Adam's blogbox: on becoming a Rodney Dangerfield nation, and getting zero respect

It’s rather weird how America has now become the Rodney Dangerfield nation: we get no respect.

You can call our president the devil to his face in our own country, and what happens? The world has a giggle, and life goes on.

Domestically, most of us live blissfully believing we’re the greatest nation on earth. But internationally, we’ve now assumed the status of South Africa when it was ruled by apartheid: we’re the moral skunk of the world, a pariah hated by all. There’s a very weird disconnect between how we regard ourselves and how the world regards us.

Some of us are a little freaked that Chavez called Bush “the devil” in a humorous comment at the UN. The rest of the world happens to agree that Bush is a joke and, accordingly, we are a joke.

What we stand for is a joke: our military power is now exposed as useless in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Our influence in the world is zero. Nobody takes a nation seriously that supports torture.

Bush can rant and rave about exporting democracy and changing the Middle East, but to the rest of the world they’re the ravings of a madman. The world takes Chavez and his social justice program much more seriously, since he is doing something rather unique for the poor in his country, and something rather upstanding in his encouragement of a Bolivarian revolution in Latin American, to let them stand together against the nefarious Norte. Also, he’s brilliant at sucking up to the Muslims, which we’re hopeless at.

The rest of the world now has only one use for us: we’re a great place to dump their exports, which we hungrily buy, since we’re too useless to manufacture products for ourselves.

Perhaps our biggest humiliation is that Japanese auto companies are now building factories in America to make cars for us, because GM and Ford are too useless to do it here. Fuck me with an SUV: the Japanese are beating us on our homeground, building their factories here. They’re better at giving Americans good jobs than Americans are.

What will become of us? We are definitely into a major decline, what with also being the biggest debtor nation on earth, now that Bush has sold us out to China and other Asian countries, who own our currency.

Poor America. It just goes to show that a single administration -- President Cheney, Vice-President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld – can bring the mightiest nation on earth to its knees in under 5 years.

Whose fault is this? Our own. We voted for our joke leaders twice, and it’s our own bad that we’ve allowed them to turn us into a joke nation for the rest of the world to mock and kick around.

Another reason we’re a joke (besides our military power being a useless asset) is that we’re totally dependent on the oil of nations like Iran and Venezuela. No wonder they can mock us – they know they’ve got us by the short and curlies. Chavez is even supplying cheap energy to the Bronx, for chrissake. He’s helping us take care of our own because we’re so useless at it.

And with our oil companies (and our oil men leaders Cheney and Bush) only too happy to sell us out to oil-rich countries, and fighting any attempts at American energy-independence tooth and nail, we’ll be beholden unto eternity to every stupid nation who happens to be born with a sea of oil under their deserts. We’re actually financing the guys who mock us. Worse: we’re financing the terrorists. Every time an American fills up their car at the gas pump, they’re helping to finance terrorism.

Jeez, if it weren’t for our movies, and our rap music, the world would be basically ignoring us. Thank God we at least have that to be proud of – our movies and our music – but is that enough for a nation who, once upon a time, saved the world from fascism?

Can we sink any lower? Indeed, we can. Just watch. We’ve still got two years to go with the Bushits -- Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld -- in charge. They’ve now institutionalized torture and the suspension of habeas corpus, putting us on the road to some poor man’s version of Fascism. God knows what else they’re going to come up in the next two years to make us an even bigger joke in the eyes of the world. For sure, they will. A bunch of assholes this stupid, arrogant and stubborn, can’t be expected to deliver anything but more assholery.

Poor John McCain and Hillary Clinton. One of them will have the really shitty job, starting in 2008, to try and clean up the mess of the Bushits. I sure don’t envy them. One thing they can be sure of: it’ll probably be impossible for either of them to restore respect for us in the eyes of the world. Once the world has learned to laugh at the big bully without him being able to bully them about it, there’s no reason for them to stop.

We’re the #1 joke nation, Rodney Dangerfield writ large, and I for one can’t think of a thing we can do to win back the respect of the world. The tragedy is that a proud and supposed intelligent nation that allows itself to be suckered and butt-fucked by a crew as transparent as the Bushits, probably deserves it.


1. Now, Oil-Rich Leaders Mock Bush Team -- by Jay Bookman

Last week, the presidents of Iran and Venezuela took to the podium at the U.N. General Assembly to lambaste President Bush, with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez going so far as to refer to Bush as the devil.

That rhetoric drew harsh condemnation from Republicans and Democrats alike, with some conservatives seizing the opportunity to bash the United Nations as well, which is more than a little silly. (Getting mad at the United Nations for being the setting of such speeches is like getting mad at Turner Field because the Braves have played so poorly.)

However, Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have more in common than their dislike for Bush. It is no coincidence that they also head two of the most oil-rich countries in the world. Through our nation's dependence on oil and our decades-long refusal to pursue energy alternatives and energy efficiency, we have contributed to giving Chavez and Ahmadinejad the money and power to behave as they do.

The problem is, most of the steps that would ease our dependence on foreign oil have been fought bitterly by our own oil industry. Higher taxes on oil consumption, tougher fuel-efficiency standards on automobiles, substantial investment in energy alternatives — it has been impossible to get such ideas even considered by those now holding power in the United States.

And that's too bad, because what's good for Chevron and his buddies is good for Chavez and his pals, too.

One of the most maddening and illuminating examples of the oil industry's grip on the Bush administration is what's going on with deep-water oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico, where Chevron recently announced a major new find.

Back in the late '90s, the U.S. government signed more than 1,000 leases allowing oil companies to drill in the Gulf. Because deep-water drilling is expensive and risky, the U.S. government agreed not to collect its standard royalties of 12 percent to 16 percent of the price of oil or gas from those leases.

As part of the deal, though, those leases were supposed to include a provision requiring companies to start paying royalties if oil prices ever rose higher than $36 a barrel. The oil companies understood that was to be the arrangement; federal bureaucrats understood that, too. Yet when the contracts were signed, the fail-safe provision was somehow missing.

Today, with oil prices at more than $60 a barrel, that oversight has already meant a bonanza of roughly $1.3 billion for the oil industry, money that by rights ought to be going to taxpayers. Chevron alone may save more than $1 billion in royalties just on its newly announced discovery.

Outraged by that possibility, some members of Congress have tried to pressure oil companies into renegotiating their faulty leases, but their effort has been frustrated by Republican congressional leaders and the Bush administration. Bush officials are taking the legalistic approach, claiming that "a deal's a deal" and refusing to consider legal action, new legislation or any other way to possibly recoup the money.

In essence, the Bush administration claims that's just business, but it isn't. Not by a long shot.

In business, behaving as the oil industry has done in this situation would have consequences. If General Motors or Microsoft got stiffed out of billions of dollars by somebody who has displayed the bad faith demonstrated by the oil industry, you can bet their corporate lawyers and accountants would be re-evaluating every business relationship with the offending company, looking for any possible way to get leverage. They would never meekly accept such an outrage, as the Bush administration has done.

The Interior Department, which is supposed to act as the taxpayers' steward, has also cut the number of auditors investigating possible royalty fraud, which has produced yet another bonanza for the oil companies at the expense of taxpayers.

According to the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, federal auditors recovered an average of $115 million a year in unpaid royalties between 1981-2001, making their salaries one of the best investments in government. But from 2002-2005, the number of auditors was cut and annual royalty recoveries fell to less than half the previous level.

It's gotten so bad that four government auditors who were denied permission by their superiors to pursue unpaid royalties from oil companies are now seeking to recover the money by filing lawsuits as private citizens. It's just too bad we can't sic 'em on Chavez and Ahmadinejad, too.

(Jay Bookman is deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Mondays and Thursdays in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)


2. Warincontext.org Comment on Chavez and Ahmadinejad

As American commentators reflect on the impact that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are having on the international scene, there is one dimension to both of these men that gets much less attention than it deserves. They are both working class heroes who have huge popular appeal and thus make a glaring contrast to the norm in Western political culture, where mass popularity eludes virtually every contemporary leader.

Meanwhile, a suave young King Abdullah, an avuncular President Mubarak, a crisp General Perez Musharraf -- all of these men, seriously lacking in popularity, have the bearing of "our kind of people." They occupy what they have come to regard as their station in life.

It's easy to say that you have to make alliances where they are available and useful, but shouldn't we be asking what it tells us about our own political leaders that for so long, with such ease and such obvious comfort, they have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the company of autocrats and dictators?


3. Is Bush A Devil? -- by Charles Hardy (an ex-priest from the US who lives in Venezuela)

During a recent visit to the United States, I heard a woman say that she felt Vice President Dick Cheney was an evil man. Her sister, with a different view of the world situation, said she felt all Arabs were evil. For the past few years President George W. Bush has been speaking of an axis of evil in the world. And, just a few days ago, President Chávez of Venezuela said President Bush is a devil. Let me first of all share my personal opinion on the matter of evil. I don’t believe there are evil people. There are people who do bad things (I don’t like the word “evil”), but that doesn’t make them bad. I have done bad things in my life. Everyone has. That doesn’t make us bad people.

Secondly, I have a prejudice against identifying people with evil and the devil. I once asked a priest who was tortured in Argentina, how one human being could torture another. He replied that his torturers denied that he was human. His words as I recall them: “They said I was a devil dressed as a priest and as such they could do whatever they wanted to do with me.”

Thirdly, I don’t like name-calling. I was taught in high school that it was the lowest form of argument. It can hurt; it can bring laughter; but it doesn’t contribute to a fair discussion of ideas.

Having said this, I would like to present my analysis of the repercussions resulting from Chávez’s address in the United Nations.

Within Venezuela, the reactions have been mixed. Those who oppose Chávez see it as another strike against him as president. But among those who support him, I have found no one so far who felt he did wrong with his comments.

I watched Chávez’s speech in the office of a public building. The secretaries were all cheering Chávez as he spoke the words. Later, a respected lawyer told me he didn’t see any difference between Bush’s designating countries and their leaders as part of the “axis of evil” and Chávez’s calling Bush a devil. A labor leader felt the talk was excellent and necessary. A radio commentator said Chávez voiced what many world leaders would like to say but don’t have the courage to do so. The most hesitant comment was from a taxi driver who said it was ok that Chávez made the comparison once in the U.N., but that he shouldn’t have continued repeating the idea.

The Sunday 24 September issue of the Caracas daily, Ultimas Noticias, had a cartoon showing the devil sitting in front of a television set watching Chávez’s U.N. speech. The devil is saying, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Chávez but Bush is a lot worse than I am. In addition the odor he leaves behind is not that of sulfur but of gun power.”

Within the United States, I have no idea how people are reacting because I haven’t had access to the Internet these days and I don’t trust the major news sources anyway. One fellow journalist who did check out the reporting said that it was unfortunate that the articles were concentrating on Chávez’s devil remark and not on the rest of the message he delivered.

In any case, I do think it is time that people in the United States wake up to the fact that Chávez simply voiced what many people in the world think about their president. Two or three years ago I was on an airplane passing through Mexico City and received from the airline a major Mexican daily. That day it carried a long editorial comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. One may agree or disagree with the comparison, but it is important that U.S. citizens are aware of it. I don’t know if many Germans in the 30s and 40s knew what was being said about Hitler and their country in other parts of the world. U.S. citizens today do not have that excuse. Many, many people in the world are having difficulties justifying the massive killing of several thousand innocent people because a few thousand people died in the Twin Towers. There is some similarity with Israel’s killing of Lebanese citizens because two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped, another action the U.S. supported.

It is also important for U.S. citizens to realize that their leaders have not been kind in their words about Chávez. Major government spokespersons have called Chávez a hyena and a pied piper. Also, there is no question that the U.S. government was happy when the 2002 coup against him took place, and may have even helped finance it.

Greatest Enemy

The time has come for U.S. citizens to wake up and realize that they are becoming hated because of the policies of their leaders. As Chávez pointed out, the greatest enemy that the U.S. people have is their own government.

How will Chávez’s remarks affect his position in the world and his relation with other world leaders? I don’t think what he said will hurt him. Venezuela would like a seat in the UN Security Council. The vote will be in secret. I think they will easily win it. If that happens, it will be a huge victory for Chávez and a horrible defeat for the Bush administration. But if Venezuela doesn’t win it, it will show that the U.S. might still be politically more powerful than Venezuela. So, what’s news in that?

I would expect other world leaders, friends of Chávez, to tell him he shouldn’t say things like he did in public forums — even though they feel likewise. Even if they don’t have similar feelings, I don’t think they will stop supporting him. My brother once called another driver, who cut in front of my brother’s car, an “asshole.” I wouldn’t have used such a word, but it didn’t stop me from loving my brother.

Hugo Chávez is Hugo Chávez. Upon his return to Venezuela, I heard him tell a group of people that he didn’t know exactly what he was going to say until he said it. But he also said that he doesn’t take back what he said.

Four years ago I wrote that one of Chávez’s major problems as a politician is that he says what he thinks. Many people see that as being honest—and love him for it. Others see it as being inept and stupid—and hate him for it. But Hugo is Hugo. I don’t expect him to change.

Let me add one final thought. When I shared what I just wrote with a friend, he made an important distinction, which I share, between the attitudes of President Chávez and that of President Bush. He said that when Chávez spoke of Bush as a devil, he was joking. He entered the podium of the General Assembly saying it smelled of sulfur. He made the Sign of the Cross, a common Venezuelan practice not only to show one’s Catholic faith but also to ward off evil spirits. It is done seriously, but often it is done in jest. I know a person who is always making it in front of friends and saying, “Away from me Satan.”

But when Bush speaks of the “axis of evil,” he is deadly serious, and I put emphasis on the word “deadly.” It is my belief that Chávez shares my feeling that Bush is doing bad (evil, if you prefer the word) things. I don’t believe he sees him as a devil in reality. Not so with President Bush. His words seem to reflect a fundamentalist Christian attitude that the devil has taken possession of some people. They must therefore be wiped out. Too bad if others happen to be in the way, but the evil ones must be eliminated. Therein lies the danger for the world—and for you and me if we should fall into that category for the U.S. government.

Chávez wants to wipe out imperialism. He doesn’t see the need to kill those who are imperialists. Bush says he wants to eliminate terrorism. His only solution seems to be to kill those who are classified as terrorists. I repeat: therein lies the danger for the world — and for you and for me.

(Charles Hardy is a freelance writer and former Catholic priest who has lived in Venezuela for over twenty years. He is author of a forthcoming book on Venezuela from Curbstone Press http://www.curbstone.org. His personal blog is Cowboy in Caracas http://www.cowboyincaracas.com and he can be reached through cowboyincaracas@yahoo.com)


4. Why the Firebrands Get Heard -- by Eugene Robinson (from the Washington Post)

My but the lesser nations are getting uppity.

I do love that word, uppity. Once upon a time, it was used to describe a black person who didn't know his place. The word came back to me this week as I heard all that impertinent oratory at the United Nations, most of it aimed at the United States in general and George W. Bush in particular.

Did Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez actually call Bush the devil? And then ostentatiously cross himself? And then complain that the podium, where Bush had spoken a day earlier, still smelled of sulfur? That's exactly what he did.

And as Chavez continued his monologue, calling Bush a "world dictator" who "looks at your color, and he says, 'Oh, there's an extremist,' " his audience of world leaders laughed and applauded. Clearly, Chavez had ignored the flashing yellow lights and crashed straight through the guardrails of diplomatic propriety. Clearly, this was no way to speak about the president of the United States. But Chavez, who hosts his own weekly talk show back home in Caracas, had his audience in the palm of his hand.

Afterward, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton did what the diplomatic playbook said he had to do and refused to dignify Chavez's tirade with a response. But while his words were measured, it was hard to look at the anger in his eyes and not think of Yosemite Sam wishing he could blow that varmint to smithereens.

Chavez was so arch in manner and so extreme in his personal attacks on Bush that it's tempting to write him off as crazy, although I tend to think he's crazy like a fox. Can anyone name the last president of Venezuela, or remember when a speech by any president of Venezuela made such news? Still, Chavez may have gone so far that he hurt his chances of securing a temporary seat on the U.N. Security Council, where he would be harder to ignore.

But the uppity leader who spoke Tuesday evening, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, is another story. Like Chavez (his new best friend), Ahmadinejad controls a sizable fraction of the world's oil supply. Unlike Chavez, he has advanced nuclear technology and almost surely is working to build nuclear weapons. And also unlike Chavez -- perhaps because he is on the verge of having a very big stick -- he speaks softly, at least in the tone of his voice.

Ahmadinejad's was actually the more uppity speech, because what he seeks is nothing less than to remake the world.

"The prevailing order of contemporary global interaction is such that certain powers equate themselves with the international community and consider their decisions superseding that of over 180 countries," he said. "They consider themselves the masters and rulers of the entire world and other nations as only second-class in the world order. . . . Is it appropriate to expect this generation to submit to the decisions and arrangements established over half a century ago?"

That's pretty clear. Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier who presides over one of the world's most repressive and misogynistic regimes, is determined to rearrange the furniture. Since the Soviet bloc collapsed, the West -- led by the United States -- has pretty much had its way. Ahmadinejad is determined to create an alternative focus of power and influence, and he has the faith of the fanatical true believer in his ability to succeed.

Really, this should be no contest. Given a choice between a manifestly imperfect but open and dynamic society such as ours and a retrograde theocracy such as Iran, where free thought is stifled and repressive laws have the imprimatur of unimpeachable holy writ, who would freely choose the latter?

Yet Ahmadinejad is being listened to, and not only because of Iran's oil. When I travel outside the country, I'm struck by the decline in America's moral standing in the world. The Iraq war is the main reason, but not the only one. For all its talk about public diplomacy and spreading the U.S. gospel throughout the world, the Bush administration does an appallingly lousy job of it. Even our government's genuine good deeds -- vastly increased funding to fight AIDS in Africa, for example, which has saved countless lives -- go largely unrecognized.

Our policy of not even talking to governments we don't like has proved counterproductive -- pushing Syria closer to Iran, for example, and needlessly prolonging the Israel-Hezbollah war, to no one's benefit except perhaps Ahmadinejad's. Our arrogance has turned us into the neighborhood bully and made our adversaries look like more sympathetic figures than they really are.

We have to do better. Hugo Chavez shouldn't be received as the new Dave Chappelle.

(eugenerobinson@washpost.com)


5. Ahmadinejad's Gauntlet
The U.S. and Iran Need Each Other Too Much Not to Find Accommodation
By David Ignatius

The most telling moment in a conversation here last week with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came when he was asked if America would attack Iran. He quickly answered "no," with a slight cock of his head as if he regarded the very idea of war between the two countries as preposterous.

Ahmadinejad's confidence was the overriding theme of his visit. He was like a picador, deftly sticking darts into a wounded bull. As he moved from event to event -- TV and print interviews, a chat with the august Council on Foreign Relations, his lecture to the U.N. General Assembly -- he displayed the same flinty composure. It sometimes seemed as if he owned New York, dispensing his radical bromides like a tidy, compact version of Fidel Castro. I sensed the same certainty that was expressed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini back when this confrontation began in the late 1970s: "America cannot do a damn thing."

Over the course of a week's time, I had an unusual chance to sit with both President Bush and President Ahmadinejad and hear their thoughts about Iran. The contrasts were striking: Bush is groping for answers to the Iran problem; you sense him struggling for a viable strategy. When I asked what message he wanted to send the Iranian people, Bush seemed eager for more contact: He spoke of Iran's importance, of its great history and culture, of its legitimate rights. He made similar comments in his speech Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly.

Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, is sitting back and enjoying the attention. He's not groping for anything; he's waiting for the world to come to him. When you boil down his comments, the message is similar to Bush's: Iran wants a diplomatic solution to the nuclear impasse; Iran wants dialogue; Iran wants more cultural exchanges. At one point, Ahmadinejad even said that "under fair conditions," he would favor a resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States.

But if the words of accommodation are there, the music is not. Instead of sending a message to the administration that he is serious about negotiations, Ahmadinejad spent the week playing to the gallery of Third World activists and Muslim revolutionaries with his comments about Israel and the Holocaust. This audience hears the defiant message between the lines: America cannot do a damn thing.

Ahmadinejad is the calmest revolutionary I've ever seen. Sitting in a plush easy chair in his suite at the InterContinental hotel, he barely moves a muscle as he makes the most radical statements. His feet don't jiggle, his hands don't make gestures, his facial expression barely changes. His eyes are the most expressive part of his body -- sparkling one moment, glowering the next, focusing down to dark points when he is angry.

An interview with Ahmadinejad is an intellectual ping-pong match. He bounces back each question with one of his own: Ask about Hezbollah's attacks, and he asks about Israel's attacks. Question his defiance of the United Nations, and he shifts to America's defiance of the world body. In more than an hour of conversation with me and Lally Weymouth of Newsweek, he didn't deviate from his script. Indeed, some of his comments in the interview were repeated almost word for word when he addressed the General Assembly a few hours later. This is a man adept at message control.

The common strand I take away from this week of Iranian-American conversation is that the two countries agree on one central fact: Iran is a powerful nation that should play an important role in the international system. Bush put it to me this way: "I would say to the Iranian people: We respect your history. We respect your culture. . . . I recognize the importance of your sovereignty." Here was Ahmadinejad's formulation, when I asked how Iran could help stabilize Iraq: "A powerful Iran will benefit the region because Iran is a country with a deep culture and has always been a peaceful country."

That's the challenge: Can America and Iran find a formula that will meet each side's security interests, and thereby allow Iran to return fully to the community of nations after 27 years? Iran can't achieve its ambitions as a rising power without an accommodation with America. America can't achieve its interest in stabilizing the Middle East without help from Iran. The potential for war is there, but so is the bedrock of mutual self-interest. The simple fact is that these two countries need each other.

(David Ignatius co-hosts with Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek an ongoing discussion of international issues called PostGlobal, at http://www.washingtonpost.com . David Ignatius can be reached at davidignatius@washpost.com)


6. Reflections on Our Inner Bush
Corporate Monkeys In Our National House Of Mirrors
By Phil Rockstroh (from www.dissidentvoice.org)

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” -- H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Sun, 1920

As Americans waddled into the new century, overweight, overworked, and as self aware as a cloister of sea slugs, so too arrived George W. Bush, affecting his bandy-legged, fake cowboy swagger, to usher in this era of unquenchable consumer craving and perpetual martial emergency.

Currently, we watch as Bush vacillates between chest-puffing belligerence and jaw-gyrating fecklessness. Due to his hapless response to overwhelming events, some commentators have made comparisons to Jimmy Carter. Not true: Carter, as beset by tumult and contretemps as his administration was during the late 1970s, never resembled, as Bush does, a tweaked-out methhead in the throes of a full blown Methamphetamine-induced psychosis.

There is little mystery as to why Bush is now beating a war drum, in time to that all-too-familiar election time, Rovian rag. Bush’s handlers are desperate: Recent polls have revealed that suburban males, Republican women, southerners, and even Christian fundamentalists are starting to have misgivings about Bush. Why? One would guess: since Bush has proven himself incapable of changing Iraqi blood into cheap, ever-available oil, this has caused, for a portion of his base, the sheen of beatitude to come off Jesus' earthly emissary.

The aura of despair leveling upon the country is undeniable. Not that there was a great deal of peace of mind previously here in The United States of Distractions. The act of being in perpetual flight from reality requires a great amount of energy; it's quite a workout pushing down dread. We’ve been faking it for a while now. Over the years, our relentless selling of ourselves to the world became about as genuine as Bush's forced smile when he's in the presence of cameras or African Americans.

Baffled and mortified by what we’ve witnessed during these Bush-afflicted years, we ask ourselves: How did this come to be?

We may be unable to answer this question -- because we cannot lay all the blame upon Bush. Our nation’s aura of insularity and hysteria was present long before Bush. Bush is merely emblematic of the depth of our collective denial regarding how cheaply we have sold ourselves to the exploitive corporate order and the concomitant unease engendered by this Faustian bargain.

Although many of his former supporters may be growing weary of him, one is cautioned not to mistake these developments for any sort of vast, societal awakening.

Bush’s steady decline in popular support is merely the result of Americans, on a personal level, beginning to feel the effects of his administration’s mixture of ruthlessness and incompetence.

But this fact alone will not effect change. One does not exactly have to be graced with extraordinary powers of perception to notice that Bush is a fraud. What is more difficult to apprehend is this: The emergence of Bush is not an anomaly. Bush is merely a symptom of the pathologies of corporate capitalism. He is not the disease.

Bush was packaged like any other corporate icon; accordingly, the war in Iraq was sold in the manner of any other corporate PR campaign. Bush is simply a product, designed by and marketed for the benefit of the elites of the corporate state.

Bush’s manufactured image is a hack's construct of mythic American manhood: He was sold as an uncomplicated man of action -- a Christian cowboy redeemer -- a man who could kill evil-doers at fifty paces. Just from a single whiff of his manly phenomenal musk, our enemies would flee back to their caves and cower in abject terror. Although events have shown, to appropriate an overheated metaphor from the Christian fundie End Time lexicon, Bush is in fact closer to an Angel of Idiocy come with a Sword of Stupidity to reveal the rot of our corporate dystopia.

The sad and tragic circumstances of our time are much larger than Bush. Bush's grandiosity mirrors us, a people who have lost all sense of proportion. Look around: notice how huge and grotesque the objects and accoutrements of our age have become: colossal motor vehicles; the portions of food we crave; gaudy, land-devouring McMansions; American consumer's enormous, sea-to-shining-sea asses. These things are manic compensations antecedent to the crash to come. Apropos, our SUVs, oversized pickup trucks, and hummers are no longer large enough to compensate for food no longer serve to push down the sense of dread; we cannot find enough room in our McMansions to hide away all of our anger, sorrow, and regret.

Mojo Nixon sang, “Everybody has a little Elvis in them.” Nowadays, regrettably, we must sing: Everybody has far too much Bush in them. Internally, to one degree or another, we’re all George W. Bush. Bush is the corporate state's dancing monkey -- as, to one degree or another, we all are. The corporate state necessitates that we become, like Bush, all puffed up phonies in order to face a daily life ruled by its mandates, as well as to compensate for our inner emptiness, borne of our internalization of it.

If we choose to face our inner Bush, our habitual verities and sacred beliefs risk being shattered and scattered asunder. Because the situation is larger than us and it’s larger than Bush: Bush is merely a reflection of it all. Ergo: to listen to the mangled syntax of Bush’s speech patterns is to hear the sound of the national infrastructure crack and buckle; his booze and cocaine decimated brain cells mirror the earth's diminishing bio-diversity; his snits of entitlement and his ruthlessness echo the entropic forces of global capitalism that are driving the engines of extinction.

There is a feeling of flimsiness and haphazardness present in our daily lives here in the empire. Even the landscape before us has been inflicted with an ugly, ad hoc quality. The structures of our age evince a lack of substance. The shoddy, quick buck-snatching stripmall/big box store/fast food outlet, prefab nowhereland of the present day United States is reflective of our shoddy, quick buck-snatching leaders who are, in turn, a reflection of us. We have come to dwell within this Architecture of Denial; we have come to call this House of Distorted Mirrors, our way of life.

As, all the while, the parallel narratives of compulsive consumerism and Christian End Time Mythology surround us.

Contemporary Christian fundamentalism is a religion of consumer instant gratification. It is a religious cosmology resonating from a junk food paradigm: a Gospel of The Drive Thru Jesus; when The Rapture comes our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.

But be warned, by your eating of all that high caloric food, all of you Jesus-hungry Lard Asses of The Lord: If your clothes were to fall from you (as your prophecies claim they will) as you rise skyward, the sight of all your fat, sagging bodies floating in the air will resemble anything but the dawning of eternal paradise -- instead the event will more likely resemble an endless tape loop of a porno video for fat fetishists shot in a zero gravity chamber.

On the secular side of our sickness, Big Pharma factories and rural crystal meth labs can't manufacture enough products to prevent this sinking spell. Soon, even the ruling elites will begin to buckle beneath the weight of their self-deception. We the laboring classes already know the feeling, due to the fact, we’ve been carrying those bloated bastards, plus their delusions of infinite entitlement, on our backs for quite some time now. We strain beneath the load, because the plutocrats have grown very fat gorging themselves on the nation's seed crop.

Bush is nothing more than the effluvia, rising from the landfills of the Corporate State . He's the abiding stench of what we buried and tried to pretend never existed.

Corporate culture is based on mendacity made palatable for mass consumption: Public relation and advertising firms exist to create cute, cartoon animal icons to mask the realities of the slaughterhouse. In corporate life, there is scant reward for depth and authenticity; conversely, an amicable ruthlessness pays off well indeed.

Corporate “reality” is all about “perception management.” Hence, a corporate, utterly commodified, life usurps, exploits and diminishes not only the outer environment, but our internal ones as well. How could one not play off the other and visa versa? How can one spend all day in a so-called “work environment,” spending a large percentage of one's life beneath florescent lights, with sweatshop-cobbled shoes touching industrial carpeting, and bodies supported by bland, utilitarian office furniture, then return, by way of a hideous, dangerous freeway, home to some ugly suburb or exurb, all the while having one's senses incessantly inundated with commercial imagery calculated to manipulate -- hypnotize one, actually -- into a particular way of viewing the world, and not become subject to the sort of psychic pathology that is pandemic among the populace of the empire.

Living such criteria, day by day, how could we not have conjured Bush and company? Bush is only a byproduct of the present corporate order; he is but a reflection of the everyday hubris, denial, mendacity, and exploitation of daily life in the corporatist state. He is emblematic of the House of Mirrors that our nation’s collective psyche has become -- a mass of distorted perceptions sustained

Bush is our hidden intentions made manifest before us: We live in an empire bent on murder/suicide; our nation has become a global-wide spree killer . . . unrepentant . . . seemly devoid of conscience.

Then what hope remains for us, here in this age where self-serving lies promulgated by public relations hacks have hijacked the verities of the human mind, heart, and imagination as, all the while, so many genuine voices of humanity have been lost amid this seemly endless bacchanal of bullshit and blown blood?

That is up to us: Personally and collectively, our fate might well be determined by how honest we’re willing to be with ourselves. After all, by way of our passivity, we’re at least partially responsible for letting a million Rovian Turd Blossoms bloom. We have summoned Bush by the incantation of our hidden intentions; perhaps, if we were to awaken to the George W. Bush concealed within, we might understand our own collaboration in creating him -- and then, at long last, we can begin the process of dismissing him and all he represents.

(Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com.)