In the Bushes

For years, for decades, Richard M. Nixon was my ideal president. "I’m the President of the United States. I can bomb anyone I want," Oliver Stone had him say in the film. If it’s not a documentable quote, the spirit is still gospel.
Nixon was clever, devious, schizophrenic. You’ve got to have a basic brainpan for that. But he was certainly not what a philosopher, a scientist, a cutting-edge theologian ... would call intelligent.
All educated peoples live in kleptocracies. For pk, what could be more kleptocratic than a president like Nixon? Unless we were under Stalin.

But now it’s 2005. We’re bombing, torturing Muslims. Different setting, different colors for the setting, different temporal impressions. And my opinion in changing. Now I think the Bushes, any Bush, is the perfect Koba. Oh, there’s only one original Koba, but he’s dead.
I still shiver when I recall George Bush, Senior running for Vice-President with Reagan. He was a bulldog, a perfect Yalie, the Bulldogs: snapping at anything his masters wanted snapped at. My favorite moment in any presidential debate ever isn’t any speech from Lincoln, isn’t Nixon’s shadowed jowls against Kennedy’s baby fat (and atrocious Boston Rs: Cuba’r: We’ve got to flatten Castro, and Cuber), it’s Bush interrupting Geraldine what’s-er-face. She couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And of course the moderator allowed it! Democracy, you see: stage-managed.

Ah, you think. pk is picking on Republicans: he must be a Democrat. Not on your life. Oh, then he must be a Commie. Hardly. Can’t you tell an anarchist when you see one?
Except that all the other anarchists I know seem to accept civilization: big populations, corporations, markets too intricate for anyone to understand (but not so intricate that a zilllion experts won’t claim to understand them: and get licensed: by the kleptocracy.
No, no. I’m a We were better off, less toxic anyway, as Neanderthals, as Cro-Magnon: I wish nature could magically send a few hundred survivors back to the savanna, in Africa, and that we’d stay there.
Of course there won’t be any savanna in Africa. Africa too will look like BedStuy.

But could we only be too busy looking for food, looking over our shoulder for predators, for enemies, we wouldn’t be worrying about markets.

Meantime, we’ve got Bush: Bushes everywhere you look.

[2005 10 31 I promise a piece on Alpha Kleptocrats.]

PS: Gregory Bateson, THE teacher, told of a philosopher, one of the old Greeks, who ceased to believe in human speech. He said nothing, wrote nothing, left no disciples. Bateson, wisest of the wise, calls the guy foolish. But despite my reverence for Bateson, I LIKE that guy!
pk has written millions of words, talked a blue-streak, for well more than half a century. So much wasted breath. I could have been fishing! I could have been crawling around in the under story looking for a newt to pounce on!

PPS Did pk want to hear what candidate Geraldine had to say when Bush interrupted her? No. I wish the moderator had interrupted all of them: made the debates 100% commercials. Oh, of course the debates already were 100% commercials, but commercials for this or that agenda. A solid hour instead of Ford has a better idea or Tastes great! Less Filling! might have been less harmful.

PPPS "Cutting edge theologian"? Where did I get that idea? It’s not even an oxymoron.