something about dynasties and Great Men

A few months ago, former President George W. Bush delivered a speech during an elbow-rubber’s wine-and-cheese event held at his presidential library in Dallas. The occasion should have gone by unnoticed, but W's remarks drew unexpected attention because of a Freudian slip. Intending to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, W instead decried "a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq." In 2003, of course, W invaded Iraq on the claim that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing a nuclear weapon. The claim proved untrue.

But the part of W's remarks that got me came just before that nauseating gaffe, when W noted that “the Ukrainian people elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with whom I Zoomed the other day, by the way—cool little guy—the Churchill of the 21st century."

President George W. Bush gave people nicknames and made little jokes that sometimes, like this “cool little guy” quip, showed how removed rather than how normal W was. After all, he was a Bush, and a Bush is not like other people. To W, Zelensky, a little man with broken English from a strange land, is just another amusing accident of history. Not like a Bush.

Note: Would a Bush have stayed in Kyiv while most of the world was saying the Russians would conquer in a few days?

something about "The Good Fight" by Harry Reid

Harry Reid was the Republican Party's biggest Democratic villain before he retired and Nancy Pelosi took the honor. In The Good Fight, Reid shares his life's story, including his battles with the George W. Bush Administration over Social Security and war in Iraq.

Reid was born and raised in a Nevada mining ghost town called Searchlight, a place where the leading industry was prostitution. "I don't exaggerate. There was a local law that said you could not have a house of prostitution or a place that served alcohol within so many feet of a school. Once, when it was determined that one of the clubs was in violation of this law, they moved the school." His parents were a tough, booze-bleeding pair, and his boyhood home had no indoor toilet, hot water, or telephone. Reid emerged a scrapper from true poverty in Searchlight.

His assessments of his influences produces my favorite passage; Reid remembers Willie Martello, a "whoremonger," lecturing him about honesty, and pairs that with his parents' ways:

... They never taught me things about basic honesty—maybe that's why I had to learn about it from the whoremonger.

But this lesson my mother did teach me, and it's the most important thing I've ever learned: She taught me to have confidence when sometimes I had no business having confidence. She taught me that no one was better than me, even if it wasn't true. She taught me that I could handle anything that the world could throw at me, whatever it might be.

Reid worked as a policeman to pay his way through law school. He faced down crime lords as the head of the Nevada Gaming Commission and eventually was elected Senator and served as Majority Leader in Washington, DC. The Good Fight shifts coherently back and forth in time between Reid's tough-it-out rise and those hard-fought, highly consequential battles of the 2000s. Quite an enjoyable read about a one-of-a-kind in modern political history.


Notes:

• “Who I am now, and what I am doing now, began in that town, with those people, in those mines.”

• The book's full title is The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington. Reid had writing assistance from Mark Warren, whose resume highlight is his tenure as Executive Editor of Esquire magazine. Warren, a Texan, also worked on or directed several state- and national-level political campaigns in the 1980s.

a young George H. W. Bush

Warfighter

Warfighter. What does it mean? Who is a warfighter? What is a warfighter?

Circa WWII America, people often spoke of soldiers with admiration, depicting competent men of bravery, or, alternately, innocent sons away in foreign lands. Then, during early 1990's military campaigns in the Persian Gulf, speakers urged the public to "Support our troops". Now, the US Department of Defense introduced into use the term warfighter.

Using the term warfighter shifts the emphasis from the soldier's service to his time in combat. So a veteran is not a warfighter; a soldier is not necessarily a warfighter; and a warfighter is not necessarily a soldier from one of the branches of the US armed forces.

Soldiers have already become somewhat ubiquitous--we see them honored routinely on television and at sporting and political events. Finding yourself in public in the presence of a soldier in uniform is not unusual. Using the term warfighter takes that a step further; it normalizes the condition of war. If a soldier (or contractor) is overseas, he is at war. His presence is war. He is present in war. He is war.



 

Something on the film W

Left-leaning critics of George W. Bush tend to fall into one of two camps: Those who view the man as evil and those who view him as a puppet ne'er-do-well. Oliver Stone's film "W" agrees with the latter view, depicting the 43rd President as an over-confident and devout man driven by his need for approval. This angle of the W story is a familiar narrative--that of a son always seeking his father's approval. To be the man his father could admire, W believes he must appear in control. The role of "the decider" becomes crucial.

The film feels a little canned, but that may be part of the point: Bush is not an exceptional man, nor is his story at its core. What was extraordinary was the consequences of the group-think so pervasive in his cabinet, seized upon and steered by Vice President Cheney--the unassuming villain in this film, always lurking at the edges.

By combining an uncomplicated character study of George W. Bush with a cohesive narrative of his tenure, the film is useful for giving critics a shared interpretation of the events that transpired between 2001 and 2007. The film reviews I read when "W" premiered were pretty consistent and accurate in voicing surprise at Stone's restrained depiction of the younger Bush, revealing a deeply flawed man who found his own direction rather than a one-dimensional villain or straw man. The film attributes W's formidable initial political successes to his religious conversion, brought on suddenly after a physical and mental collapse during a very hungover three mile jog. His failures come as a result of his gullibility and insecurities.

Stone uses a thematic metaphor in the film--the baseball pop fly: the movie Bush often dreams of fielding a high fly ball in center field and then basking in the the praise and adoration of a cheering crowd. In the film's last scene, Bush, dreaming again, backs up to make the play on the pop-up, but the ball never comes down, leaving a confused Bush staring into the quiet stadium lights, wondering how the winning moment and adulation eluded him.