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September 2, 2005

it's always like this

The Imposter President finally took his stage-managed tour of the Gulf disaster area today, his arrival timed to coincide with the appearance of the first National Guard troops in NO. Bush flew a swooping arc that took him first over the devastated Coast, then into Biloxi and (via wifely proxy) Lafayette before the presidential farce came to a semi-screeching halt the outskirts of the devastated Big Easy. His reactions throughout were a study in irrelevance and disconnect. "There is a spirit" in Biloxi, according to the president. He evinces near sexual excitement at the prospect of sitting on Trent Lott's reconstructed porch in Mississippi.

"Hang in there," he tells a sobbing woman.

The Imposter President laughs and he smiles and he frowns and he sputters. His smirking face, his idiot, perfunctory nodding all suggest a man desperately striving to not so much follow a predetermined script, but to embody a vaguely defined set of characteristics and traits, qualities that while technically associated with his office nonetheless seem to consistently hover beyond his reach and the outer boundary of his talent / functional competence.

I mean, it's completely pointless to offer the following at this late juncture, but the man is clearly a fucking moron. This fact about Bush - consistent, unchanging - is why the obsessive tracking of his (now) dive-bombing approval rating always strikes me as absurd. We elected/allowed the installation of this idiot twice at our clearly discernible peril (well, actually, I didn't but you know what I mean), so our approval and disapproval has as much real meaning as the variation in the weekly box office tallies, indicating at best minor variation in our collective appetite / tolerance for the consumption of shit.

Motivation is reputed to follow action (and, moreover, the cameras are watching) so the Imposter President clearly has to keep on trucking despite any innate limitations. (This persistence despite himself has long been chief among Bush's most discernible traits, that and his useful inability to ever cohere into anything more than a shell into which anyone can conceivably pour anything.) Strange as it is to still need to emphasize against what feels like a disputing tug of stunned incredulity, he is the POTUS, with all the stature that implies even in these worst of times, but no amount of play-acting and beseeching today, no amount of human sacrifice in the streets of New Orleans could call down the Oval-O loa that mysteriously chose to favor Bush during his first visit to Ground Zero. Much is being made of the difference in Bush's reaction to Katrina and 9/11, but the man on the little screen this morning is the same nitwit who lost his place reading a children's book that morning four years previous. At Ground Zero Bush stood enveloped and enmeshed in a more fortunate (for him) aesthetic regime, which is to say, on the shoulders of a preternaturally focused Rudy Giuliani and against the backdrop of the instant, universally agreed-upon primal scene of the day, i.e., NYPD and NYFD and EMS rushing up stairs to their doom. The scope of the disaster in NY was smaller, its arrow of outrage pointing outward, across national borders, its implication all upside for the men in power in DC. Who is there to blame today besides the black people dying because they lacked wheels, living as they do outside of Bush's SUV ownership society?

Surprisingly, though, despite all his fumbling, Bush committed no obvious gaffe today beyond the underlying/overarching failure of being Bush. That left it to Wifey to hit the most unintentionally astounding note of the day. Shanked by a reporter in Lafayette who had the bland temerity to ask her what the overwhelming blackness of the victims in NO may or may not suggest, Laura Bush was reduced to chorus of disturbed mewling, whining "noooo. No. Nooooooo." Her subsequent sentence-structure response (paraphrased) was that it was "always like this" during natural disasters. The poor tend to live on low ground, explained the FLOTUS, in houses that tend to be more vulnerable to destruction by hurricane and flood.

Or put another way, Mrs. Bush believes that black and brown people just "tend" to be drownin' and dying and starving and shit, like, all the time. Has been and ever shall be in her estimation - "it's always like this" - and extracting any particular implication from this outbreak of suffering in NO is to ask an already settled question about the American Negro's ordained lot - settled at least in Mrs. Bush's mind.

Someone needs to lose it on either Bush the way Anderson Cooper lost it on LA Senator Mary Landrieu yesterday on CNN. Did Bush meet with NO Mayor Ray Nagin today? If he did I'm sure that meeting took place off screen and off mic. Nagin seems a little likely to go maroon about now.

Posted by ebogjonson in new orleans, politricknal sciences, on September 2, 2005 3:52 PM