Sacred West

I would only exceptionally cite a Huffington Post opinion piece - admire Arianna though I do - because the shop is simply too chauvinist. But the exception is a piece by James Moore from January of this year, 2007, called The O.J. President.

The article begins to set the oddness of the George W. Bush presidency into the etched relief that we are accustomed to in the considered judgments of history. By contrast to its cooling waters, I understand how panic-stricken we have been through these desolated years of the Bush administration.

Words have not been sufficient to tell of the gasping, the suffocating, the drowning in badness, the sheer death-by-mediocrity of these times. It should be funny, but instead it’s more terrible than I want to look at today. Tomorrow, in history, I’ll look at it and try to sympathize. Today I’m still surviving through it.

I want you to read James Moore’s opinion. It matches my own, and it seems perfectly to sound the ghostly tocsin that tolls out the watches of this adminstration in its crippled, stealthy ways. Let me quote from it for the flavor:

George W. Bush confronts a long and lonely walk down the hallway of history.

…

Fewer and fewer people in government and politics want to be associated with the man who has set these sadnesses rolling and after he is gone from office, Mr. Bush will become almost invisible. His phone won’t be ringing and that’s because almost everybody won’t be calling.

…

He will, of course, still be oblivious to all the wrongs he has done to his country and the global community. Forever, this man’s heart and soul will be separated from the harm he has caused and the lives he has ruined and he will continue to sleep the sleep of a child.

James Moore’s opinion piece is fairly short, a little over 1100 words, and it reads much faster because it is beautifully written. You have time to read it, and when you do, listen for the resonance in yourself, that weirdness again, the faded, hollow, off-key ring of actual madness, all dressed up in suits of course, but utterly gray and lost. These are the times we have been living though.

Link: James Moore, The O.J. President