Salon: Is there life after Bush?

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Is there life after Bush?
We've been hating him forever, but he's leaving. Now we have to decide what to do with the rest of our lives.
By Gary Kamiya

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First, of course, there's going to be one hell of a mess to clean up. Whoever replaces Bush is going to face a daunting array of national and international problems. God only knows what will be happening in Iraq by then; whether or not U.S. troops are out, we could be watching a genocide. The rest of the Middle East could easily have degenerated further. Radical Islamists are still going to be planning terror attacks. The global environment will not magically heal itself. Our economy, propped up with Chinese money and crippled with an enormous deficit, could have turned south. The unhealthy schism between red-state and blue-state views of the world could have gotten wider. And there are all those festering problems that Bush's world-scale idiocies have allowed us to ignore -- little things like the healthcare crisis, race relations, the dismal state of public education, and the soaring prison population.

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One of the consequences of living under a dreadful president like Bush is that you start magically thinking that getting rid of him will solve everything. You start believing if it weren't for Bush, the glaciers would not be melting, the Democrats would grow a spine and Bible-thumping reactionaries would be reading Bertrand Russell. Alas, the day after the Bush-countdown keychain becomes a collector's item, these things will still all be true.

So we will have to recalibrate our brains, learn how to make finer distinctions, be less Manichaean in our judgments. Bush has been so egregious, such a cardboard villain, that he has made us intellectually lazy -- just about anything he is for, you know you're probably going to be against. This is not exactly training to run an intellectual triathlon. Whoever succeeds him is going to be good in some ways, not so good in other ways. The knee-jerk response was appropriate to Bush -- his entire presidency consisted of whacking the national patella with a huge hammer. But it won't make sense anymore. We're going to have to learn to work with gray, not black and white.

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I don't mean we should stop analyzing politics, taking it seriously or being politically active. Politics is inescapable. It's how power operates, and when power is being used by corrupt or foolish men for corrupt or foolish purposes, as a responsible citizen -- or just a sentient human -- you'd better pay attention and respond. But power itself is ultimately sterile, because it's purely instrumental. You use power so you can make life better; it isn't life itself. Obsessing about power or politics takes your mind away from the things that really matter. Art, literature, music, science, religion, sports, friendship, love -- these things are outside the realm of politics. The famous '60s motto, "The personal is the political," summons us into a nightmarish world. Politics, like power, coarsens; total surrender to it leaves you unable to appreciate the fragility of things that exist for their own sake. In the end, political obsession is self-devouring; like the onion peeled by Ibsen's Peer Gynt, there is nothing inside.

Paradoxically, the more you hate Bush, the greater the danger you will become as hollow as he is. (This may help explain the Carville-Matalin phenomenon: Perhaps people who are utterly political, even when they hold diametrically opposed views, in some hidden way are exactly the same.)

Much more @ http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/02/20/after_bush/print.html

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