The Ex-President In The Shower by John Grant!
(2021-09-05 at 00:59:38 )

The Ex-President In The Shower by John Grant!

Exiting a Debacle Is Not For the Faint of Heart

Where is George W. Bush - the post-presidential, sensitive painter of humanity - when Joe Biden needs him? As chairman of the board of the United States Constitution Center in Philadelphia, on Veterans Day 2018 Joe Biden arranged for Bush and his wife Laura to receive the coveted Liberty Medal for their work with veterans. Biden, for certain, did this out of his famous instinct to work across-the-aisle; in this case, he seemed to want to make a warm and friendly public gesture to a Republican ex-president who clearly needed a life ring.

Of course, one of the reasons Mr. Bush needed a political life ring was that it was he who made the two fateful decisions that involved the United States in two disastrous foreign wars that quickly turned into classic quagmires. The man is branded.

I have been a Biden critic in the past and could be in the future, but the criticism over his messy exit from Afghanistan is either partisan nonsense or fear of the inevitable Republican backlash. The biggest strike against Biden in the military violence department is that he is a Democrat, which means whatever he does will be fodder for relentless Republican "gotcha!" attacks.

After 241 Marines were blown up in a 1983 terrorist bombing in Beirut, Ronald Reagan somehow fled Beirut with his tail between his legs and got away with it. He was a Republican. George W. Bush, of course, was re-elected after ignoring a lot of very wise opposition (most of it from the left) and setting in motion two foreign policy disasters. Now, many of the very same people who let these Republicans get away with their military fiascos and all the dead young soldiers on their watch are now piling on President Biden. If it was a thriller it would be titled The Benghazi Protocol.

George W. Bush has become moderately famous for expressing himself as a painter. I never had much respect for President Bush, but his taking up painting instead of golf or speech-making threatens to humanize the man. He started out painting his pets; then he did a series on world leaders; and he ended up painting the men and women he sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. I actually paid $35 to buy a copy of his book of veteran paintings, Portraits Of Courage: A Commander In Chiefs Tribute To Americas Warriors.

"This is a tribute to men and women who volunteered, many in the years after 9-11-01, to defend our country." In the introduction, he tells us, "I studied the stories and photographs of the warriors. As I painted them, I thought about their backgrounds, their time in the military, and the issues they dealt with as a result of combat." He recognizes their post traumatic stress issues. "I wanted to show their determination to recover, lack of self-pity, and desire to continue to serve in new ways as civilians."

I know many veterans with PTSD and many who fit his description about a "determination to recover" - but the ones I know tend to damn the wars they were sent to fight and that caused their difficulties. They also damn the politicians who decided to create those wars. Abandoning the idea their war was a noble effort is, for them, the absolute key to healing and liberation.

I am not an art critic, but Mr. Bushs paintings are not bad - albeit in a naive, primitive way. Self-expression can be quite therapeutic for someone carrying a dark burden. In Mr. Bushs case (granting him his humanity), I would argue he suffers from what we might call PDSD - Post Decision Stress Disorder. He arguably decided two of the three most destructive United States foreign policy debacles in the post WWII era. That is quite a burden to carry.

Some of George Bushs paintings share something of the qualities in paintings by the famous artist Alice Neel. While Mr. Bush copied many of his images from sources like Google, Ms Neels work was of people she loved or knew intimately. That is, she was an artist grounded in life - no doubt a leftist - who relished the richness of humanity over the power to control it. This would seem the very opposite of an ex Republican president killing time - maybe assuaging some guilt - by dabbling in paint.

[ Top, left to right: Chris Demars, seriously wounded by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan (Bush); Hamid Karzai, the puppet president Bush appointed in Afghanistan (Bush); and Henry Geldzahler, art curator and historian (Neel). Below, Alice Neel with some of her paintings: and George W. Bush painting veterans. ]

Beyond the portraits, there is the more personal George W. Bush images from actual life, the paintings of his dog and the one below that seems to be of some guy jerking off in the shower.

Is that out-of-line to say about an ex-presidents self-portrait? For me, the image recalls W.D. Ehrharts classic 1983 Vietnam memoir Vietnam-Perkasie, the tale of a young kid from Pennsylvania who joins the Marines as an infantryman to fight in what he soon learns is a morally rotten enterprise. Ehrhart is wounded, promoted to sergeant and be-medaled for service in battles like Hue, 1968. It is a powerful memoir, full of post traumatic stress, detailing the birth of a nationally-recognized anti-war poet and activist. At the end of the book, he is back "in the world" - but it is not the same. Here is the last sentence of the 311 page book:

"I went back to the base and masturbated in the shower, passing out beneath the warm stream of water before I finished."

I recently joked with Bill how that last line always struck me as one of the saddest, most indelible last images from a book - and how it took incredible guts to go with it. One might argue masturbation is the ultimate absurd act. In a sad and lonely way it is also an apt metaphor for all the wasted potential involved in morally rotten, unnecessary wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

I can hear the ex presidents conscience in the shower bemoaning his fate:

"Woe is me. I was a two-term President! Now, everybody thinks I am a fool. After 9-11-01, I tried to sell myself as a war president. What was I thinking? All I ever really wanted was to be liked and to play with my dog. I did like owning a baseball team. But I had to do something. I had been caught like a deer in the headlights reading "The Pet Goat." I had to show gravitas. The war president thing came naturally. It worked for a while. But then it did not work any more. I read a bio of LBJ, but I realized other than escalate, he did not know what to do, either. Everything led to more confusion, more violence, more horror, more lying to the American people. Shakespeare was right. Ohhhh, woe is me!"

Excuse the slippage into fiction; but according to New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) it is my First Amendment right in the pursuit of truth. It seems natural Mr. Bush might question the terrible decisions he made as an out-of-his-league President of the United States. One aspect of PTSD is the mental haunting from decisions one made under stress that went horribly wrong. Whether any possible suffering by Mr. Bush is real or just overly-generous speculation on my part; or whether any possible suffering is rooted in morality or just regret that he has become a joke and a political pariah - only he knows the answer.

If George W. Bush is an honorable man, he might consider paying Joe Biden back for awarding him that Liberty Medal on Veterans Day 2018 in Philadelphia. Having the guy who started the debacle defend the messy exit would be helpful. As for the Veterans Day Liberty Medal event, I was able to get inside and, by phone, help direct the Iraq veterans and Gold Star mothers outside so their chant of "Shame! Shame! Shame!" could be heard by Mr. Biden and Mr. Bush inside.

Like much of the patriotic hoopla in support of post-WWII United States Militarism, the Liberty Medal event was based on a popular, but specious, idea:

That United States soldiers in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were fighting there for our "liberty" here at home. It is one of the most profound bullshit ideas that thrives in militarized America.

The truth is, it was members of the anti-war movement who were fighting in the street for the constitutional liberty to tell the government its wars were immoral.

While history is complicated and nuanced, the deeper truth is that our soldiers were sent overseas to fight for United States domination following the collapse of European Colonialism in the so-called Third World and because of Cold War fears of the Soviet Union. We can not change any of that. But for our own good we can learn to accept the hard truth. Peace through world military domination is an idea that died with the 20th Century.

Joe Biden gave a good speech defending his decision to get out of Afghanistan. It is an unfortunate fact that the United States (or any country) cannot exit a 20-year-war it has obviously lost without the endgame being a mess.

The exit from Afghanistan was light-years better than the one from Vietnam; plus, it is not over. In Veterans For Peace, we like to say: "Wars are easy to start and very difficult to stop." Back in the Vietnam era, an anti-war senator was asked how the nation could accomplish an exit from a quagmire like Vietnam. His answer was eloquent: "Ships and planes." Call it the Nike approach: Just Do It!

In the end, that is what the Biden administration wisely did in Afghanistan.

The Republican right could be counted on to flog the Stabbed In The Back Myth ad-nauseum. The point is to look forward, not backward.

There is too much at stake. In Afghanistan, the United States should work diplomatically as much as possible with the Taliban to get any Americans out who want to get out. Then, we need to get on with bread & butter domestic issues like climate change, voting rights and domestic terror.

Our worst terrorist enemies are now home grown.

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