Sabbath eve, January 16, 2009

Indulge me for a moment. Imagine if something came to pass because you wrote that it would. Most times when I write I know that’s not the case—I am one more bullshitter with an opinion, just as likely to be wrong as I am to be right.

But every once in a while, I get this feeling that the words I write are not my own. I’m sure I am not alone in this, for I have read the words of others and had this same feeling come upon me—that I was reading inspired words and the things being said would come to pass.

While writing Ruminations from the Garden I wrote about the curse of the first-born, how it applied to me and to our president at the time: George W. Bush. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I did know that this country would falter under his watch. I can’t describe the feeling I got when I wrote these words—in some strange way I am a lot like Bush—raised among the same people, we walk and talk a lot alike—among our peers willful ignorance of matters that don’t interest us is a trademark, yet we can be deceptively intelligent when called to be. I knew what motivated bush—that he truly believed in what he was doing, and that he was dead fucking wrong, that everything he touched would turn to shit in his hands as surely as it had for me in my days as a marijuana smuggler.

You see, I also believed I was doing the right thing. And I was dead wrong.

Bush was no more at fault than the first born sons of Egypt in Moses’ day. He was a product of the American Empire, of the dominant race and class, a male from an aristocratic line, born into privilege, pride embodied in human flesh. The first born sons of Egypt became evil and so did he, just like a wasp grows up to be a wasp. Neither they nor he had a clue that was the case. Pride is a sin that blinds it possessor.

Like the character in the movie Angel Heart, George W. Bush will spend the rest of his life learning who he was and what happened by his hand; the full consequences of his actions and inactions have barely begun to manifest; we have a nightmare yet to come, the result of actions taken under his watch, probably worse than anything experienced in the history of the United States of America to date in size or scale.

We as a nation were also blinded by pride and ripe for a fall. Bush just happened to be the one chosen to lead us into collapse. Each of us will discover, one grisly piece at a time, all the ways that we have hurt and injured this world by our own ignorance, greed and pride, either by our actions, or worse yet, our failure to act. As surely as we breath, there will be blowback due to the way we have treated other nations, peoples and the planet on which we reside.

Barack Obama is the product of an oppressed people. He is smart. He cares about this country. He is free from the curse of the first born. He will do his best to mitigate the damage.

But the legacies of previous administrations, not only that of bush the junior, but also of all American administrations over the past half century, will haunt him and us like a recurring nightmare.

The Project for a New American Century will someday be looked upon as a sick joke; Neo-con will become a curse word no one willingly wears.

After the fall, it remains to be seen whether something resembling a Republic can be resurrected from the ashes of the American Empire.

George Bush, here’s your legacy: you and other members of the Neo-con movement forsook the privilege and responsibility of being an American at a critical time when the whole word was depending on you.

You say you have no regrets, but you will live to regret what you have done and the rest of the world will regret following your example.

You will someday meet hundreds of thousands of people that suffered and died by your hand.

Fighting for peace is akin to fucking for abstinence.

A total goddamned lie.

PS.

Welcome home, Mr. Bush.