Like horses, lame ducks are also dead ones, so I really should dispense with comment on the two-hour show of obsolete vapidity last night. But the useless little runt is like a sore neck. I simply couldn't resist testing it.
My attention, however, was sparse. When pointlessness is interrupted almost 70 times by even more pointless and raucous applause, I find myself cursing the Founders for constitutionally requiring the silly thing. If only all presidents since Tom Jefferson had followed his lead and simply submitted the vomiting pabulum in writing, we'd be a better Republic for it. But we have Woodrow to thank for reversing that intelligent trend, the show-off.
Given my less than rapt attention, I'm always forced to rely on press reports the next morning to gauge what I happily, mostly missed. And on this particular morning, I'm even happier than usual. I missed nothing, according to the paper of record.
A subheadline on its front page tipped off -- or, rather, screamed -- the dreadful nothingness within. "The question of President Bush’s relevance coursed through an address that avoided reflection on his legacy," it said. Implicit in that line was that Bush somehow broke with his tradition of public reflection, which of course never was. For seven excruciating years we've suffered a one-way lecture, never a dialogue.
"The King Doesn't Carry Money" is how New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti titled one of his works; neither does he consort with the little people. He simply issues edicts from on high. And last night in response to two terms of this undemocratic falderal, the people's representatives cheered.
Best I can tell, Bush's latest monologue was at least filled with juicy double entendres, especially when he opened by noting that "our country has been tested in ways none of us could imagine" since the malignant little authoritarian stole office. Finally, on that we're with him 100 percent, and we have yet another year of testing to go. It'll be like the neck thing: Is he still there?
Other portions were so disconnected from any recognizable reality, they nearly defy rational comment -- as when he declared "We have faced hard decisions about peace and war, rising competition in the world economy, and the health and welfare of our citizens." Then came the real insult: "These issues call for vigorous debate, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve answered that call. Yet history will record that amid our differences, we acted with purpose."
One strains to recall any checked-and-balanced decision-making committed by any outside the Oval Office. For two terms the national "debate" has been a one-way street and more than a trifle one-sided. That, gentle reader, is what history will record.
As for any "purpose" other than the unconstitutional concentration of executive power, have we as a nation seriously addressed fundamental questions of war or peace? (roughly half the citizenry was eager to assault yet another unprovoking nation just a few months ago) or risen to meet the challenges of "rising competition in the world economy"? or in any way advanced the cause of our citizens' health and welfare?
Nope, not at all. We've remained deadheaded in the water and mostly locked in an orgy of fear, at you-know-who's beckoning. Other than drowning ourselves in more inescapable debt to serve a dying global empire, there's been no movement whatsoever on real matters of real concern to real people. Oh, and the world hates our guts.
Bush's reign puts me in mind of historian Ellen Schrecker's postscriptual assessment of the McCarthy Era (in Many are the Crimes). After detailing all its disgraceful misdeeds and malefactions -- how we got sucked into them, how we suffered through them, and how we slowly crawled out of them -- her final and most incisive judgment is that, simply, the era was a tragic and irretrievable waste of national emotions and political resources.
We could have used our energies in devotion, say, to folks' health care, or children's hunger, or people's ignorance. But we shoved that all aside, allowing ourselves instead to fritter away years in mindless, pointless hysteria and follow the inanities of dangerous demagogues and power-hungry dunces.
Such was, and possibly remains, the state of our union."
