Is Bush wet or dry? What a dumbed down question.
Did you know that people who lose a part of themselves -- an arm, their legs, or every single thing below the neck -- get the very same stupid statement from everyone?
Said in a thousand different ways, with treacly sincerity, it's the dumbest thing you can say to a cripple. It screams out that you don't know, and don't really care.
The sentence goes something like, "Oh, you're so brave." "Oh, you're so strong."
Well. The truth is, cripples carry on because we have no choice.
It's guaranteed that every newly crippled person will freak out, cry, pound the walls, yell and shout, kick the dog, sit in a funk, scream at God, get drunk, take miracle cures, write poems, pray, pop pills -- only to find that those legs are still gone, every morning. No choice about it, ever, not even for an instant. They're gone, gone, gone.
Sooner or later, you live with it, or you don't. That's all.
If it were possible for a human being to simply lay down and die, most cripples would do it promptly during this 'adjustment' phase, when you hate what you are. You can't, though. And so you find that you're still here when the sun comes up. Day after day after day it comes up, and here you are.
You only return to actually living when you accept your damaged self. That broken thing -- that is your body now. That is you, living in a shell of what was, like a squatter in a half-burned building, but with no other choice than to get up again each morning.
But please. Please don't call that being brave. That word is far too small. Brave is for when you put up with pain or fear beyond what's easy or comfortable. Not for when there is no exit from a lonely room, full of pain.
There's no word for that windowless room. Call it being stuck, call it a raw deal. Call it humbled, shattered, broken. Call it Groundhog Day, forever. Call it the room at the end of the world.
Cindy Sheehan knows that place, where part of you is ripped away, and it won't ever come back, or heal over. When Bush drafts my young son and kills him in the desert I'll have a room like hers. When he does it to your child, you'll have a room at the end of the world.
But I'll never call her brave for living on after landing in that place. I know she simply had no choice, and the sun kept coming up, and she's still here. It's a place where being brave falls by the wayside pretty early on, insufficient to the challenges presented. Truth is, there are human states of mind way beyond brave, and that is where cripples learn to live, afterwards.
This has everything to do with Mr. Bush, and whether he's fallen off the wagon or not.
For he is a cripple. He has no heart, no human feelings for other human beings. It never grew in. It's twelve sizes too small. Alone on the stage in his mind, everyone else and everything else are props in a lifelong play about him, only him. He's the only real person in the world. And so he plays with real people like boys play with little green soldiers, crashing waves of men upon one another, and making explosions with their mouths and minds.
The extent of the damage done in his childhood and young adult life is right there in his frightened eyes, in his twitchy and tumbling gait and manner, in his total inability to genuinely work, to accept criticism, to abide stress, to hear bad news, or to show mercy. It's right there in his need for constant praise and agreement, in his view of himself as God's Agent, in the way he confuses himself with America.
Bush is stuck in his 'adjustment' phase, still running from his wounds, still lashing out in pain of them. He hates himself, and the absentee father and cruel mother who built his hellish inner life. But he very likely will be stuck there all of his life, since he shows no inclination to take his inner life for himself and do something about it.
Well. I'm sorry about that, but that is his concern, and his family's.
Our concern is that he is not in control of himself while he is largely in control of our country. What harm he does to our nation while he plays with soldiers and follows the scripts put in front of him by his handlers is amusement to Bush; it is of no real interest or concern to him. It is to us.
That country he's set fire to? That's the one we were going to give to our kids.
Bush has long been described as a dry drunk. Now the Enquirer pegs him as a wet drunk. What a dumbed down question. Wet or dry -- it doesn't matter in the least. What matters is the drunk part of the phrase.
A drunk is a person who flees immediate reality because they find it too painful to abide. Whether they flee by chemical means -- or by a contrived structure of mental, emotional, social, religious and physical supports that let them live in fantasy -- is entirely incidental and secondary. Make a wet drunk dry or make a dry drunk wet -- you've still done nothing about the drunk. You haven't touched the crippled part, and you haven't put them in charge of their own inner life.
You've labeled them wet or dry, clucked over them a bit, and left them acting out and avoiding their windowless room. In Bush's case, acting out on a world stage. Literally, he'll start a nuclear war rather than examine himself.
Being a drunk is a lizard brain condition, a fight or flight response that takes place before any higher thought. Those responses erupt first. Mr. Bush is on some good meds to keep his underlying fears and angers within respectable parameters consistent with living in thousand dollars suits and oval shaped offices, but the demons are there in his face for all of us to see.
He cannot function 'as is' in any serious capacity. He can pretend to work, if he is kept on meds and living in a bubble of praise and good news only. But problems in our nation have gone beyond having someone pretend to work on them. Our house is on fire, where it isn't flooded or fallen down. There are roaches crawling out from under the desks in our Congress. There are thousands upon thousands of cripples being flown home after dark and squirreled away in hospital wards where reporters aren't allowed to hear them adjusting to their room at the end of the world.
Our nation is in a dance of death with a madman. Just as the high court of King Louis at Versailles held fanciful balls far into the night while hundreds of thousands starved in the villages of France, King George is acting out his hatred and fear and loathing for himself, his father and his mother with our young men and women in Iraq.
Bush will invade Syria and Iran next, if he is not stopped by his handlers or others -- it won't be his choice not to nuke them. He'll have to be stopped or talked out of it. He is acting out his rage and fear upon a world stage, and we are all helping him do it by pretending he is up in the polls or down in the polls week by week, or he is a wet drunk or a dry drunk today, or he is a lame duck or a strong leader with a mandate this year.
As if his fantasy world were our real world, too. At this rate we will be posting the body count from Tal Afar on the evening news right beside a graph of how many shots Bush downed between breakfast and lunch. Some will cheer him on and some will say tsk tsk, and the game will go on to its merry end.
Enough!
There is only death and destruction and misery and hunger and poverty and pain and sorrow down the road Mr. Bush is walking on. He is making a room at the end of the world for each one of us.
Don't go there with him. Be brave. Make your choice while you still have it.