He's a fucking addict, remember? His solutions are always to increase the amount of whatever it is that isn't working: booze, coke, oil, sex, god, soldiers--increase the number of whatever he was into and somehow what had failed to bring him to climax before would now make a drug party the whole family could love. Think of Bush as our very first truly post-post-modern junkie President.
He cannot see "the bottom" because he resides in it, endlessly yelling up at the clouds while Bill Kristol tells him how smart he is, or Chris Matthews contemplates his man-crush and stares blankly past him. A very few people with a lot of money are playing Ned Beatty to Bush's reactionary anti-Howard Beale bully/user. He's not the first President to be handled with Kid Gloves, but he is the first one to be handled with latex ones used to ward off communicable diseases. Diseased, used, crazy, hungry, in a perpetual withdrawl state, he represents The Revolution without Love or Peace: just singed receptors in the privileged class, the smell of sulphur at the edge of nowhere.
With no one able to kick Bush to the curb, with his powerful millionaire and billionaire supporters propping him up like a Weekend at Bernie's Corpse, he blinks stupidly into the Eye of the Needle and waits for a feeling he can't get any more, the rush of dope, the numb-hum of cocaine, the Skull & Bones twitters when he bullies some poor slob into a corner. Bush is all about the high, and zero about the why. We are witnessing not the War on Terror but the War on Drugs, the War on Maintaining a Feeling that eludes the Junkie more and more until finally he just shoves everything in the baggy into his arm and doubles over passed out or dead, one result more or less like the other.
There is no redemption for a man who has burned out the remaining receptors he once had, no glorious moment of recognition or sapient epiphany, just more injections, more smoke, more disease. Bush may have quit his druggy ways, but his druggy ways never quit him: just give him 20,000 more and that's it! C'mon, man, don't be a loser. Just 20,000 more: I can feel it, man. I'm so close to being a winner.
The difference between Bush and a street drug user is a matter of entitlement, the random nature of chance and fate and family. Sociopath or not, he has already carved out his own sarcophagous, which is the living death of his life.
Look at him the next time you have to stop at the end of an offramp only to be confronted with a homeless person seeking cash: He holds out his hands just like he has for years; scolding you at times, yelling at you, yet even then manages a forced smirk as he stumbles in his later, darker days. And make no mistake, these are his later, darker days.
So our junkie President wants 20,000 more of something to inject into his veins, 20,000 more to save his high, his dream, his party. I say we don't give it to him, but it probably won't matter. His wealthy friends will more than likely sneak contraband to him in the bathroom and help him to straighten his tie and tamp down his hair, but he's just another fucking junkie with fake friends who are using him to keep their wallets fat. Poor Bush: all of his friends feel sorry for him. They will try to cheer him up with 20,000 more toys to play with, but he'll burn those up in time. Like any good junkie, he eventually burns everyone he touches.
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Originally posted at Correntewire. Look for the MJS tag.
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