President Bush finds the world around him increasingly “unacceptable.”
In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems “unacceptable,” including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea’s claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Look, I knew when Jeffrey Sebelia won Project Runway last night that the world was off its pole and the entire humanthing was fucked up, where an asshole who makes ugly dresses gets $100,000 to make more ugly dresses, but even I had no idea it was this bad. Pardon me while my head explodes. Don’t worry about the mess. The chinchillas will clean it up.
I rarely address myself directly to the president, because like he cares, and there’s an analogy about singing and pigs that comes into play. Still, I’ve got to just say:
Don’t like your toy country anymore, Mr. Bush? Coming around to the idea that the world’s a lot crappier than it looks from the veranda in Kennebunkport, you privileged, condescending tool kit? People just not behaving the way you saw them in your head? Paper dolls are so much more fun, aren’t they? They don’t talk back, they aren’t ungrateful for your benevolence, they don’t insult your wife and children, and they look so fetching in their flat feathered hats.
The country kind of sucks right now? Wow. Welcome to our nightmare. Jump right in, the water’s really warm. It’s mostly from the sewage, but warmth is warmth, and with heating costs going the way they are, we can’t be choosy. Unlike you, we don’t have servants to call on when times get tight. We make do with what we’ve got.
More and more, Mr. President, you’re reminding me of the tourist who goes to Guatemala or Jamaica and notes with utter shock the crushing poverty. I try to be patient with this kind of ignorance, because I know not everybody’s up on geopolitical chessboards and stuff like that, but deep down something burns my ass about fat rich people in cocktail rings complaining that people by the side of the road are badgering them to buy woodcarvings, because that’s what this is, sir, this whole, “how dare you be poor in my presence” attitude you’re displaying. It’s not even unworthy of you, because really, what did we expect, it’s just gross.
I have to admit, it takes bigger balls than I thought you had to look aroundnow and say yeah, man, this economy I’ve been lying my ass off about for six years reallyhasn’t made everybody rich, and this war I started reallyhasn’t made everybody free.Unacceptable? I’ll tell you unacceptable. Thousands dead. Hundreds imprisoned. Military families on bread lines. Soldiers worried about paying for the food in the hospital they’re in because of the leg they got shot off fighting your war. You want to talk unacceptable? Mom and Dad up all night trying to figure out how to keep their kids off the streets and in school while both of them work and still can’t afford anything more than a shitty apartment with walls so thin they can hear the hooker next door screaming at her pimp. You want to talk unacceptable? Come to my town, Mr. President, walk around for a while. I’ll show you unacceptable.
You want to talk unacceptable? Paying your pasty white boys from the Heritage Foundation and AEI in nice crisp C-notes to talk sanctimoniously about painting schools in Baghdad for people who deserve freedom when I can drive 30 minutes and show you a school with rusty grates on the windows and a hole in the roof, where the principal had to pay for the paint with his own money, and where the eighth grade class president will tell you he knows everybody in the towns around him thinks his school is lousy. You lean down and pet that nice kid, Mr. President, and then you talk to me about how frustrated you are about America today. You tell him — I’ll give you $20 to do it to his face — that it was more important to declare a national day of prayer and to invade Iraq than to declare a national state of educatonal emergency and fix his school. Then you tell the rest of us we should really give a flying fuck about what you think your problems are. It’s unacceptable? It’s a disappointment? It’s a real bummer?
SO ARE YOU.
A.