The
Eighteen-Sixties that is. Actually you can take it either way, as it works either way.
Like many of you, I have been wracking my brains trying to figure out: "why why WHY do they still support him like they do? Why do they look up to him a reverence that even Christ never received while he was alive."
Then it dawned on me while reading "Sore Winners" by John Powers (an excellent book by the way, I may publish a mini-review sometime this week.) He speaks of how Bush is the least European President since perhaps Truman.
Then it struck me. Like Colonel Kurtz said in Apocalypse Now, it was like a diamond bullet had been shot into my head. (And I'm a political neophyte so I'm sure others have had this thought long before me) :
The South dominates our politics.
Nixon and Reagan were from California so they had that advantage.
But Lyndon Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Gore, and Bush were all from the South.
But until 2000, I had no idea the South was still carrying a grudge against us.
But they are. A BIG one.
And George W. Bush is their savior.
First there's the 1960s. The time when the coloreds, the feminazis and the queers took over the country with the hippie-love, the busing, the wacky weed and the baby-killing. They've never forgotten that and have determined to to make all those damned, New York intellectual libruls pay, pay, pay for all that mess.
But then I went back further -- to the Civil War. (I've been reading up a lot about secession lately. Did a diary on the subject of a red state-blue state separation.)
Many in the South still feel they were cheated. That they've been in thrall to the North ever since 1865. And then came George. To them, Bush is Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee all in one. Karl Rove, say what you want about him, had his hand on the pulse of the zeitgeist perfectly. (For one thing they're people who don't use bourgeois words like zeitgeist!)
He has made Bush a real life superhero: Captain Confederate. Faster than a death-row clemency request! Able to leap Ted Kennedy in a single bound!
In fact, that may not go far enough. He is, in their eyes, the proverbial savior on a white horse. He is not Jesus but he is Christ-like in all the right ways. After all, Christ proposed a Welfare state and that "turn the other cheek stuff". Bush, on the other hand, will not allow himself to be crucified, beheaded or put in the lions' den.
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He will gird his loins with The Belt of the Supreme Court, The Breastplate of the NRA in place, his feet fitted with the sandals of Chevron-Shell, and he shall wield the The Shield of Murdoch, the Helmet of the Floridian, and The Sword of the Pentagon. He shall fight against the Satanic hordes of Hollywood, Europeans, and Al-Qaeda, until the last breath.
In the name of the father and of the son, and
of the Holli-Burton. Amen.
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