George Bush's
America
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Actually, George W. Bush has more than one America. When I go to the local WalMart store in Rohnert Park, California, I see one aspect of George W. Bush's America. I see working class poor. I see people earning at or near the minimum wage, recent and past immigrants, people with low education and job skills, and I wonder how America managed to become a superpower with all these undereducated, underperforming people in the general population. There is nothing about the WalMart America which should dominate the entire planet, and the WalMart America is the direction that America the superpower is headed. If George W. Bush was named George W. Jones, with his skill set and intellect, George W. Bush would be a charter member of WalMart America. There is another America, which also is George W. Bush's America. It is also located in Sonoma County, California, the home of the Rohnert Park WalMart. This is the Bohemian Club America, where the power elite from across the political spectrum meets in luxurious, but rustic retreats to network and party. Bohemian Club America is the powerful America, the land baron America, the corporate America, where the strings are pulled. Bohemian Club Americans are the landlords and employers of WalMart America. Bohemian Club America sends signals to the American government as to when to send troops overseas to conquer markets. Bohemian Club America sets favorable tax programs that concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and maintain the status quo. Bohemian Club Americans carry the pedigrees that are missing in the mongrel Americans of WalMart America. George W. Bush, has the pedigree that elevates him into Bohemian Club America, an America of wealth, power and privilege, not because of talent or skill, but only because of pedigree. When one looks at the history of America, the relentless land grabbing genocides of native peoples, the establishment of a constitution and governmental system and legal system favoring the landed and the wealthy, and the military interventions across the hemisphere and eventually across the globe to favor corporate machinations, one better understands the America of George W. Bush. One understands how power, wealth, and influence must be hoarded and managed in secrecy. One understands how George W. Bush's main concern with prisoner abuses in Iraq is that he was not told about the photos before they reached the press, because his handlers could have concocted rationales and lawyeresque obfuscations and diversions of blame and responsibility. George W. Bush has no more concern over the abuse of Iraqis than his forebears had over genocide of the native inhabitants of Kennebunkport or the Staked Plains near Lubbock. George W. Bush's America takes what it wants. George W. Bush's America is an America that grew its economy under the barrel of a gun; sending Smedley Butler and the U.S. Marines to make the world safe for United Bank and Chiquita banana and Dole pineapple. The resulting economic activity and cheap raw materials and foreign labor add up to make the U.S. WalMart shopper a beneficiary of bargain merchandise, the sales of which end up fueling booming stock markets and enriching investment portfolios of the Bohemian Club crowd. It is a big cycle of American enrichment at the expense of the world, particularly the Third World. But the cycle is based on manipulations, raw military might, heavy debt, and forced deprivation of non-Americans, particularly non-white, poor non-Americans. Even Americans of color and low social/economic status live in relative luxury compared with Africans and South Asians who would consider WalMart Americans rich and privileged. Both WalMart America and Bohemian Club America are George W. Bush's America, and both are now at their peak of power and ready for a hard fall. WalMart Americans want cheap merchandise, but fail to understand that low wages, low benefits, and corporate greed will ultimately reduce wealth and purchasing ability of the deluded who believe they are benefiting from bottom feeding in the food chain. The bottom will get lower and lower and lower until the trap is sprung, from which there is no easy or painless escape. The Bohemian Club America will eventually find that power is ephemeral, the empires come and go, and that victims around the world have long memories. Bohemian Club America will also learn that natural cycles of planetary ecological health are the basis of true wealth, and that pauperizing the planet for short-term profit is a bad business plan. The current and future realities of finite natural resources must be balanced against the insanity of infinite greed. The alterations of global climate in the name of profit and the resistance against environmental protections will ultimately diminish the portfolios of the Boheminan Club Americans, because you cannot grow corn or caviar with investment certificates and you cannot unchange the climate by running out of petroleum after important thresholds of change have been crossed. George W. Bush's America has had its run in world history. It has proved once again that human civilizations cycle -- they come and go. George W. Bush's America is the prototype of the unsustainable human civilization, reaching new heights of wealth, while pauperizing the planet and making future generations of human life on the planet much more fragile, uncomfortable, and making the world a much more dangerous place in the interim. The America of George W. Bush will not quietly go into the night of its own making. The struggle to sustain the unsustainable will likely be violent and murderous. The world, the planet, and the human race will ultimately reject George W. Bush's America and cast it out like a foreign body, a virus, a splinter, a piece of shrapnel. But first must come a fever and sweat and pain and probably a near death experience. That is the reality of George W. Bush's America. As Ward Churchill stated, the chickens are coming home to roost. George, do you hear the clucking? Stan Moore lives in San Geronimo, CA., and can be contacted at: hawkman11@hotmail.com. |