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-------- Original Message -------- The Heron’s Latest Catch December 8, 2005 Notebook [Extracts] By Lewis H. Lapham Harper’s December 2005 (pp. 10-11) On further acquaintance with the modus operandi of the Bush Administration, I've come to think that the attributions of a competent criminal intelligence miss the point. They give credit where no credit is due, and they fail to account for both the increasingly evident childishness of American culture and the corollary attitudes of entitlement that over the last thirty years have infected ever larger sectors of the country's equestrian class. President Bush and his friends bear comparison not to Jesse James or Commodore Vanderbilt but to a clique of spoiled trust-fund kids. Certain of their superiority by virtue of their wealth (whether derived from corporate salary, family inheritance, or a sweetheart real estate investment), they fit the profile of wised-up teenagers who don't want to hear it from anybody telling them what to do-which shoes to wear, how to behave in a dance club, when to speak to the caddie o r the French ambassador, why it might not be a good idea to wreck the Social Security system, redirect the flow of the Missouri River, or invade Iraq. Smug in their cynicism, proud of their selfishness, pre-Copernican in the sense that they know it is the sun that revolves around them, not they who revolve around the sun, fortune's children interpret corrections as insult, amendments as impertinence old news, uncool. The attitude shows plainly in nearly every _expression_ that wanders across the President's schoolboy face-the sly smirk, the cute smile, the petulant frown. At home on the range with his chainsaw in Crawford, Texas, he looks to be making a guest appearance for Paris Hilton on The Simple Life; at a White House podium threatening Arab terrorists or standing tall in his opposition to universal health insurance, he strikes the pose of a rich boy anarchist wishing to frighten the faculty at Yale. Three years ago on Earth Day the news photographs showed the President setting off into the forest with an axe over his shoulder, glancing back at the camera with a hint of malicious mischief, as if to say, "You liberal media guys think that the environment is sacred? Let me show you how we deal with trees." . . .
Understand
"government" as a synonym for "adult," and what we have now in
Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM
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