I've been trying to find a way of stating what I think of President Bush, now that all is said and done. It's been surprisingly difficult. I guess can start with this: certain images keep coming back to me.
Bush's televised landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, for which the president wore a flight suit and a helmet and took underwater survival training in the White House swimming pool, was the dramatic start to a visit to the carrier that included an air show and a televised speech to the nation. In his address, the president declared victory in Iraq in front of cheering sailors and a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished."
I keep thinking about that swimming pool. I get this little movie in my head. I imagine myself walking into the White House during the last week of April, 2003 and asking an aide where the President is. I imagine being told that the President of the United States is in a flight suit, being suspended by some sort of trapeze-like apparatus over the White House swimming pool, wherein he is being repeatedly dunked as a part of underwater crash training because he wants to land on the USS Abraham Lincoln in an S3-B Viking jet in order to announce that the war in Iraq is over.
"Oh," I imagine myself saying. An uncomfortable pause. The aide shuffles his feet. "Is the President enjoying that?" I ask.
The aide's face brightens. "Oh, yes," he says, nodding. "President Bush is having a grand time with it."
I suppose that it's difficult for me to sum up what I think of the forty-third President because what I want to say is so straightforward, and it should not be a straightforward matter, summing up the impression you have of a person, after knowing him, even from a distance, for eight or -- counting the 2000 campaign -- nine years. But, you see, I keep thinking about that swimming pool. Bush, underneath sun-dappled and chlorinated water, in full flight gear, with a big happy grin on his face.
He was an imbecile. He was a man of below-average intelligence, perhaps even slightly impaired, who mistook his own fantasy life for the good of the nation and was perfectly content to put people to a lot of trouble in order to attain both. He liked fart jokes.
He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.
That, and war. There never was anything more to the man than that. Not in high school, not in college, not in failed business after failed business, not before the booze and not during the booze and not after the booze. There was nothing more than fart jokes and war.
I think about Karla Faye Tucker (who never actually said, "Please don't kill me," in the Larry King interview, despite Bush's mockery) and I think about Abu Ghraib. I think about the seven minutes or the eleven minutes in the classroom on 9/11 and I think about Bush's shriek "I will screw him in the ass!" I think about Fallujah. And I think about that swimming pool.
The images coalesce, finally, into an image I had seen before. A painting, actually. The most terrifying painting I have ever seen. A depiction of a quiet imbecilic doomsday in an ordinary town, titled "The Street," by Balthus. Nothing much is happening in the painting. Some people are walking around; a small girl plays with a paddle and a ball; a mother carries a child; there's a man in a chef's hat taking a stroll; a teenage boy in flat cap walks towards the left of the viewer, arms swinging deliberately; there is a priest and another man in white suit who walks by carrying a plank of wood that obscures his face. Just a day on any street, anywhere.
But as you look closer you see that everything is slightly wrong. The small girl with the paddle is deformed in the face, somehow. The boy walking towards you is blank-eyed and dead. The baby looking back at you from his mother's arms is wearing a sailor's outfit, but he is actually a tiny adult, and he is squinting. For the first time you notice that another boy, there on the left, is mindlessly molesting a girl. And none of them, no one in the painting (except, maybe, the man in the white suit, face behind plank) is thinking any thoughts at all. Their eyes and their postures betray minds that have left. An atom bomb will soon drop on this town, or it has already dropped. It makes no difference. The man in the white suit, whatever unseeable expression might be on his face, is having his day in the sun . . . that he is Death needs hardly be added.
I don't know who Balthus imagined the viewer was, in this painting: the person on the sidewalk through whose eyes we are looking. It is strange to think about, because if everyone in that world is dead, or imbecile, then we, with our line-of-sight, must be too. I also don't know what Balthus imagined was just out of view, behind the viewer. But I do note the following: a swimming pool with a trapeze contraption and a flight suit would not be so out of place in that world. Not there. Not at all.
"The Street," by Balthus, though painted around 1934, is a painting of George Bush's America. When I look through the forty-third President's eyes in my imagination, I am chilled and disgusted, because I am looking at a world that knows only fart jokes and war, and all that I can see is looking back at me. How we got through that world with our sanity intact, I am not sure. Many, of course, very many, didn't get through it at all. We must do what we can to make recompense. For now though, for the moment, I simply feel like I've woken from a nightmare. The new day seems, if I could use a corny word, like it could be wholesome. I am glad we got here at last.