A famous quote from The Great Gatsby has been making the rounds in another context, a Gatsby-themed party trump hosted amid a government shutdown and his scheming to prevent food from going to the needy. That they were careless people who smashed things, leaving others to clean up their messes. That reminds me of the Bush-Cheney legacy in Iraq.
The commonality is that living in a bubble, whether of the rich or of military strategists, you don’t get criticized, REALLY. The powerless often know the other side because they have to, they are subject to it. The powerful, no.
I hated Cheney and I hated George W. Bush. I kind of loved to hate them. That had to be tempered a little that trump is worse and Cheney called that out. Some don’t pull punches for that. See Jared Yates Sexton for example:
I am not so sure that Cheney’s relationship with the wealth class is primary among his errors, as for example John Kerry was married into great wealth. But then even Kerry was in retrospect tepid in his opposition to the Iraq War.
That time of my life I RAGED over the stolen election of 2000 and the mind-set behind the US invasion of Iraq, the group-think of the media in supporting it, the rah rah JOY at war by some members of the public, the loss of civil liberties with the PATRIOT act. It twisted my life at the time I was so upset.
And that the election was stolen by oil men from environmentalist Al Gore. The misdirection from the Saudi regime and the oil economy distorting those who came from it like the 9/11 terrorists.
But as with the death of Kissinger I feel a little cheated and a little enlightened that, and partly also because of Cheney and his daughter’s anti-trump stance, my instinct isn’t a metaphorical dancing on Cheney’s grave and joy that he’s gone.
It’s hard for one mere human being to be worthy of that much hatred, although it seems trump is worthy of that and nothing else, and when the joyous day of a world without him comes I won’t be able to make a similar distanced analysis.
We have strong attachments to our beliefs and identities too, in ways that are psychological but can’t be explained AWAY by psychology. And there was that folded in with Cheney I hated, a kind of arrogant ERROR.
He seemed to define himself against straw-man opponents, simplified to caricature, who he felt superior to. The ’60s Vietnam War protest generation. Human rights lawyers. People he saw as wooly-headed, lax, naive, bleeding hearts, lacking the hard resolve that came to a person able to brush aside international law and precedent to order torture. That attachment to the image of hard resolve (which Elon also seeks) led to such unnecessary tragedies.
The real world consequences of course were incalculable, though that they would follow his actions was so easily seen, even by him, that there’s a youtube of him explaining why we didn’t go further in the earlier Gulf War to overthrow Saddam.
With George W. Bush, his effect on the culture has been to normalize what I hated about him. What I love most is learning and careful thought. Now we’ve made anti-intellectualism our defining identity. The “elite” aren’t rich spoiled legacies like George W. Bush and RFK Jr. now, but people who study and learn. I hated that W. had taken up a seat at Yale with its world class education and refused to value it.
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