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Poop goes the President
Why is everyone so shaken up if George Bush says 's***' when he thinks that the microphone is switched off? Isn?t he using the rest of the world as a toilet anyway? Writes Jerry Pinto.
That George Bush should use cuss words when he thinks the microphones are off is not really very surprising.
Has this man ever struck you as a guy with an overwhelmingly sophisticated command of the language?
You do remember that he was asked whether the tide was turning in Iraq in June this year and he said, “I think -- tide turning -- see, as I remember -- I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of -- it’s easy to see a tide turn -- did I say those words?”
Can you imagine him saying, “See, the irony is what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this excrement and it’s over”?
After all he has a subtle view of the whole situation, “I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel.”
Of course, his constituency would be surprised at his use of the word, “s***”. No doubt the pulpits of Tennessee have seen some Bible-thumping.
No doubt in Louisiana, they’re asking the Lord to have mercy on the soul of the President for he hath sinned with his mouth.
No doubt in Texas, they’re asking everyone to organise super-sized prayerthons so that the man in the White House will see the light and abstain from cuss words.
No doubt these good people would not see it as very offensive that Mr Bush has launched a war against the people of Afghanistan and is quietly backing the war against Lebanon.
Sure, you can kill all the towel-heads you want, they must be thinking, but you can’t go around using no cuss words. How will that impact our children, they must be asking.
Can we tell them that any honeychile can dream of becoming the President and changing all the crockery in the White House if the President we elected with our Good Books says toilet words in public?
None of the outrage would be at the inappropriateness of the place.
For the Americans who elected this animal into power over all of us, the world is America.
Bush warned us in May. “If people want to get to know me better, they’ve got to know my parents.” You remember Bush senior? The one who said, “The American way of life is not negotiable”?
George Bush Senior wasn’t talking about democracy or civil rights or the aristocracy of the meritocracy although that was what the phrase had once stood for. He was talking about consumption patterns.
If four per cent of the world’s population consumes 25 per cent of the world’s oil, c’mon guys, get real, this is the United States of America we’re talking about and driving the car three blocks to the gym where air-conditioners burn some more energy? That’s their right. Where did George HW Bush make this chilling remark? At the Earth Summit, 1992, a meeting called to discuss the environment.
The United States has always been willing to treat the rest of the world as the place for its faeces.
They tell us our cattle break wind -- I almost used a four-letter word there, this thing must be catching -- and cause significant depletion of the ozone layer.
They tell us we should make reparation for our bullocks and perhaps for Khushwant Singh, the only other writer I know who has a deep appreciation of the whole anal breeze thing.
They tell us this but they will continue exploiting the environment, continue making decisions about the world that suit them.
So why are we surprised that George Bush, war criminal, mass murderer, should use a few cuss words when talking to his bitch, Tony Blair? (Here’s what they have in common according to the Bushwhacked George, “We both use Colgate toothpaste.”)
And since we are used to American crap -- in our theatres, on our bookshelves, on our plates -- we should hardly be worried about the use of that one little four-letter word.
This remark is much more chilling; it’s about Kofi Annan: “I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens.”
Annan is asking for the firing to stop so that the talking can begin. If only we would read our history, we would know that the only long-term measure that works with terrorists is to deprive them of the steady supply of cannon-fodder that they get when young people think they have been cut a raw deal.
Get the dialogue in motion, start listening, start applying more democracy instead of less and things begin to ease up.
But none of this can even begin to have a fair chance if the snipers still rule the rooftops and the young people are still winding RDX around their middles and preparing for the kamikaze moment that they hope will validate their lives.
Perhaps that is why we’re all so stirred up about Bush using the word ‘s**t’ on a microphone. It takes our minds off the fact that we are tottering on the edge of an abyss.
It takes our minds off the fact that we are being ruled, indirectly, by a man who described himself as “the master of low expectations” and once told Bob Woodward, “I’m the commander -- see, I don’t need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being President.”
We’ll play word games while Bush sticks a finger up his nose and flicks a booger at the globe to decide who he’s going to bomb next. We might as well laugh. It’s about our only weapon.
(The writer is executive editor, Man’s World)
