Don't Know Much About History

History is odd. I will be long gone before the true history of the Bush administration is written. I'm still reading analyses of Abraham Lincoln's presidency. -- GeeDub Bush

Sigh. This tired-ass riff is as stale as the one about the yellow rug in the Oval Office, or how peachy-cool it is that Daddy shot Japanese and now Junior can be friends with them, maybe pitch a tent on the South Lawn and cook fucking s'mores. Jesus H. Christ.

Look, Cletus, there is nothing "odd" whatsoever about history. History is just people doing things, and other people writing about those things, the people who did them, and the people who had to deal with the consequences. As such, it is a quintessentially human endeavor, one that is generally not helped much by this or that writer's need to justify themselves, either to their academic peers, popular demand, or ideological brethren. Realism should at least trump hagiography, insofar as the craft itself generally consists of its practitioners reading their stuff to each other, not unlike the network news.

Thus I would venture that it is infinitely more likely that ten, twenty, fifty years from now, more people will find valuable perspective in, say, The One-Percent Doctrine than Rebel in Chief. Why? Because odds are that events will continue to unfold in accordance with one far more than the other. Nobody's going to give a damn about a Freedom Institute appended to a coloring-book library of redacted lies, and nobody's going to give a shit about what a court jester like Bob Woodward had to say about anything.

Bush is right in that time and perspective are the ultimate arbiters of whether you're remembered as a Lincoln or a Fillmore. But in his case, time is only going to strengthen the perception that he initiated what was essentially a war on gravity, to the immense profit of a select few who just happened to be part of or associated with his term in office. Gravity eventually wins, and Cheney and Halliburton and Blackwater and the Carlyle Group and the rest of them got their filthy pelf.

What gets remembered most is whether we continued to allow these people to metastasize, and bring us the rest of the way down, or if we start to recognize our own collective roles and disengage from the system, so as to delegitimize its more energetic misdeeds.