Commentary on “Dear President Bush”

Is George W. Bush the nightmare we can’t wake up from, or was he never a nightmare but the essence of our souls?  Does he inhabit the White House, delivering decrees from on high, or are we the ones who work in his name, pontificating in idiot-style, reveling in grammar-smashing, conjuring threats of apocalypse that we always knew were true?  What does the continuance of this dream, drilled into our heads especially when we think we are most awake (when making love, say?  Or reading Les Misérables), say about the state of our civilization?  Has it collapsed so deeply that we can register Bush’s presence only, and specifically, in our dreams?  Why is he able to haunt those of us in particular who think we are immune to the brutality of modern civilization?  Is he after all an idiot savant, or is he a tyrant, the sky-in-the-God figure the brightest of us thought we had long ago banished to obscure evangelical churches or the madrassas of Afghanistan?  Why does Bush live amongst us?  What did we do to earn him as a perennial nose-thumber, a rebuke to our every desire to live and thrive and enjoy ourselves?  Is he real?  Or is he fantasy?  Is apocalypse real?  Can we – do we – share anything with him?  Is he us, or is he him?  Is there a them who thought they were electing someone like themselves, or is there only a them in Bush’s imagination, whom he constructs and discards at will?  How long will this nightmare last?  When will we wake up?  Have we already woken up but just don’t know it yet?  When did we wake up?  In 2000?  In 2001?  In 2009?  What is there in common between us and him?  Is he merely representative of the lowlife skinhead, the redneck, the hillbilly, the gangster, the criminal, the jackbooted enforcer of norms and rules he has determined for us?  Or is he our client?  How do we – especially writers, humanists of an older tradition – relate to him?  How often does he inhabit our dreams?  Is Laura a friend of his?  Do they ever make love?  Do they talk?  How does he relate to his daughters?  Do they talk?  Does Bush love his dog?  Is he capable of that?  Who are the twenty-eight percent who continue to endorse him?  Who were the ninety-percent-plus who approved of him right after his crowning moment?  Who are the forty-eight or forty-nine percent of us who voted for him in 2000 and 2004?  How can I write as long as he is in office?  But how can I not write as long as he is in office?  Why isn’t every sentence, every stanza, every word of mine not about him?  He is the engrossing reality, the lord and master and über-friend who has taken the upstairs guest room, and plays Beethoven at loud volume all night long, and walks down the stairs in time for breakfast, dressed in a sleazy red robe open at the neck, showing off plentiful tufts of hair at his chest, and demanding to be fed sausage and bacon, ham and eggs, and then burps – and then we laugh at the innocence contained in his indifference; but why do we tolerate this?  How often does he enter your dreams (mine, once, when I was escorting Laura, and this was undoubtedly the most frightening dream-moment of my life)?  Can you imagine standing next to him?  Does he generate unbearable heat?  Or is he cold as ice?  Would Robert Frost recognize him on the street?  Is he the end of the world or a new beginning?  How can he get away with everything we were told the twentieth-century had forever banished from the realm of acceptable behavior?  He tortures us in the Guantanamo of our livid dreams, but who is it that has let him in?  We could have gone to Vermont, writers, breeders of the old humanist tradition, we could have gone to some idyllic hamlet where news of the world doesn’t often intrude (unless you stand around to chat at the country store, and even then, your need for privacy will be respected), but we chose to stay in place, all of us, the gays and the minorities and the women and the scientists and the artists, and of course the writers, the writers above all, who thought something good must come of it after all, and we think we’re almost at the end of the line, but are we?  What comes after Bush?  Hasn’t the future become unimaginable, uninhabitable, unendurable, indescribable?  Why does this dystopia feel so close to utopia?  Why are the announcers’ voices (this week in war, this week in torture, this week in deportations) not those of the shrill obscene hatemongers we would have expected, but cheerful in insidious doses, making up for Bush’s lapses in syntax and sense with their own made-up reality, where we vote with our feet each time he makes a move?  How is it possible to write with Bush in power?  Mustn’t we do something – stop everything, and do something?  What is the nature of the fantasy, the deep inbred incestuous Southern illegitimate evangelical mercenary compassionate fantasy, that correlates us to him?  He represents which side of us – the darker or the brighter?  Is he angel, mercy of God, or God, father of man?  Which one of us, paradigmatically, is he?  How many multitudes does he contain?  What must I write?  In what form, shape, or structure, to capture what is happening, how deep the sloth has penetrated our thought processes, our tolerance of the intolerable?  Where did Bush come from?  Weren’t we looking?  Were there no guards at the post?  Or did we always know he was coming?  Now that he has come, can I continue to write?  There is a war going on – but I don’t know who’s fighting whom, and where I belong – is there a writer amongst us who knows?  Why are we silent?  We were told the next time such unspeakable things happen, the voice of the world, the reason of reason, would rise up in clamor, smash the infidel, destroy him before he got a foothold in our minds and imaginations – but I only hear the silence of silence, and am I not a part of it?  What must I write?  Addressing whom, and for what purpose?  He is in my dreams all the time, my waking dreams, that is, and he comes dressed as my mortal twin, the one who failed school, has no aspirations, likes to crush flies in his pastime, and mocks our lame father, and I can’t will him to go away, nor do I want to – do you find that too?  How long has it been since Bush was president?  How long can we shun our real friends?  I feel like no one has written anything for eight long years – do you too?  I feel free as a bird – thanks to him – do you too?