The Waking Nightmare of the Bush Presidency

Prison inmates "do time." If you've worked as a lawyer and come into contact with people who have actually spent time in a prison, and they have described their experience to you, you get a sense of what it means to endure punishment in the form of watching your life slip away while you rot in a stinking, noisy, brutal environment where most of the softer human emotions have vanished and you are left with one thing, and one thing only: the slow, inexorable ticking of a clock. Someday you may get out of there, if you survive, if luck is with you. You live only for that.

Being an American citizen has much of that quality for most sensitive and intelligent citizens these days. Life is a waking nightmare. We're waiting for morning, to wake up and find Bush gone. He continues to pile on horror upon horror from his seemingly inexhaustible trove of bad ideas. If you think through everything he says and does, you are left with the simple and inescapable conclusion -- he is opposed to human joy. He is a Destroyer, a Wrecker, a Disease. Every day I read the work of writers who fall all over themselves in attempts to capture the essential awfulness of the man, who resort to tactics which are really beneath them as intellectuals. They call him names, attack all of his personal qualities, employ ridicule, caricature, vicious satire. It is because you can't quite say it, you can't quite get at it. The frustration is palpable, soul-sickening. George W. Bush is still president. He's still there. It will be more than two years before our societal case is reviewed by the Great Parole Board.

Maybe we feel like prisoners at Auschwitz in 1945. We've heard the Allies are coming, from the East and from the West. We've seen the bombers overhead, the SS guards have intimated that the camp will be closing soon. Many of the Nazis have already left. You probably feel profoundly ill at ease. You sense liberation will be snatched from you somehow, you'll starve, or be shot, or led away at the last moment to some grisly death. So here in America in 2006 we're trying to hold it together long enough so we can thrive on the far side of the Bush presidency. Still, we're bitter that 8 years were not just wasted but squandered, that America was set on a retrograde course, that we have lost precious time on critical problems affecting human survival while an insufferable idiot who screws up everything he touches makes mistake after mistake after mistake, yet is so dense, so implacably incapable of recognition, so unaware, that he persists in insisting he has some faint idea what he's doing. Yet humans survive because they hope. If the democracy can be held together, if we can thwart the hacking of the electronic voting machines, maybe we can restore something of the Old America. It keeps us going. We know that Bush, when his time is up, will retreat to his "ranch" and essentially vegetate. No one will be interested in what he has to say. He won't write anything. He will not be "consulted," because his demoralizing mediocrity will foreclose consultation. He will be not so much forgotten as willfully suppressed by a relieved American collective memory.

So like many others, I'm trying to hold on, to hope America and the world survive Bush. I have noticed over the years that the e-mailing among the American dissident community has slowed, that our dispiritedness has become more a private affair. We feel powerless to change things, and we've already entertained each other with our zingers. We can fix things in our heads, but we can't fix them in real life. As another analogy, maybe we feel like the Eastern Bloc countries before the Berlin Wall fell. It's just the way it is. The powers that be. They own everything, the Congress, the media, the money. Most of that will be true when Bush is gone.

So that remains the point, the hope, the prismatic sheen of rainbow's end in the gray cloudiness of the horizon. At least Bush will be gone. After all those years. After all that sadness, that cruelty, that debasement. Bush, at least, will be gone.