One for the Road

For the last four years it has been my good fortune to be linked to the commissioning and then construction of a new motorway extension just north of Auckland. Last week that road was opened to the public two months ahead of anticipated and a little under its forecast cost. The road opened to much acclaim for its beauty, engineering excellence and convenience. The criticism that surrounded the tolling mechanism and the long sight-seeing queues were not of the road itself nor, understandably, those who built it.There is to be satisfaction and relief about that. I was among the builders when the road was officially opened by the usual gaggle of dignitaries who will be forgotten long before the road is. But a nice touch was the surrender of the floor, or the pavement in this case, to one of the workers on the project, a digger driver. In halting voice and with some emotion he spoke simply of the pride he and his fellow workers had in being involved with the road and the special pride of ownership they now took at its opening. He spoke of bringing his young children to the road, to drive it, to point to the parts he produced. He spoke of new generations, his grandchildren, who would be informed proudly by his sons that "your grandfather build that." And whilst he didn't say as such we as such knew that man would live on in that road.
We all would.
Yes, it is essentially just an amalgam of bitumen, metal and steel. Yes, it is only 7.5 kilometres long and, yes, it costs $2.00 to drive along it. But in this world, with what is happening to and in it today, with the world the way it is and for some time will be, it's refreshing to reflect that this patch of bitumen metal and steel can be proudly proclaimed as having a life of its own and a meaning for so long for so many.

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Dear God: The Last Post

Prairie Chapel Ranch
Crawford
Texas

01/23/2009

Dear God

I find myself with a little time on my hands. I’m back home amongst my people, with Laura at my side. I know what you are going to say God. You are going to say two things: will I miss being all-powerful, how will I like to be remembered and what do I plan to do now?

Well, I have been thinking about these things to God. I have asked myself these same questions, and I got answers for all of them

Will I miss the power? Well, I got some nice letters from some pretty powerful people—prime ministers, presidents, industry leaders and that guy who runs Macdonalds and they all say the same thing, that my leaving the White House will leave the world a better place. That’s what they said. So, you see, I have some powerful friends (can you say the same?), so I don’t miss power, I still have it!

What do I want to be remembered for? Again, the answer is already there. You don’t know how many letters I have got from people just like you and me (well more like me than you) saying they will never forget me. They want to, they say, but they can’t. So, you see, I have left an inedible impression in peoples’ hearts.

What will I do now? Well, first I plan to just have a little R&R around the ranch. I might hog-tie a few cattle and Laura to. And some nice folk down there in Crawford asked me to donate my papers and books I read during my presidency to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. I told them I didn’t keep no newspapers (didn’t read them either) but Laura would look out the book.

Do I have any regrets, and how do I think the new guy will go? Yes, I have regrets. I would have liked a bigger Dick. Dick Chaney never quite measured up as a Vice-President. I could have done with a lot more help (people kept on saying to me, you need help) but he did bring in the money, so I guess he was useful. I regret going into Iraq. It was so hot and I got that rash between my legs and it stayed around for ages.

The new guy? A Black Democrat from Illinois? I think he proved his own point when he said that if he could become President anybody could become President. They said the same thing about me. So, nothing new there.

So, thank you God. Thank you for being there when I needed you. You know I’m here to return the favor. Watch over these United States, watch over the world and, if you get time, you might like to check us out as Laura and I do a little hog-tieing. We’ll be thinking of you.

I’ll leave you with one final thought. Me and Jesus have something in common—we both have daddies who are proud of us and what we done.

One day at a time,
G.


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He had it right

Barack Obama got it right: George W Bush should have concentrated on the biscuit factory.

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Show Me The Body Bags

In four days, George W. Bush will leave office. I predict his leaving will be a quiet affair with few laudatory comments and, somewhat paradoxically, little celebration. The reasons it will garner little attention are manifest: all attention will be on Barack Obama and his dawning of a new era. There are also more powerful personal issues today than the American presidency to tax our thoughts, and, put simply, many of us just want to see the back of George W. Bush. We want him gone—gone and forgotten.
He won’t be though. He won’t be forgotten. George W. Bush will likely remain in our minds and in history as the most reviled President of all time, while his election and re-election will remain as two of the few occasions that the world said they knew better than America. We told ya so.
I cannot bring myself to be forgiving and gracious about President George W. Bush or his presidency. Both were disasters for the world and will stay so, particularly in Afghanistan and on Wall Street. But these to me are not his greatest sins. Nor are his many examples of idiocy, so wonderfully exposed by Letterman and everybody else outside the Fox Network. Nor is his shameless evoking of God and the way in which the religious zeal, fervour and influence of his born-again Christianity governed his decisions. I will forget his reading books upside down and his (lack of) response to Katrina. I will consign to memory the cronyism and shameless exploitation, by vested interests, of the American people, the American system and, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the lives of young Americans. These are all matters that, whilst some are tragic, will be best left in the past.
But what I will never forget or forgive is the question of the body bags. Soon after the Iraq War began, George W. Bush decided and dictated that the world’s media would not be allowed to film the arrival in America of body bags from Iraq. He cited the effect the broadcast of such footage would have on grieving families. That comment, more than any other to my mind, was the most fatuous, the most mendacious and most despicable of any during his presidency.
My reason for that is this. George W. Bush knew, or had at least been told, that footage of body bags from Vietnam and Somalia was among the most powerful factors in galvanising public opinion against American military involvement in those areas.* With Vietnam, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all could and did ignore the plaintive cries of “peaceniks.” But when American television started showing body bags coming back from Vietnam, Middle America also turned against the war. And the war ended. It smaller scale, in Somalia.
So why did George W. Bush, for the first time ever in the television age, dictate that body bags would not be filmed? Simple. He wanted and needed the war to continue. And if that meant the full effect, the poignancy and the tragic personal cost to families of his dirty war were hidden from the American public so be it. He would do it.
To me the true obscenity of the Bush presidency is not the upside down books, the idiocy, the stupidity, the posturing, the bravado. It was his cowardly reaction to and treatment of the one enemy he knew he could never combat--the boys in the bags.

Bush will be back. For one more Fryday, next week. Then that’s it.

* Citation: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p70237_index.html

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