In these waning moments he exits a visibly weary man, but still trying to deny the burden of the still developing history that he and his collaborators set in motion. For a larger man, given the shocks that the nation and world have sustained, there might be a hint of tragedy here at the end. But he lacks the awareness or moral sense to rise beyond a mundane fatigue, both for him and for the public restless for him to move on, tiring of seeing him on the stage.
(Notice: This diary contains horrific images of death and violence. These are not meant to titillate or entertain. Please do not permit children to view them. You might also consider turning off image loading in your browser. I take no pleasure in posting these images and know that you will not take pleasure in viewing them. If you are offended by them, you should be; if you find them obscene, it's because they are. I have tired of looking at images like these and crying for the past several years, but I can not look away from what has been done in our name, away from the children that we have lost. Please understand, and Peace.)
There was never greatness—or even potential for greatness—here, neither in him nor in the changing coterie of cohorts that upholstered his privileged insulation of whispered support and reflected admiration all of his life. How natural for him to become inveigled by the smiles, the handshakes and whispered assurances from viceroys appointed mainly by his prime minister; a myriad of glances of light in the political hall of mirrors that dazzled him into believing that all was and would be glory. To such a man, one accustomed to the luxury of receiving, how easy to believe in a great destiny easily gained by projecting a synthetic aura of readiness and resolution, one fabricated from familiar cinematic trappings: swagger, tough talk, violence. Worn, superficial, put-ons that adolescents cast off without regret.
How then, with all of what he had, and all of what he lacked—his connections and his incapacity for self-awareness—could he fail to be the willing conduit of an entire cabal, the callow younger man out of his depth but struggling to show his worth, yet incapable of understanding that he had nothing beyond his own usefulness to offer the politically hardened schemers who were never entranced by the abstract struggle of good and evil that they employed to capture his all too willing imagination, and to enlist the power that they had gained by proxy.
No, these were men with agendas, with projects and purposes, with the relentless intent to deploy long-prepared plans that had only lacked the power for them to be set in motion. Their useful tool was this man with a constitutional lack of high ambition; nothing beyond venal mercantile desires or vague notions of what it could mean to exercise a power he never understood. Notions that remained incipient schemes, even under the pressure of events that would have convinced a less obdurate or obtuse man to reassess, to gauge, measure. But that would have meant consideration, acknowledging error, habits beyond the purview of the self-image concocted by this would be man of action.
He is, after all, a small man, one lacking the sense of duty or service that he might have inherited from the better man, his father, whose similar fall from political success traced a less pronounced arc just a few years before him. Cautionary tales and mythological echoes are not for him, though.
Is there confusion in him, now, uncertainty mingled with the embittered disbelief that he could re-enter private life without the laurels and acclaim heaped upon him by the sycophants who propped him up as the instrument for their own ambitions? If it were only so; his valedictory is suffused with self-justification and a steady current of unexpressed but blatant self-pity, an automatic fallback to his customary stance of defying the evidence. No, as he walks off into private life we know that he will continue to shrug off any sense of unease that might disconcert him into the ruminations and considerations that he has always derided in favor of his intuition; regardless of where that intuition has led him, regardless of the cost.
To be sure, others have paid; and here these horrific consequences stop cold the parlor game of speculating on how much Mr. Bush was a driver of events or driven by others.
There is no arguing: The history of our nation (and of the world) would be different had not Dick Cheney operated as our country’s self-appointed regent for the past eight years. But in this there is no absolution for George Walker Bush. There can not be. The magnitude of what the conspirators around him were able to achieve through him is appalling, constructing as they did an archipelago of horror only whose most dramatic effects we have seen, an entire global apparatus of destruction, fed with the traumatized, shredded, and incinerated bodies of innocent men, of women, of the aged; of children. The mind reels. It is beyond repellent; it is the obscenity of indifference to the suffering that one has caused.
It was Mr. Bush’s authority that drove our materiel and military into Iraq; his the authority that kept us there after Saddam was gone; it was his feckless meandering that permitted the insurgency to fester and seethe into the low intensity civil war that tormented thousands of innocents.
Below, in the images, you will (I hope) read what W.B. Yeats wrote about Ireland’s own civil war at the beginning of the last century. The poem is called "Ancestral Houses," and is part one of a four-part poem called "Meditations In Time Of Civil War." It is a poem that I read and loved when I first encountered it more than twenty years ago as an undergraduate. I was completely unable to understand it then. Sadly, now I do; and sadly it is still as germane as when Yeats wrote it.
How can a man be so blithe to horror? We know by now that Mr. Bush has a natural talent for abjuring responsibility, as you will see in the juxtaposed images below. That will certainly be part of his "legacy" if one might use such a word. Mr. Bush has said that we don’t know about our legacies in history because we’ll all be dead. Even if he were correct (he is not), others will not be dead, and they will know:
You have done this, Mr. Bush. For history, this is you.
The Yeats poem:
Meditations in Time of Civil War
I. Ancestral Houses
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.
Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;
But when the master's buried mice can play.
And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.
O what if gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn displays
Before the indifferent garden deities;
O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight for every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence?
What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished floors
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?
Peace. Peace.