|
Tuesday, 19 September 2006 16:14 |
 | | Mark West |
Like a lot of people, I found myself lost in a haze of remembrance on Sept. 11. There was the remembrance of the horror I felt when I first realized what was happening, when I got the phone call from my mother telling me what was going on. I remember the shock of seeing the World Trade Center buildings collapse, and then of realizing that the buildings werenët empty, not by a stretch.
It was a long day, for me and for everyone.
I remember that my wife and I went to a coffee shop in our hometown, where, every Wednesday night, some people got together and played and sang what the proprietor called "Americana music."
That
night, the coffee shop was packed, and we all sang. And, for a while,
no matter what our political opinions, we were together. As Americans.
We were, for
once, united. America, we all believed, had ended up at a crossroads.
But we were together, and, together, we could do anything. If our
leaders would just give us the leadership, we could do the impossible.
Make the poor
wealthy? The Marshall Plan worked in Europe; we could bring something
like it to the poorest nations of the Islamic world, and remove much of
the strength possessed by the terrorists and their recruiters.
Make oil
irrelevant? We could do that, too. In the Second World War, we built
the mightiest army the world had ever seen, virtually from scratch, in
a couple of years. With our science, our infrastructure, we could do
anything.
But what George W. Bush asked for was ÇƒÓ nothing.
We were told to travel and shop as if nothing had happened.
We were told that to keep "our way of life" as normal would be the greatest defeat we could bring to the terrorists.
And then we were
told that Saddam Hussein was Hitler, that he had nuclear weapons or
their precursors, that those who opposed a war on Iraq were misled,
dead-enders, appeasers.
George Bush
squandered the greatest opportunity an American president can ever have
ÇƒÓ a united populace. What he did with it was to move toward a war
which, as closely as possible, emulated the Vietnam debacle through
inadequate planning and the reliance on rosy scenarios.
Sidney Blumenthal, in a recent excerpt from his new book, claims that George W. Bush is the worst American president ever.
I must disagree.
Thereës always Jefferson Davis. And, while I suppose it is a stretch to
include the unlamented president of the Confederacy ÇƒÏ as an American
president, I think we ought to be charitable to Mr. Bush. And thatës
how far I think we have to stretch the definition of "American
president" in order to find one worse than George.
Thereës always
Millard Fillmore, I suppose. And Andrew Johnson. But those guys didnët
run as if they were one thing, and then reveal themselves to be
something else. Even Jeff Davis said what he was going to do before he
became president of the Confederacy ÇƒÓ and then did it once he was in
the office. Of American presidents, it is hard to imagine another who
did a more complete flipflop from his promises to his realities than
Bush.
And Bush squandered a rare moment of national unity. That, truly, is the tragedy of the Bush administration.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
|
