To sleep, perchance to rewrite history

I'm no one's bard (not news) - I'm also no one's poet.

I say these things because in humility do we find the honesty and compassion so often lacking in the behavior of those whom we would otherwise despise. I say that because it is the lack of self-awareness, lack of humility, lack of grace which so often I (and I believe others) find so off-putting from those who can easily criticize, but rarely acknowledge their own failures. Instead, excuses are offered, instead the failures of their detractors are offered as justifications for their own conduct and their own failures.

This week (yesterday to be precise) George Bush gave (yet another) farewell speech. In it, he described how history may judge him better than we do so today. He described how he simply listened to his convictions, and kept us 'safe' from terrorism, how he was the unhandsome hero, who bore the price and lashes of his detractors willingly while staving off calamity. He admitted to a few 'mistakes' but generally didn't name them, nor did he claim ownership of what might have lead to them - meaning he didn't acknowledge any fact of behavior or weakness, merely that 'something' went wrong.

Such is the pattern of those like this man (Bush), this masquerade of a Presidency. I found this conference to be disquieting at best, nauseating at worst.

This President violated law after law, not openly in the pride of the cross-bearer, but clandestinely. He positioned political operators to sully and demean his detractors, not welcome their barbs and slings with due confidence and humility. He engaged in a war not of necessity, but instead contrived to force upon us a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives needlessly, to erect a hoped-for democracy that may well fail in the end. He did not write an epitaph of Wilsonian vision, but a legacy of debt, deceit, and contempt.

His supporters liken him to Lincoln, but in truth, he and his supporters were and are as far from Lincoln as they are from Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, Ghandi, and Yitzhak Rabin. Lincoln accepted the reality that both the North and South created and abided slavery, and that both were due blame. He (Lincoln) counseled compassion, grace, forgiveness and cooperation in rebuilding the south, rather than retribution, tough talk, and scornful contempt for the south as so many of GWB's supporters bespeak of Muslims and Arabs. He was the antithesis of the neocon movement, humble, accepting of his own shortcomings, forgiving, and always seeking a better, more decent way. President Bush presided over 8 years of extraordinary divisiveness where contempt for one's political opposition grew to a fever pitch, where the opponent was demonized in a revival of McCarthy-esque commentary about "America Haters" and asinine calls for investigations of "Anti-American sentiments."

So, as President Bush says farewell, I bid him on his way. I hope his life is peaceful, but I also hope someday, someone will help him understand the folly of his contemptuous attitude, help him to understand that unwavering conviction to principles that 'anything goes' to accomplish financial tyranny, or American corporate imperialism, including the constant and wilful deception of the American people, was hardly heroic, and certainly anything but Lincoln-esque.

As Shakespeare puts it - (the true bard)

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make

I hope this President grasps someday in his life or his eternal slumber that his challenge was not to trade liberty and long-term stability for 'security', but rather the ensure liberty by setting a shining example - that is the lesson Lincoln lived - and he did not.