Essay: Death of the 41st President of the United States of America (Link)
Musings on the Death of the 41st President of the United States of America
Despite all of its negative qualities, one of the few good things you can say about death is that it is the great equalizer in human existence. No matter how many CIA-puppet, international drug dealers a man has double crossed, how many innocent Iraqi children he’s starved to death or how many Prime Ministers of Japan he’s vomited all over, the grim reaper comes for all of us in due time. And so it is that Poppy, the plutocrat princeling of putrid Republican presidents has shuffled off that same mortal coil he helped so many others discard during his own lifetime. George Herbert Walker Bush is dead at ninety-four years old, and likely not a moment too soon for the young ladies who worked at his local Hooters.
In life there are some villains whose infamy will write their names across your memory long after they die, and others whose legacy will continue to ruin lives long after their personal wretchedness has been forgotten. Poppy Bush was almost certainly the latter but something tells me that the former head of the CIA and Reagan’s largely unrecognized point man on what would eventually be known as the Iran-Contra scandal, probably wouldn’t mind the anonymity. If this is to be the last time I remember George Bush Sr. however, as a union-family child from the cored-out heart of the American manufacturing sector, I feel a certain vengeful obligation to put the whole thing in writing.
There are those who will admonish me for taking perverse delight in the task of shoveling the final load of clean, moist earth on the desiccated corpse of Poppy Bush. To these smooth-brained people I say “please look at this photo and then kindly go fuck yourself.” It is important to speak the truth about monstrous dead men both because as a society, knowing our shameful past can help us to recognize future monsters before they commit atrocities and because in an environment of carefully constructed, pro-establishment lies it falls on observers who lived through those atrocities to protect the truth for those too young to remember.
Of course, aristocratic devils never find themselves short of advocates and even as you read this, the power-worshiping corporate media are busy constructing a fetid, false hagiography on behalf of the elder Bush; a repugnant, myth-making exercise built around the former president’s military service, his supposed rejection of right wing extremism and the fact that he wasn’t very fond of swine emperor Trump. Unsurprisingly, these distortions and half truths are part of a larger rehabilitation project surrounding the entire Bush family; a white-washing campaign conducted by influential elites in the media, for powerful elites in US politics. The truth is much darker and remains on the media margins because in the rarefied world of the American establishment, the Bushes are the right sort of family – filthy-rich, politically connected, old money Nazi-sympathizers who bolstered their fortunes by committing a little light treason on behalf of Adolf Hitler’s war machine.
So who was George Herbert Walker Bush really and what effect did his one-term presidency have on America? He was a lying, grotesque war criminal, a paragon of puritan moralist cruelty, and one of the key fathers of modern terrorism. Behind his dorky, grandfatherly persona Bush was a sort of route chameleon monster, a cunning opportunist who could at once run the most racist campaign ad since the days of Goldwater and yet also admonish the “fringe” white supremacist element in the GOP; both with equally unnerving lack of conviction. The former president will be remembered by those who speak the truth as an awkward, cold-blooded lizard who taught himself to walk upright like humans do, a macabre wooden puppet with a gore-splattered, emotionless human face stapled to its skeletal cranium. Bush Sr. was a noxious creature of privilege, power and political influence whose lasting legacy in American history will be reduced to spawning the president who launched the endless war on terror and accelerated the rise of global fascism.
Perhaps in the final analysis the real key to understanding the first Bush presidency is found only in the context of other, more memorable and dynamic men.
Economically the first Bush era served as a sort of transitional (but largely cosmetically so) period between Ronald Reagan’s libertarian market fundamentalism and Bill Clinton’s bootstrap mythology-fueled neoliberalism. Indeed, much of the modern centrist “budget balancing” movement owes its mainstream credibility to Poppy Bush’s then-unpopular commitment to American austerity. Domestically, the elder Bush’s cynical escalation of the War on Drugs helped put a doddering, less threatening face on America’s (then) new form of “colorblind” racial injustice.
The area in which George H.W. Bush’s presidency was most consequential however is almost certainly his role in normalizing a belligerent, muscular U.S. foreign policy. As the gatekeeper of the American empire who oversaw the “end of history” it was Bush who transitioned the U.S. and its NATO partners from the proxy-war based, covert chess match of the Cold War to the “New World Order” of modern American exceptionalism. Under Bush, the Pig Empire finally “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and our enemies would soon learn that “this aggression will not stand” because he’d “never apologize for the United States” and with no more credible threats to keep US imperial power in check, “what we say goes.”
And now, like the tile mosaic bearing his likeness that used to adorn the entrance to the Al- Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, George Herbert Walker Bush is gone; washed away like grains of sand in some forgotten desert storm. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
Goodbye Poppy, I’ll see you in hell.
– nina illingworth
