What A Narrow Escape!

I had a sobering thought this morning.

What a NARROW ESCAPE we are having at the Bush Inauguration.

Just think, what if they had decided to scale back the parties, spend a million bucks instead of 40 or 60 million, and donate the rest to humanitarian aid efforts?

They could have made a statement about this being a difficult time for so many people.  It's a time of war and of natural disaster.  A time when our leaders need to show responsibility and compassion.  They could have made it about Christian values, about fiscal responsibility, and about how one can both prosecute a war and provide for its innocent victims.

A move like that would have been a huge PR bonus for Bush, defused and deflected much of the steam for inaugural protests, and demonstrated that they are indeed the party of Christian values.  It would have made difficult to criticize the atmosphere in which he is taking office, and lent a new and badly needed dignity to his second term.  Even if it was insincere, it would have been really great press for them.

Instead, they are behaving entirely typically, spending huge sums of money stuffing the finest perks and caviar into their largest contributors and spilling more American excess in front of the hungry, ravaged world.

I know that they don't care about the poor, the sick, the hungry, or the war dead.   But I find it difficult to believe that they are missing this golden opportunity to pretend to be good.

It's one thing to have the ordinary responsibility of being  one single human being.  But to have such far-reaching power to do harm or to do good, and to fail to ever use it to do great humanitarian  good, that's really something to answer for.  And it's also really, really stupid.

By the way, after struggling for about a month to think of a suitable sticker for my car, one that expresses both my disgust and my hope, and espouses an internationally positive message that is relatively non-partisan and criticize, I settled on this, and I'll be handing them out on Inauguration Day.

•  I hope protesters

  carry signs with this stuff on it:
  "chrisian?  how about war dead and tsnunami victims?"
  "spare a dime for a war victim?"

  Etc.
  Thanks for posting

  by DrKate on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 09:10:08 AM PDT

  •  are they allowing any protesters at all?

    or are they sealing off the city?

    by kate mckinnon on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 03:24:56 PM PDT

•  W doesn't care anymore

  After all, this is his last inauguration so he doesn't need to come across as anythong positive.  And as for history, well he doesn't care because he will be dead then.

  Besides, we will still have enough other things to go after his successors with, just for backing him in so many cases.

  I still wish he had done what you suggest.  It would have been the right thing to do.  

  by JAPA21 on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 09:10:42 AM PDT

•  Greed and selfishness

  Yes, they could have and should have, yet they won't.

  They are doing what they do best - lining their own pockets.

  Just look at their ideas for propping up the floundering economy - raiding Social Security and freezing/slashing entitlement programs.

  Good diary.

  by Andrea inOregon on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 09:19:45 AM PDT

•  C'mon, Kate. You're flying in the face ..

  ...of long-establshed oligarchical values here.

  Thorstein Veblen helps out:

  Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naive ostentation, but they acquired their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on which these usages rest. Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is, by this method, made to sense as a means to the end. He consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is a witness to the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to witness his host's facility in etiquette. ...

  Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must be wasteful.

  by Meteor Blades on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 09:22:17 AM PDT

  •  yeah, but remember FDR?

    SOMEONE had the sense to serve some chicken salad, make a great speech, and get to work.

    http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/fr32/speeches/fdr4.htm

    "Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. Vice President, my friends, you will understand and, I believe, agree with my wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words brief.

    We Americans of today, together with our allies, are passing through a period of supreme test. It is a test of our courage--of our resolve--of our wisdom--our essential democracy..."

    by kate mckinnon on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 09:41:42 AM PDT

•  PREEMPT THE BASTARDS NOW!

  The Democratic State of the Union Address

  "Generosity, Ethics, Patience, Effort, Concentration, and Wisdom"

  by Dood Abides on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 09:43:42 AM PDT