The desperate search for silver linings

In a conversation recently, I remarked that Bush's 8 years in office constituted 1/9th of what we used to think of as a typical American life span of 72 years. It was a depressing thought: for many Americans, about 11% of their entire lives will have been spent enduring the consequences of this terrible mistake. For those who don't reach even this modest milestone, for those whose lives are cut tragically short (say by a roadside bomb in Anbar province), the fraction is larger. For thousands of those soldiers, in fact, the ratio might be one year of Bush for every three years spent on Earth. The lesson is stark: electing someone this bad as President has a tremendously powerful impact on the course of your life. The effects are not something you shoo away with a flick of the hand. We live with them, and we'll live with them a long time after (finally, mercifully) he gets the hell out of the White House.

Can any good come out of it? I remember that practically the very day he seemed to have been "elected" in 2000, my very first thought was that the world had just lost its last opportunity to deal effectively with global warming. I've written before that my familiarity with the subject of CO2 concentrations in the troposphere began with reading I did in Hawaii in the late 1960's. It struck me then as it strikes me now that of all the environmental imperatives, climate change because of CO2 build-up was the most inexorable, the most dangerous, the least impossible to ignore safely. Yet Bush ignored it, in favor of temporal, venal considerations, with a myopic (and evil) callousness that exceeded even the pessimistic predictions of how indifferent he would be. So any hope has to be tempered by the realization the window of opportunity may have closed. When the largest polluter (and "moral" leader) on Earth increases its CO2 production for eight years, and fights tooth and nail against international cooperation as a reflection of the anti-social tendencies of one small man in charge of that polluting machine, it's hard to be sanguine. You can't just keep throwing away long stretches of time where you do nothing. The IPCC report yesterday was devastating. It should make you sick to read it. The living world is in mortal peril, and the danger zone keeps getting advanced as the evidence around us keeps popping into sudden view.

Yin and yang. After eight years of Bush, maybe the United States will become a constructive force again simply because his presence forced us to take honestly into account the "shadow side" of our national personality. You can't really miss it now, unless you're an empathy-deprived jerk like the guy in the Oval Office. Jung would counsel us to perform a countrywide integration. We don't have a good-intentioned, freedom-loving democracy to "export" anymore. Get serious. We invaded a country and set in motion 650,000 deaths by violence, and then fought all serious attempts to count the number so the damage could be assessed. We take innocent people from countries we happen to be invading, peasants sold to us by bounty hunters, and deliberately lock them up at the eastern end of Cuba so they'll have no Constitutional rights. We torture them and drive them crazy, for no reason at all. We tell their lawyers the people we've tortured confessions out of can't testify about the torture because it's a "state secret." We lock up Americans in American military dungeons and hold them without charges on the basis of Presidential fiat. The central government spies on Americans without warrants. We pull people off the streets and send them to foreign countries because we know they'll be tortured and abused. We piss on the Kyoto protocol and every other decent international attempt to save life on Earth, then lie about substituting something else in its place.

If we honestly come to terms with all of this, we may start getting over ourselves. That could be the silver lining. Bush will go on forever with his particularly rancid form of megalomania, but we don't have to do that, too. Instead of spending $2 trillion on a war that is not only not necessary but will result in massive blowback, all under the delusion of "doing something good," we can find the $1.5 trillion deemed necessary to rebuild the American infrastructure of roads, public transportation, bridges and schools. We can cooperate with the international community and ask for its help with rogue terrorist elements. We can submit ourselves to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (sorry Bush, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld - if you want to read some history, try the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution). We can dispense with the deranging notion of American Exceptionalism and accept ourselves for what we really are -- humans like other humans, with good and bad parts, who must examine their intentions to discover their true purpose, and proceed with the humility appropriate to the precariousness of life.