|
Stop
It, You're Killing Me
March
31, 2004
By The Plaid Adder
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that...
And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But
it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story
we have heard too often; we still find it funny, but we don't
laugh any more."
- Samuel Beckett, Endgame
2004 has not been kind to the Bush administration. Rove,
the man with his finger on the pulse of the lowest common
denominator, suddenly seems to have lost his touch; Bush lurched
from his embarrassing State of the Union Address in January
to an equally embarrassing appearance on Meet The Press, and
then before he could scrabble back up the slope he was hit
with the barrage of criticism over his new campaign ads, in
which he used film of the World Trade Center attacks (including
an image of a flag-draped dead body being carried out of Ground
Zero on a stretcher).
Now all of a sudden Bush is defending himself - or rather
his mouthpieces are defending him - on all fronts, from his
record on preventing terrorism to a seemingly innocuous speech
he recently gave at the Radio Correspondents' Dinner. As little
sympathy as I have for Bush and his handlers, I have to say
that I understand why this last flap might have come as a
surprise. After all, Bush was only doing something he's done
many times in the past. And in the past, this tactic has always
worked very well for him; so it's no wonder his team finds
it baffling that this one time it appears to have blown up
in their faces.
On a small scale, this is an emblem of everything that has
gone wrong for them since they took office: they are using
old strategies to deal with a situation that has radically
changed. 2004 is not 2000; and although Bush is indeed still
a joke, he is now no longer funny.
EVEN A C STUDENT
Bush's speech at the dinner was basically him narrating
a series of slides, each showing Bush doing something amusing.
The joke that landed him in hot water was a running gag about
the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. One photo showed
him looking under a table in his office, while Bush said,
"Those weapons of mass destruction have gotta be here somewhere."
This was repeated again later with similar photos showing
Bush looking for, and not finding, weapons of mass destruction
in places where it would be ridiculous to expect them.
The joke appears to have provoked outrage amongst the families
of soldiers in Iraq, who find it offensive that Bush would
be joking about the rationale he used to send their loved
ones to war. The White House line is that he was not making
fun of the soldiers, but merely trying out a little 'self-deprecating
humor.' Or, in other words, he was only doing something that
everyone should be used to by now: making fun of his own stupidity.
Bush started doing that on the campaign trail in 2000, before
he even took office. His rocky relationship with the English
language was noted and commented upon early in the race, and
his handlers apparently decided to take the sting out by having
him make fun of himself first. The basic idea appears to have
been to pass Bush off as a kind of better-looking, fitter,
more 'presidential' version of Homer Simpson: sure, he's kind
of a bonehead, but his heart is in the right place, and people
love him anyway.
One particularly high-profile example of this strategy was
the commencement speech Bush delivered at Yale University
in 2001, in which he spent a fair amount of his ten-minute
time slot making fun of his own slackerhood. The centerpiece
was a line addressed "to the C students" to the effect that
his example proved that "you too can become President."
I remember this speech because it was the occasion of my
first ever article here at DU. I found it simply incredible
that the President of the United States was going around in
public calling attention to the fact that he had essentially
pissed away one of the finest college educations that money
could buy, and then apparently just gotten comfortable with
his resulting level of ignorance. To me, putting C students
in charge of the country seemed like an extraordinarily bad
idea. But looking back on that piece I can see that there
was a lot I didn't understand about what was going on there.
After all, that speech wasn't really for the graduating
seniors who were listening to him. It was for all the people
out there who had come to see themselves as C students - people
who had been made to feel that they were not smart, that they
were not above average, and that there was no point to learning
any more than they had to. Bush's refusal to be educated was
one of the ways in which he demonstrated that despite being
the pampered son of one of the most rich and powerful families
in America, he was still a 'regular guy.'
Yes, he'd been to Yale - but it hadn't changed him. He was
still the kind of president that any guy could be if he got
a break - not brilliant, not articulate, but down-to-earth,
with good instincts that compensated for his lack of sophistication
and book-smarts. He might not be the best and the brightest;
but he would prove through his leadership, determination,
and faith, that you didn't have to be the best and
the brightest to lead the greatest nation on earth.
There has been a lot of energy invested by Bush's opponents
- myself, in my own small way, included - in denouncing this
rejection of knowledge and intelligence, and insisting that
it was dangerous and wrong to install someone as president
whose knowledge about the rest of the world appeared to be
minimal and whose language often revealed a narrowness of
mind that might easily make it hard for him to rise to certain
challenges. Unfortunately much of this stuff - and again,
I include myself - only made the problem worse by extending
our denunciation of Bush's own stupidity to include that of
anyone who would vote for him.
I have read plenty of rants about how dumb the American electorate
is, and how this is really the root of our problems. I don't
think that's the problem. I think there are a lot of people
in America who are actually much smarter than Bush but will
still identify with him because they have been made to feel
stupid. Think about the amount of standardized testing that
any child has to go through on his way through a public school
system; think about how often you have been assigned a rank
or a percentile. It's a punishing routine even for people
who test well; for people who test poorly all it does is make
them feel like failures.
People hate feeling that way; and part of Bush's appeal,
especially as contrasted to Gore, was that he didn't make
people feel stupid. They could laugh at his gaffes with affection
and sympathy, and triumph vicariously when he got to the White
House in spite of them.
So when Bush shows a slide of himself looking under a table
for nuclear/chemical/biological weapons and says, "Nope, no
weapons here," it's supposed to be just one more joke about
himself as a lovable bonehead who means well but gets confused
sometimes. Except this time it wasn't. And that's because,
three years into his presidency, people are starting to realize
that this is all an act. Bush may indeed be pretty stupid,
for all I know. But he is surrounded by people who, whatever
else you may say about them, are not blithering idiots. And
they all know - just as we all know - that if we didn't find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that's not because Bush
told the inspectors to look under the furniture in the Oval
Office.
Bush's performance as goodnatured clown is now no longer
a sufficient explanation for why his administration has failed
so badly and on so many fronts. For that, we have to go back
to the winter of 2002, and another interesting chapter in
Bush's career as funny man.
EVERYTHING ON BLACK
The first documented instance I could find of Bush's infamous
"trifecta" joke on the whitehouse.gov
site was in a speech Bush gave in February 2002 at a North
Carolina Republican Party fundraiser. Here it is:
And we've got a job to do at home, as well. You
know, I was campaigning in Chicago and somebody asked me,
is there ever any time where the budget might have to go
into deficit? I said only if we were at war or had a national
emergency or were in recession. (Laughter.) Little did I
realize we'd get the trifecta. (Laughter.)
Bush liked this joke so well he used it a week later at
a Republican fundraiser in Iowa:
You know, I remember campaigning in Chicago and
somebody said, would you ever spend a deficit? And I said,
only if we're at war or we had a recession or there was
a national emergency. Little did I realize we'd get the
trifecta. (Laughter.)
And again, later in March at a fundraising dinner for Saxby
Chambliss's Senate campaign (Bush sure does do a lot of fund-raising:)
I'll never forget one time in Chicago when a reporter
said, would you ever deficit spend? And I said, well, only
- only if we were at war, only if there were a national
emergency, or only if there is a recession. Never did I
believe we'd get the trifecta. (Laughter.)
I'll spare you the repetition; Bush uses this exact joke,
with minor variations in phrasing, thirteen times over the
course of five months. Obviously he thought it was a winner.
Now that is something that I always found hard to understand,
because what he's doing seems to be perfectly clear: he's
using the September 11 attacks to justify doing something
he had always planned to do, which is cut taxes for the rich
while giving huge amounts of government money away to Cheney's
business cronies. Especially given that we were fighting one
war and being worked up for the next, his insistence on getting
his buddies their kickbacks was criminally irresponsible.
He got away with it by passing it off as an unavoidable response
to the "national emergency" that had happened only six months
earlier.
Even in someone else's mouth, that joke wouldn't have been
funny. Even bitter, godless, cynical, even-death-wears-an-ironic-grin
types like me didn't laugh at September 11. Not only was that
not ha-ha funny, it was just too awful to generate even black
humor. But coming from Bush, that joke wasn't just not funny.
It was sick.
The online Oxford English Dictionary defines 'trifecta'
as a gambling term: to get the 'trifecta' you have to pick
the first three horses to finish a race in the order in which
they will place. Taken straight, what Bush is saying in is,
"I bet on three things that would happen, in that order...and
I won!" Now, the joke is supposed to be ironic; the point
is meant to be that no president in his right mind would really
bet on that particular combination of three events, or be
happy to find out he 'won.'
The problem is that by making the joke Bush is revealing
that as a matter of fact, it's not ironic; it's actually true.
The joke itself reveals something that should be unthinkable:
that what was a disaster for everyone else in America actually
was a jackpot for the Bush administration. After 9/11, while
the rest of us were grieving, the Bush administration began
raking in the chips. They got more than they would ever have
dreamed of asking for under any other circumstances: the USA
PATRIOT Act, tax cuts galore, apparently unlimited military
spending, a full-scale war for which there was no legitimate
justification, no-bid no-oversight contracts awarded to Cheney's
cronies... through no virtue of his own, after 9/11 Bush became
the most popular president ever, and his cabal was utterly
shameless about milking that for all it was worth.
That should have bothered people a lot more than it did.
Because the trifecta joke was a coded - and not even very
cleverly coded - acknowledgment of the rot at the root of
this administration. Their immediate response to the September
11 attacks was not, "What can we do for our suffering people?"
but "What can we get out of this?"
And as we are now finding out, one of the things they got
out of it was war with Iraq. Which they justified by swearing
up, down, and sideways that Iraq was stocked with weapons
of mass destruction. Which, as we now know, were never there.
I guess the joke was on us.
ISN'T IT IRONIC
As I said, the Bush team can be forgiven to some extent
for making this last blunder. Bush's search for weapons of
mass destruction has been an international joke for a long
time. For those of us who are connoisseurs of the absurd,
there was no absurdity fuller-bodied or with a stronger tang
than the ongoing saga of the world's most expensive snipe
hunt.
You see, for those of us who were on to Bush early, the hunt
for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction really was ironic,
just as the trifecta joke wasn't. We knew the weapons weren't
there. What's more, we knew that the Bush administration didn't
give a damn whether they were there or not. It was clear from
the way Powell and Bush kept moving the bar that they did
not actually want Saddam Hussein to disarm, or even
to comply fully with the inspections. What they wanted was
for him to keep stonewalling so that they would have an excuse
to invade.
The best early example of what Bush's trumped-up "hunt for
WMDs" did to our sense of reality was the often-repeated axiom
that "it's up to Saddam Hussein to prove that he has no weapons
of mass destruction." This is a logical absurdity: you can't
prove a negative. If pest control showed up at my house and
demanded that I prove to them that I was not harboring
a live Bengal tiger, I wouldn't be able to do it. I could
allow them to search the premises; I could point out that
it would be difficult to conceal such an animal, what with
the growling and the many pounds of raw meat it went through
every day and the tiger droppings and so forth. But the fact
that they didn't find a tiger in my house would not prove
that I didn't have it. It would only prove that they couldn't
find it. The tiger could have been creeping stealthily from
one room to the next; it could have been concealed underneath
the basement in a secret crawl space; it could be outside
in a mobile tiger containment unit ready to be driven over
the state line until the coast was clear. If, for some reason,
pest control had become fanatically convinced that I was harboring
that tiger, they would keep coming back to search for it,
no matter how often they didn't find it.
And yet, this absurdity was swallowed by the media, and
it became accepted truth; and that's what happened month after
month. A new world was constructed that defied the laws of
logic; the landscape of reality was folded, spindled, and
mutilated until it started to look like an M.C. Escher etching.
For those of us who realized how distorted and insane this
stage set of a world really was, the only way to stay faithful
to solid ground and common sense was to laugh at the farce
that was playing out upon it. And we laughed with a will,
in the beginning.
We went into Iraq in March of 2003. The invasion phase was
over within a month. After that, the 'search for the weapons
of mass destruction' began. But it did not take long for us
to realize there was something funny going on here. As early
as April 25, 2003, some "senior officials" leaked a story
to ABC
News admitting that the WMDs were never more than a pretext:
Officials inside government and advisers outside
told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of
Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war
from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home
to Americans. "We were not lying," said one official.
"But it was just a matter of emphasis." Officials
now say they may not find hundreds of tons of mustard and
nerve agents and maybe not thousands of liters of anthrax
and other toxins.
A matter of emphasis. Now that's funny.
By May 11, 2003, the first U.S. inspections teams were preparing
to come home emptyhanded. By May 31, the intelligence community
was starting to make noises about whose fault it really was
that we got embroiled in this hunt for nothing. By June 10,
Paul Wolfowitz had joined the group of administration officials
who had admitted on the record that the WMDs were basically
just a pretext. By September 2003, the Bush administration,
in an unusually desperate bid for ass-coverage, was floating
the "flypaper theory" - the claim that actually, the war had
nothing to do with WMDs, but it was all about terrorism: you
see, we went into Iraq for the specific purpose of turning
it into a hotbed of terrorism, thus drawing all the terrorists
into Iraq and away from America. (If you really need a rebuttal,
try this.)
And by October 2003, David Kay finally reported that, yes,
in fact, we had finally proved - at least to the satisfaction
of himself and his team of inspectors - that Saddam Hussein
had no weapons of mass destruction.
So by the time Bush showed that slide of himself looking
under the table for weapons of mass destruction in March 2004,
the 'hunt for WMDs' had been a laughing stock for at least
ten months. No doubt they thought it was finally safe for
him to get on the mock-the-pretext bandwagon. What they failed
to realize is that there is a big difference between Bush
and everyone else who had been telling WMD jokes for the past
ten months - and that is that Bush, as the President of the
United States, is actually responsible for both the phony
pretext and the war that it produced.
That's why the WMD jokes are not funny coming from him: he
was the one who got us into this mess, and he's the one who
should have prevented it. To have created this colossal waste
of time, money, and human life, and then to stand back and
go "aw, shucks, I'm such a bonehead" and expect us to forgive
him for it by laughing with him is not only ludicrous but
infuriating.
The excuse they've come up with - that this is just Bush
"poking fun at himself" - only underlines the narcissism of
this administration. Hey, Bush, this thing with the WMDs is
not all about you. The fact that you got us into a
war over nothing isn't just a personal embarrassment that
you can laugh off. Your actions have consequences. We feel
them. We would like to feel like you understand that real
people are affected by decisions you make, and that your stupidity
or lying or corruption has a real - and highly painful - impact
on our lives. Is any of this registering? Hello?
But responsibility isn't something this administration understands;
and that's exactly what that running gag at the Radio Correspondents'
Dinner demonstrated. Here's a man who has, through either
his own incompetence or his own corruption, caused thousands
of human beings to suffer and die over something that turned
out to be entirely imaginary. If he were an ordinary human
being, he would be crushed with guilt and remorse.
That's something that Richard Clarke demonstrated last week,
when he began his testimony by apologizing to the 9/11 families
for having failed them. Clarke has to know, intellectually,
that he did not personally cause 9/11; but because it happened
on his watch he feels some responsibility, and by apologizing
he was letting everyone know that he took that responsibility
seriously. He was also impressing upon everyone watching the
fact that we will never, ever get such an apology from George
W. Bush. George W. Bush doesn't think it's tragic that he
got us embroiled in an expensive, messy, brutal war that we
didn't have to fight. He, apparently, thinks it's funny.
Well, the rest of us are not laughing. His routine is killing
people. Every one of his little pratfalls is costing us; we
pay for his blunders in blood. The fact that he does not appear
to take himself or his job seriously has become a real problem
for us. It is true that his presidency has turned out to be
one long, bitter, black joke. But if he were any kind of a
decent human being, he wouldn't expect us to laugh at it.
The Plaid Adder's demented ravings have been delighting
an equally demented online audience since 1996. More of the
same can be found at the Adder's
Lair.
View
the Adder's Archive
|
