Down the Killer Rabbit Hole

I remember getting a D in 1980 or 81 from my International Relations Professor, a crazy Hungarian named Zarzar. It was for a paper I wrote suggesting economics (market forces) not ideology was going to win the Cold War. (I'd read about it somewhere, definitely not from his reading assignments.) Zarzar didn't like commies. He wanted them to suffer like he had under them. And he didn't suffer "appeasers" like me--or Jimmy Carter--very well. Ahh, the Carter-Reagan years, such a quixotic, otherwordly time... "malaise", Isalamic foment, Desert One, gas prices, a feckless executive:

Bush Confounded by the 'Unacceptable' - washingtonpost.com

President Bush finds the world around him increasingly "unacceptable."

In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems "unacceptable," including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea's claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Bush's decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd time, a phase of his presidency in which all manner of circumstances are not bending to his will: national security setbacks in North Korea and Iraq, a Congress that has shrugged its shoulders at his top domestic initiatives, a favorability rating mired below 40 percent.

But a survey of transcripts from Bush's public remarks over the past seven years shows the president's worsening political predicament has actually stoked, rather than diminished, his desire to proclaim what he cannot abide. Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush's rising frustration with his declining influence.

Now, maybe it's just me, but it sounds like someone is being victimized by his circumstance.

...Bush is much less like Reagan, and more like Carter in the effects of his demeanor and stewardship of the nation.

Bush's chief rhetorical weapon is to remind us, every chance he gets, that we are under assault at every turn. "I'm here to protect you", he infers, but the atmospherics and weight never ease or change. As a result of this and of Orange Alerts and of wobbly interchangeable rationales for doing any number of things, the electorate too, is in the midst of a quiet gut check. They "like" Bush as the parlance goes, but they're wondering if the keening, anxious, almost fearful nature about how we're conducting this war on terror thing is really "Who we are."

Carter's "malaise", the gas lines, economic grey skies as far as the eye could see, these all led to his being labelled as inept, but most devastatingly, they led to him being regarded as a victim of his circumstances--the times dictated what he said and recommended for us. And much of what he said was unimaginative and reflexive. True, often, but reflexive and constrictive nonetheless.

In much the same way, Bush's script has been written for him, and his edits and additions don't do much to rosy things up because, well, because "fear" is subtractive and ennervating for the broad polis. From anthrax scares that disappear into the memory hole, with their ensuing "duct tape and plastic sheets" recommendations, to the drip-drip of tragic daily causalties in our "success" in Iraq, the inevitable conclusion--often left unsaid by many voters--is that we're in a box. And a gloomy one at that...