The were trying to keep straight faces and conceal their glee as they reported on a parody entitled 'Goodnight, Bush.'
I will say this looks to be a very well executed parody. I might even buy a copy. Unfortunately, the subtext of such items on NPR is about as subtle as an invincible wino.
I mean seriously, we already know Obama is the next President of the United States. Conservatives don't really like McCain, and if we wanted a liberal Republican in the White House, people wouldn't be so unhappy with George W. He's just LBJ on an elephant.
But the mood of premature celebration that permeates things like NPR is that the Obama administration will be some huge improvement. Which simply is not true. It'll be a different flavor of disaster, but it will still be a disaster. Trust me, Presidents make life worse. All Presidents. There's nothing to be done, you might as well wish for a benign serial rapist.
Granted, the present administration has set a high bar for unmitigated disaster, their utter disregard for human rights (Gitmo, domestic spying, etc.), warmongering (Afghanistan: fair enough at the time; Iraq: Bad Touch!), reckless spending (I miss the fiscal restraint of Jimmy Carter), and blithe insistence that things are going well even when your city is under water. But trust me, Obama is a master politician—he will come up with a sequel that will make you nostalgic for this idiot from Texas who says 'nucular.'
Look at all the people who miss Clinton these days if you don't believe me. P.J. O'Rourke pretty much summed it up when he said of Slick Willie, 'Such has not been seen in the executive branch since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was wheeled up the disabled access ramp to the Gates of Hell.' Yet the only attribute of from the Clinton era that Bush hasn't bested for awful is Bitchy First Lady.
But anyway, this NPR review (it bordered on a full-length reading) of 'Goodnight, Bush,' put me in mind of a conversation I had with my friend Julie the other day. I was ranting about the disgusting government of China and how I wish the IOC would just pull the plug on the Bejing games, and she brought up America's human rights deficits.
And they're considerable. The drug war is nothing but Jim Crow The Next Generation for a start.
But what does China's tyrannical regime do with dissidents? It guns them down. It disappears them into a prison system beyond Kafka's worst imaginings. It runs them over with tanks on live TV given half a chance.
What does our regime do with its dissidents? It funds them. All this fun at George Bush's expense was taking place on a network that relies on government funding. And these 'dissidents' aren't even in danger of getting fired, much less fired upon.
As Lenny Bruce pointed out, the Romans could congratulate themselves on a lot, but feeding Christians to lions was 'as rough as segregation gets.' I too find America's self-adulation annoying, but trying to say our government sucks as hard as China's? Bullshit.
Plus, clever as 'Goodnight, Bush' appears to be, it seems to me the Dead Kennedys said it so much better, over twenty years ago:
1 comment:
Although you and I probably see many things differently, I agree with nearly everything you said here about our national leaders past and present. (And I hope you meant it, because I also miss Jimmy Carter, a guy who told us the truth about our energy policies and got ridiculed for it.) I especially agree with your take on China's human rights violations.
My only hope for Obama is that while he most certainly will screw up, he won't do it on as colossal a scale as the present White House occupant, so convinced as he is in the divine rightness of his ungodly wrongness.
(By the way, I loved your remark Sunday about which national registry your landmark gas station should be on.)
Thanks.
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