George Herbert Walker Bush demonstrated his utter disregard for basic citizenship. He has taken no punishment—indeed, pap like Hoyt's veers in the opposite direction. It's probable that Bush's eulogy, like Gerald Ford's, will salute an exemplary life thanks to efforts like Hoyt's.

When so many fathers have sacrificed their sons for the country, George Herbert Walker Bush sacrificed the country for an idiot son. If a statesman, as Bush has styled himself, there is no greater crime.

Song of the 60s

The turbulent 60s are remembered for acid trips, antiwar protests, voyages to the moon and "I Dream of Jeannie." But the 60s were funny—they also gave us the AFL and Spiro Agnew, Nancy Sinatra and the Silent Majority. When you look for the Sixties, you find as much Perry Como as you do the Electric Prunes.

OK, you say, that's easy. There's a counter counter-culture—so what? Well, to really get the 60s, and thus understand the inside-out nature of the human condition, you have to pour some mainstream into the counter-culture to give it legitimacy; then you also have to groom and button-down the counter-culture, that others might listen.

The 60s did just that. Dirty, smelly hippies tended to come from middle-class homes, while fat-cat Republicans appealed to working-class shmoes by insisting on the law and order that arrested working-class shmoes and undermined their economic security. But it's easier to look ata folk music as an example, which had a clear political message, within a simple structure, geared toward the everyday fellow with bills to pay.

By the 60s, folk music had reached urban areas from farms, work camps and boxcars. Its message of individual dignity in the face of official violence got the attention of intellectuals, who began morphing songs within its simple form about negotiating the anonymity of modern life. But these hipsters were pre-hair: the look was totally mainstream with an informal college bent. After the Beatles, 60s hair arrived and Folk followed along. Plus, Bob Dylan had led the form away from "Tom Dooley" toward "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." Beatles + Dylan = The Byrds, 1965. Eventually, it reduced to the single, singer-songwriter whose selling power dominated the 70s.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Folk was at its height in the early 60s before it melded with other pop strains to become The Mamas and the Papas. One such act was the duo Ian & Sylvia. They interspersed their own songs with traditional and standard songs from Folk's "catalog." Their voices worked nicely together, although Ian's was primary. What I find most interesting, and what Ian & Sylvia display, is the trained-voice style of singing you hear in Folk. If Ella Fitzgerald sang Folk, it would be usual for the form. Cripes, there are times when Ian sounds like Al Alberts, likely the most unpleasant singer of all time. Listen to another awful singer, Joan Baez: someone get that vibrato a drink, already! This is how Folk, while targeting its message to the exploitative heart of Western culture, is expressed in the same bougeois musical style as gave us Al Jolson (bad) and Tony Bennett (good). Dylan is teased mercilessly for his voice, but he was the god who freed us from that fatal Folk flaw.

Folkies, like most early Rock-era groups, wore suits and ties. Pretty much everyone did before the 70s, so when you combine a progressive message with status quo delivery, you have an inherent tension between meanings. Competing messages. It could only be resolved through rationalization, especially when the message wasn't completely formed, let alone understood. Folk lost and had to re-form as pop.

But that progressive message was still there and the understanding was indeed coming along at a nice pace. While songs about unionizing coal miners really did coincide with the emptiness of life in a gray flannel suit, it took the specter of annihilation and the murder of a President to clarify the fiction of most people's lives. So as Folk took a hiatus for several years, it was up to others to renew or repeat the simple lessons Folk offerd us. Dylan was still around and the Beatles tried to be relevant, but it was more mainstream guys who asked the tough questions: The Beach Boys, Johnny Rivers and yes—even Johnny Cash.

And Ed Ames. A rich baritone from the Ames Brothers and his own solo success, Ames went looking for the sharp new material that was changing Mom & Dad's records. New songs from the likes of Neil Diamond, Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach had made superstars of the artists who performed them. It was a new era for the Brylcream set, away from standards and toward contemporary relevance. It was think or swim for Adult Contemporary.

Ames took a risk and released "Who Will Answer?" in 1968, with tunes by Dylan, the Beatles, the Bee Gees (pre-Disco), the Mamas and the Papas, The Monkees, the Association and Petula Clark. The title track made the top 10 on Adult Contemporary charts, and even cracked the top 20 in Pop one week. "Who Will Answer?" is maybe that moment when Folk was able to reach people who weren't generally interested in social progress, but could stand to gain from it; and where Mainstreamers widened their record collections a little past Sinatra and Herb Alpert and extended a hand to Freedom Marchers from the backyard bar-b-que.

But it didn't last, even if there was such a moment, really. In 1968, Rock went into hyperspace, angrily leaving behind any mainstream pretensions. Society engaged in actual street battles and social progress was identified with trouble makers, labeled as radical. The Mainstream plugged its ears amd closed ranks. Idealism was sent to jail or shot dead outright, but everyone grew lots of facial hair as a consolation prize.

Any idealism of the 60s gave way to merchandising and malaise. Baby Boomers gave their fringed suede coats to Goodwill and went to business school adter Nixon resigned, content to have fallen Presidents as bookends to their decade of easier sex disguised as a new mentality. Unable to recocile neckties with songs about hoboes, Folk had earlier ratioanalized itself by appealing to parents. Mainstream music had needed brainy new music to survive, and it too rationalized itself by buying off songwriters and dressing the artists more casually. Music stood to bridge divides for a moment, but ended up as simple entertainment, with common points of rference, for different groups locked in conflict.

Everybody lost. That is the most apt summation of the 60s.

Palfrey's Death—Unsolved Forever!

The DC Madam is dead. Long live the ATF...

Deborah Jeanne Palfrey went from nowheres-ville wallflower to US Pimp. Her call girl service catered to Washington's most powerful men, (and Senator Vitter, too) making her rich and powerful. Of course, in her biz, it also made her anonymous and loathesome. Everybody dislikes a cat house before and after they do business there. It's the downside to the sex trade.

So when Palfrey got busted, she did what any self-respecting service provider would do, given the disrespectful treatment a hooker gets at the precinct: she opened the "little black book." A Madam, like a gangster, is supposed to keep her mouth shut and go to jail. But a gangster gets respect where a hooker does not. So publicity demonstrates the only power she has over her circumstances, making famous clients sweat like the pigs they are.

So Palfrey named a few names and went to court. She threatened, in a loser-ish kind of way, to pull out all the stops if she got sent up the river. But when she was convicted, she quietly killed herself. Flash back a year or so to one of Palfrey's "operatives," as it were, Brandy Britton. Like Palfrey she had an unfortunate life, and when she was busted as a call girl, threatened to tell everything about everybody. She too committed suicide instead.

I have decided it's not a coincidence—the two suicides and the timing of the two events, that is. I have seen too many movies with Gene Hackman as the bad guy to accept that these gals were too dumb to go on when they held the Ace. I declare here and now they were executed by secret government agents whose job it is to destroy ordinary people whose lives intersect the soft, stinky underbelly of men in power.

It's quite simple, really. Whistle blowers are kept in check by the fear of reprisal. Reprisal is death. Guys like Bill Clinton don't hesitate to kill you, so you can just imagine how the Dicks (Nixon, Cheney, Armitage) respond. Nixon killed the Black Panthers, the Kennedys and Marilyn. Cheney shot a guy in the face and made him apologize. If you're that macho, imagine your reaction to some call girl's threat.

Yup. "Suicide" in her mother's shed. If you believe this, you need more time with the facts. And at the movies.