America's Bush-Induced PTSD

Naturally, all of us here "progressives" (who may eventually summon the courage to call ourselves "liberals" again) are having a hard time believing that anything really good can come out of the election of Barack Obama as President.  I hear and read about it everywhere, this reluctance of good-hearted folk to take yes for an answer.  We're suspicious, wary, maybe slightly paranoid.  We startle at sudden noises.  It's difficult to sleep, we have intrusive hallucinations in which we wake up and discover we're still being ruled by an inarticulate little despot from the West Texas District of Connecticut. 

Okay, that last part is not a hallucination.  Bush is actually the reason for our national Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  The Chief Dude, with his snarling sidekick Dick "The Dick" Cheney, absolutely trashed the United States. They hammered away at our self esteeem and patriotic pride.  They destroyed the world's finest legal system, left the economy a shambles, made the USA a feared and despised nation.  Certain tasteless jokes are circulating that with this big of a mess, naturally we'd hire a black man to act as janitor.  We are loath to trust The System to make any fundamental changes.  We'll keep both wars going, we'll maintain our various concentration camps in Guantanamo, Bagram, other black sites.  We'll keep illegally spying on ourselves.  Attorneys general with advanced cases of amnesia will say stuff like habeas corpus is not actually a part of the U.S. Constitution.  Joe Biden will refuse to comply with any Congressional investigations on the basis of a contention that the Office of Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch, nor the Legislative Branch, but is perhaps a wholly-owned subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase.

Well - time will tell, is all I can say.  Is the cruddy, dilapidated, depressed state of the Union the New Normal, from which there is no escape?  Will Barack Obama like all this "Unitary" power which Bush arrogated unto himself with the acquiescence of a prostrate Congress?  

I doubt it.  It's hard for me to imagine, for example, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would sit down with a cadre of warmongering thugs, like the Neocons, and concoct a pretext for invading a country as a means of ensuring their reelection in 2012.  While Bush has never had any compunction about killing all those American soldiers in the Iraq war, and refusing even to count the Iraqis who have been killed, a war which the editorial page of The New York Times called "pointless" the day after the election, I just don't think Mr. Obama thinks or feels that way.  Imagine the callousness it requires to kill people in a pointless war simply for your own aggrandizement.  It's mind-blowing.  Yet there it is; that's our current President and the way he rolls.  Whether we realize it all the time or not, we've internalized all that, we have had to come to terms with having a President who operates at that debased level.  It creates a dark mood which haunts every aspect of American life, provokes a cognitive dissonance in which we cling to old images of ourselves while trying to reconcile the actual barbaric and uncivilized practices of this Administration.  Torturing human beings, ruining the lives of absolutely innocent men, such as the Chinese Uighurs finally, finally released from Guantanamo Bay after years of completely baseless captivity, simply because Bush & Co. could not be bothered to institute a humane system for reviewing their cases.

No, I do believe things will get much, much better.  We have to understand, at a deep level, that the fundamental problem with George W. Bush was that despite his occasional displays of maundering sentimentality, at his core everything he did was anti-human.  Don't ask me why. Don't ask me why he actively opposed and worked against the interests of the very people who elected him.  But he did.  And his malevolence had a global reach.  He also did everything he could to interfere with any international efforts to ameliorate global warming and ocean acidification.  He tried as hard as he could to fire up the Cold War with Russia into a new conflagration.

I guess the psychoanalysts and the social psychologists would tell us that what we have here is a serious case of co-dependency.  Bush has been enabled every step of the way by the reflexive respect and deference the citizenry shows to the office of the President, never mind the flesh and blood occupant.  So we have accommodated his outrages.  Even now he's spending his last days in office doing everything he can to despoil federal lands by opening up pristine wilderness to mining and exploitation.  Why, you ask?  Because it's who he is.  Because he's the President, we look for excuses for his mania for violating us, abusing us, cynically using the military under his command, but there's really no excuse.

So after such a bad relationship, it will take quite a while for us to trust again.  Gee, maybe this new guy is the well-intentioned, humane, compassionate fella he seems to be.  We guard our feelings however.  We're not sure.  We've been taken for a ride before.