Letters to the Editor

• Kamiya has fine antenae

  [Read the article: Is there life after Bush?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I greatly look forward to anything written by Gary Kamiya. This article was superb and very evocative of all the things I'd been going through in the last 6 years.

  I have a few disparate thoughts to add after having read it.

  The anger that Bush elicits in me and in Gary is just a transferance of the rage that Bush is actually feeling. The same with Cheney, and Rice and Rumsfeld. These people are highly unintegrated, and they know [except for Bush] how to play the public game as if they are fully grown up. Witness Cheney with Blitzer, and also the knowledge that Cheney was consumed with the desire to discredit Wilson when flying back from some event, and he set the whole ball rolling that has ended up with the silly and pointless 'Scooter' - his underling - in court. But not him. Cheney is untouchable.

  Gary makes the brilliant point that all the important things that needed addressing were not and instead a needless war was started. This is no accident. These insecure brittle angry posturing men are not interested in the unbelievable complexity of creating policy and thinking through systems for ameliorating the lives of the masses, i.e clever taxation, family policies, health-care, the tempering of the harsher effects of globalization etc.. They are not interested. They couldn't care less. They are not in politics to do that tedious complicated and unglamorous work. They are in politics to strut around and alleviate their own inner feelings of rage and alienation by playing at being omnipotent.

  I can't remember who it was who said that politics is 'rock 'n roll for ugly people', but it seems apt here.

  I've always reflected on how deceptively adult and mature other people seem to us when we look at them from a distance, witness the august CEO and his mega MBA brain, the paternal politician with his stentorian tones, the clever entrepreneur and his world monopoly.

  All these people are just people, they're as flawed (actually usually more so) as anyone else.

  The GOP under Rove was not about policy it was about domination. The people who built this rag-tag coalition of bullies, egomaniacs, inadequates and incompetents, were just posturing on the world stage, everything they DID do crumbled in ignominy because it was never about the policy it was always about them and their desperate cries to be admired, feared and respected...held in awe, held in high esteem. Look at us we are the new Romans. This was the era of spectacle. It's no surprise that they were so incompetent because when they sought solutions to real problems in the real world they employed the most direct violent, brutal methods. Nuance? Nuance is for cissies, it's for girly men. We are at the OK corral and we are going to show the effeminate Democrats how to deal with the troublemakers in town, not with any of that Clintonian "I feel your pain" s**t. They will be feeling our Pain! if you complain you're a communist, you're a traitor, you should be locked up without trial.

  One final thing, the first time I realized I would miss Bush [yes...it's true] was when I watched in increasing amazement and hilarity [I was bent double] his rambling incoherent press conference with Hamid Karzai back in the summer of '06. I thought to myself "The wheels have come off" and the strain is showing, I felt jubilant, but at the same time, I was laughing so hard, I realized that it would be a long time before politics would be such a visceral rollercaoster and my deep engagement and resentment at this buffoon has added colour to my life, a greyer politician won't provide such high drama, on the other hand, he probably won't lead us stubbornly into WWIII

  Permalink Tuesday, February 20, 2007 04:12 AM