It has been a long 8 years, an age of a Dark Age, and I freely admit I wasn't at all sure it would actually end, not until Bush screwed himself so badly that even his own party ran away from him. For a while it looked as if they might be able to cover up their mistakes, theft, and moral bankruptcy long enough to eliminate the presidential term limit and steal yet a third election. In the end, it was the very excess on which they prided themselves that took them down.
George W Bush's lopsided career is tragedy by neither Miller's nor any classic definition although it contains elements of both. It's as if Willy Loman had been born a king: no talent for anything either innate or developed, a high pride undeserved and poisoned by prejudice and pettiness, a man as my mother used to say, whose "heart was common as dirt", as mean and insignificant a man as Willy and yet a man given great power and responsibility far beyond his capacity for judgment or understanding.
That he would misuse it was as predictable as the winter paths of geese. He had no ability or even desire to do otherwise. So stupid, so arrogant, he still doesn't realize he was about as wrong as it's possible to be about everything. Has anyone, ever, had a presidency or held any office where they did nothing right? Nothing at all?
At that point we're beginning to approach farce, as if we'd given the Three Stooges the presidency and seriously expected them to run the country competently. Except even then there was an innate decency in the Stooges for all their bluster and swagger that was missing from Bush. He was the kind of clown who makes you laugh by accident and then insults you, the kind of clown who thinks mass murder and plague are funny because he hasn't been killed and isn't himself sick. When Shakespeare's high-minded sovereigns fall from grace through inherent flaws, they fall from a time when they thought they were going to change the world. Bush merely fell off a stool he shouldn't have tried to stand on in the first place.
Oh, he thought - was arrogantly positive - that he was right about everything and was going to be the guy who proved it to the world, but it was the certainty of a 5-year-old who just knows the world is flat because, well, it's obvious. And now, even though the truth is all around him, he still won't accept a round earth because he can't climb down long enough to admit he was wrong, especially about something as fundamental, as basic and accepted knowledge by everyone (except the Flat Earth Society). When a stupid kid insists the moon is made of cheddar cheese, is it a "tragedy" when he finds out it isn't? Hardly.
But it can't really be farce, either. Farce presupposes accident, misunderstanding, incompetence, and/or ignorance leading to a crash of illusion against reality precipitated by co-incidence and framed by unintended consequences. But Bush got everything he wanted, got exactly the outcomes he was trying for. The consequences were foreseeable, the policies deliberately set up to provoke them. They did exactly what they were supposed to do for the people who were supposed to benefit from them. Whatever that is, it isn't farce.
The tragedy of the Bush Era comes clearer when we realize that Shrub was the culmination of a long, blind love affair the country had with conservatism. The tragedy isn't Bush's but the entire nation's. In the Age of the Common Man, we the people are the ones who flew too high, wanted too much, lived on hubris and hope like beggars dreaming of rainbow gold and hidden treasure under the compost heap in our neighbor's garden. We are the ones who couldn't see and wouldn't believe that pie-in-the-sky was a mirage and pigs with wings were myth, not some new scientific cross-breed, no matter what Cheney the Snake Oil Salesman said.
The tragedy is ours, not Bush's, and to a certain extent we, as Franklin once warned, finally got the government we deserved.
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