Apologizing for Bush and Cheney

For the past few years I’ve been wondering what could possibly be going through the minds of Bush and Cheney to make them do the things they’ve done. At first I thought it was just stupidity. There are jokes about Cheney’s heart condition being that he lacks one but that didn’t seem explanation enough. Then I came to believe they were both truly evil, in the purest sense of the word.

But as a writer, I know that villains never think of themselves as villains. The “evil genius” thinks of him or herself simply as “a genius.”

So with this in mind, what’s going through Bush and Cheney’s minds (I’m assuming they both have one, even though that fact is in doubt).

How do they sleep at night? The answer is simple, they sleep because they think what they are doing is right. They also think that pretty much everyone else on the planet is wrong.

In short: Bush has lead such a rich, sheltered life that he can’t relate to normal people and their everyday issues, even things as simple as making money and paying bills. Cheney believes that Corporations are the only true democracy (one vote per share of stock), and they should run everything because they’re so much more efficient than government. Corporations are easily accountable, when they make money they are successful. Period. Money is the bottom line because it’s the only true signifier of success.

"The rich are different from you and me." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Yes, they have more money." -- Ernest Hemingway

Baby Bush

Let me start with W. first. He suffers from something that’s common among the very, very rich and privileged. This means it’s extremely uncommon in the real world. And right there you have the explanation. His entire life has been so removed from the reality of the lives of 99.99999% of normal people that he simply can’t relate to them.

Just the way you and I can’t relate to a mass murderer, a mass murder can’t relate to us. But it’s even more basic than that—Bush has never had to get a job for himself, he’s never had to actually work and be productive to keep a job. He’s never had to worry about money, wonder if he has enough or how he can make more. He’s never had to balance a checkbook, pay a bill or ask himself, “How can I afford that?” With anything. Ever.

When I was growing up I had a friend who was the son of an immensely wealthy man, a man so wealthy he owned famous places I thought were public buildings. And so my friend, Bernard, had grown up with everything done for him. He wasn’t stupid, but he had almost no common sense, because he didn’t need it. Other people took care of him.

My favorite example of this was one time he invited me over to his father’s house. It was summer and very hot. All the doors and windows of the house were open, and the three industrial size air conditioning units were working overtime to keep the house cool—and make sure cool air was blasting through the doors in case you were by the pool and needed a cool breeze.

In trying to be a normal host to a visiting friend, he went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and offered me a basket of red berries completely covered in a greenish mold. I said, “Um, those are moldy.” He replied, “No, it’s frost.”

He didn’t know what mold looked like, because he’d probably never seen it before.

And this is how George Bush is about just about everything. He doesn’t know what it’s like. So he can’t understand anyone not being super-rich the same way he can’t understand someone speaking Martian. He can’t even comprehend it. He can’t sympathize or empathize because it’s not within the realm of his experience, much less his imagination.

Everyone he knows is rich. Everyone he knows is in business. So if he does what’s good for the people he knows, understand and relates to, he is doing good. Period. No one else really exists.

A prime example of his inability to even see other people as people was when he was running for president and he appeared on the David Letterman show. During the commercial, the show’s producer came up to the desk, as she often does, to talk to Letterman.

While she was leaned over talking to Letterman, George W. Bush grabbed the bottom of this woman’s jacket and cleaned his eyeglasses on them. That’s right, he used her clothing like a Kleenex.

Basically, he had no respect for her as a person. He had no regard for her property. It was there, he needed it, he used it, just as it should be in his little world.

Magnify this on a global scale and you can understand his action. Kill thousands of people? Spend billions of dollars? That’s OK, he needed to do it. And he was just killing bad guys anyway, right? “SADDAM TRIED TO HURT MY DADDY!” Bush said publicly. Well, then we all understand how you could take the entire resources of the United States of America, disregard the UN and other nations, ignore over 50% of the citizens of the country, let over 1,000 Americans and thousands of innocent Iraqi’s be killed. Of course we do.

Bush is doing what’s best for himself, because what’s best for himself is best for himself. And that’s all he’s ever known. And look at how well he’s doing? He must, then, be right. And if he’s right, then everything he does is right. It’s really very simple.

Cheney—it’s just business

Cheney didn’t grow up rich. His father was a “soil conservation agent” for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He lived close to the land and saw its potential for use (or exploitation). He learned about geology, which lead him to learn about all the oil under the land. And he was off.

What Cheney soon learned was that land is money, and money is power. Cheney was successful in the corporate world because money was all that mattered to him. That’s how you got power, and without power, you were nobody.

And there’s the key to Cheney. In his word, the business world, money is power, and power is all that matters.

The way he sees it, Corporate America is America. It drives the economy, so it is America, and it’s what matters. It’s the “engine of democracy” and in his mind, stockholders voting for corporate boards are the only democracy that matter.

Corporate boards are elected, and stockholders get one vote for each share. Notice it’s not “one person, one vote,” as it is in the country, but “one share, one vote,” which is, in Cheney’s mind, how it should be. Why? Because you get as much say as you can afford.

In his mind, if you have money, you have influence, and if you have influence you are an important member of society. If you don’t have enough money to buy your power and your vote, then what good are you, really? You’re just one of those necessary people who carry things. You aren’t a mover or shaker. You are a person of no importance—and he can prove it, because if you were important, you could buy your vote.

While in his mind it’s not so cold and clinical, and he might even be able to relate to the fact that other people have families and lives (especially if they are stockholding families), that’s the underlying thought.

And this leads to his other major viewpoint—that you make it on the Board of Directors because you are smarter than everybody else. You can prove this because you have more money, more stock, and more power. You must be smarter, or you wouldn’t have those things.

Cheney believes he’s so smart he should simply rule the world. And while that seems insane to us, he has his logic. First, the world is a screwed up place. Even little people who carry things can agree to that.

All kinds of governments have had thousands of years to straighten it out and they never have. Democracy has tried for over 250 years and failed. The world is still a mess. The country is a mess.

Part of the problem is that there are too many opinions, too many voices, too many people trying to make decisions. This leads to arguments when there should be action. A dictator can get things done fast. You don’t have to put up with, much less listen to opposition. Things get done.

This is how it is in Corporate America—he who owns the most stock makes the final decision (unless other people can get together and pool their stock and vote you out—see, democracy in action!)

What’s more, Corporations are more efficient than the government. They have to be, because they have to show a profit. The government doesn’t make a profit. So how can you ever tell if Government is working successfully? How can you correctly gauge that success without profit, the only true indicator?

If a corporation fails, they were doing something wrong, and they are replaced by another Corporation which can try to do it right, and prove they’ve done it right by making a profit. Corporations treat people as well as it’s profitable to treat them, and if people want to be treated better they need to buy stock in the company, band together, and have enough shares to make decisions. That’s democracy.

Cheney is so much smarter than we are, even so much smarter than the Founding Fathers of the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin were smart, for their time, but it just doesn’t work now because now we have Corporations to run things for us, and it’s so much more efficient—you gotta move with the times.

“Democracy moves too slowly...”

Condi actually said that as one excuse for why they didn’t do more. It was a clear view into the underlying “logic” of the Cheney administration.

Democracy does move more slowly than a dictatorship, and with good reason. But the Cheney Gang don’t see it as a good thing, they see it as a detriment, a failing, and something they must overcome by overcoming democracy.

So now Cheney’s true mission is to rid us of the terrible overhead that is democracy and move us directly into a corporate fascist state—oh, wait, we’re already there! See what a success Cheney is!

Cheney knows a better way than democracy. Wasting all that time with representatives like Congresspeople and Senators, much less actual citizens who, as I’ve said before, mostly don’t own stock, so they just didn’t care enough to be buy stock and vote and be involved.

In his mind, Cheney is the John Adams of the 21^st century. He sees a better way. He must be a radical, as our founding fathers were. He is going to lead us into the future with him in charge, because, after all, he’s smarter. We are lucky to have him in power.

Aren't we? If you don't think we are, then you must just be ungrateful. It's your fault. And your responsibility--that's right, Bush and Cheney like to tell us all that we have many responsibilities as citizens. But they seem oblivious to responsibility themselves..

And while it makes sense that Bush doesn't understand the concept of responsibility, Cheney's corporate background should make him sensitive to responsibility, and yet he's still oblivious of it. That's something I can't find any logic for, no matter how twisted.

But don't forget--we are lucky to have them ruling us. We didn't really want all the mess and bother of democracy, did we? Isn't it easier just to turn it over to people who are smarter, or at least richer than we are? That is, of course, what Bush and Cheney want you to believe. Do you?