Warning! This diary contains spoilers for the movie No Country for Old Men. If you haven't seen it, and don't want to know what happens, don't read past the jump.
I just read dday's diary and it reminded me of a diary idea that I had shortly after I walked out of seeing the new Coen brothers' movie No Country for Old Men
dday mentions, among other things, the damage that Bush has done, and will do, through his numerous judicial appoinments.
He walks off and leaves us with quite a mess. We may revel in the victory that we seem assured of this coming November. But lest we forget, like the spoiled man-child he is, Bush leaves us with his mess; bodies piled high, enemies reinvigorated, allies now alienated.
To the jump.
Last warning. There are spoilers on the other side.
I of course am not unlike a lot of people. I long for a world of justice. I desire it, not just in our courts, but in the world at large. It would be nice if Karma was a bit more attentive to the doings of evil men. But the time has long passed when I was surprised to see that those who rape and pillage often walk off to private jets and beaches.
At the end of No Country for Old Men, when Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh walked down the street with a compound fracture as his only punishment for his virtual landscape of murder victims, I blinked hard. He had almost met justice when that car ran the red light and t-boned him. Who among us didn't think that he had just been served his just reward? Who among us didn't see all the innocent and good (and evil) people who had fallen at his hands, and believe that the death of Anton Chigurh would in some way, make things right. We would be able to breathe that sigh and believe, if only for a moment, that justice is unavoidable.
But of course it is not. Anton opened the door to his car, stumbled out, fashioned a sling out of a shirt provided to him by the young and ignorant, and walked away. Here's your hundred dollars. Your innocent are now complicit. Off into the unknown future of his mad world. More killing to come. More people pleading, "You don't have to do this." More blood spilled.
And of course here I sit, worn thin from the past 7 years and I prepare myself for that day when Bush will walk away. I picture it so easily because we've seen it before from previous Presidents.
Bush, standing on the steps of our helicopter. He turns, flashes that infuriating grin of his and waves. That wave that happens only once in a Presidency, at the end. Arm straight, held high, jacket awkwardly pulled askew. And away he flies.
Florida 2000. Ohio 2004. Faith, the life blood of our democracy, spilled.
294 federal judges. Alito. Roberts. Underfunded science. Further deregulated media.
Faith-based initiatives. Is this a government or a church? Why no faith-based weapon systems? Abstinence only. If you believe in it it must be true. Evidence is for suckers.
And 9/11. I will never be convinced that 9/11 was inevitable. Gore would certainly have taken the threats more seriously. Perhaps that would have made the difference. We've all heard of Bush's scoffing at Clinton's warning that Al Qaeda was our top threat. Nope, according to the governor of Texas it was Iraq. Well, I'll give it to the guy, he keeps his eye on the prize.
Yes Iraq. Iraq and all of its collateral damage. Our nation divided (less so now, but those wounds will be slow to heal). Thousands of our soldiers dead. Countless maimed. PTSD. Walter Reed.
Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Billions (when will it be trillions?) of our national treasure squandered. Cronies enriched. Taxes cut. Debt.
Katrina. New Orleans. The amputation of an American city. Heckuva job. ". . . so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."
A landscape littered with the dead and broken.
Come November we'll celebrate something.
Come January, Bush just walks away.