If you have paid attention to the opinion pages of some of the popular (i.e., larger) newspapers during the week preceding the inauguration and the days that followed, something should have been painfully clear: We, as a nation, want to forget George W. Bush and just get the hell on to the next guy.
The newspapers I’ve been perusing — which I’ll name so you can laugh at me for thinking they were or are worthy of reading — are The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Excluded from the latter group’s susceptibility to derision, of course, is The State Press.
A statistical analysis (one I won’t bore you with) shows that the opinion columnists are more concerned with what Obama should do, or with ruminating nostalgically on inaugurations or prognosticating. Or pretty much anything other than Bush.
If we grant that opinion pages tend to follow the American psyche (because opinion columnists are a part of that psyche and are unique in that they operate outside of normal journalistic constraints on bias and neutrality), then this seems to be pandemic throughout the nation.
The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in “Exit the Boy King,” describes the inauguration crowd watching Bush’s helicopter fly away: “They wanted to make absolutely, positively certain that W. was gone. It was like a physical burden being lifted, like a sigh went up of ‘Thank God.’” She goes on to relate it to the catharsis of Greek drama — the emotional and spiritual release of, well, all that stuff people felt the last eight years, from the opening tip (the 2000 [stolen?] election) to the final buzzer (the crowd chanting “Nah, nah … goodbye” at the inauguration).
By all accounts, the nation wants to forget. People are tired of thinking about anything Bush-related, and they’re pushing him out entirely. Such categorical defenestration, though, means the national memory is ridding itself of not only Bush mistakes but also Bush successes.
But we shouldn’t forget; we can’t forget. If we do, it’s a disservice to all those who suffered the mistakes of the last eight years. I’m not, though, advocating war-crimes tribunals against members of the Bush administration, but merely positing that a sweeping refusal to remember the past is a preemptive condemnation of the future.
A week after the inauguration, it’s easy to use Obama and optimism to push past the Bush saga, but the lessons history offers are irreplaceable and free. We need to take what we can get, learn from it and work to make a better future.
If we push the Bush years away so absolutely, then we’re going to repeat the same follies that made us want to forget in the first place.
Scary as it sounds, in four to eight years, we might find our national psyche suffering from another mismanaged presidency, making strong attempts to wipe it away.
We can’t allow that to happen.
Jeff is a creative writing major. What are your favorite Bush blunders, botches and boggles?jweyant@asu.edu.
