George H.W. Bush, 41st President of the United States, died very late last night. The news dropped right around the time I was going to work, I guess. I caught the news right around my first break, and damn if it didn't make me think.
See, I used to be a Republican. It was, in fact, Bush's leadership that led me to make that decision when I turned 18 and registered to vote. It wasn't that I was particularly a fan. Hell, I loved Dana Carvey's impressions of Bush from Saturday Night Live. Honestly, I loved even more that Bush in fact would invite Dana Carvey to the White House...and that was it, right there. I appreciated Bush's ability to see the good in people, and to work with others to get things done, even when he often didn't agree with those others. I would not ultimately vote for him in 1992 (a decision I have sometimes regretted, other times not) on the basis of his raising taxes.
I appreciated Bush's commitment to international cooperation, to peace and to the rule of law and a rules-based international order...and ultimately the fact that when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the fact that instead of just talking about it, he sent the United States Armed Forces to Saudi Arabia firstly to defend our allies and secondly with the explicit intention of liberating Kuwait, and we got an international coalition together and we kicked Saddam's ass and liberated Kuwait...and then we settled in for the long haul to contain Saddam after that.
I also liked Bush's commitment to diversity, and (despite his employment of unscrupulous racist Lee Atwater in his campaign) his conviction that we needed to leave bigotry and racism behind us and move forward as one people.
My introduction to the day-to-day workings of politics was following, reporting on and writing a paper about the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas for a government-class extra-credit project (Class of 1992 here) when he was nominated to replace the retiring Thurgood Marshall, and to become the second African American to ever sit on the United States Supreme Court.
On one of the days of the hearings I was sick as a motherfucker, so I didn't go to school. In fact, it was bad enough that not only did I have to go to the doctor, but I was so out of it due to exhaustion (I'd been up puking most of the night) and nausea that I couldn't drive myself. My Grandpa took me to town and on the way in, we listened to the confirmation hearings on the radio. I went to the doctor, then we went to the drug store to fill my prescription and my Grandpa decided to go to the grocery store. Well, long story short, while my Grandpa was doing that I'm sitting in the truck listening to these hearings and listening to all these old Senators talking about sexual harassment and some dude named "Long Dong Silver." That was the first time I can ever remember thinking "My God, what the hell is wrong with these people?"
In fact, my inclusion of that exact phrasing in the next day's (I was feeling marginally better and not vomiting, so I went) verbal report to my class drew sharp condemnation from the teacher, who was both conservative and religious, but got a lot of support from most of my classmates so he let it stand.
And that whole story, too, was my first brush with "Political Correctness" such as it was at the time, and with the various societal currents that are still with us today, though far more strongly-backed by society, the reverberations of the Navy's "Tailhook" scandal which continue to today as well, and ultimately the #MeToo movement.
Maybe it's just me, to many younger people such an era seems anachronistic and barbaric, surely our first serious attempts at LGBT rights were still several years in the future, Lawrence vs. Texas was a dozen years in the future, Don't Ask, Don't Tell would go down as one of the first major policy achievements of the Clinton administration (and its own repeal and open LGBT service was a full twenty years in the future at this point) but it seems like we, as a nation, grappled with a lot of the same issues as we do now from both a more clear-headed and facts-based perspective. Emotion, and appeals to it, was less of a thing. I'll grant you that this could also be bad, at times.
But we couldn't have gotten to the good parts of now without going through that, first.
Also, racism was not cool, or at least the open expression of it was not tolerated as David Duke found out when he ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991 and George H.W. Bush called that shit out directly. More to the point, Duke lost, in Louisiana. This too, was a factor in my choice of voter registration. I say that as somebody whose heroes at the time included a lot of Black Republicans, including people like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and James Brown.
Now? Clarence Thomas aside, there's damned few Black Republicans, and for reasons that should damned well be obvious...chief among them being the fact that David Duke now has a fucking audience...and it's Republican.
I'm damned tired of this "Anything goes" moral relativism in America today. Given that, as I recently wrote, a generation ago this very thing was decried and warned about by conservatives and Republicans...I'm even more tired of the fact that it's their own spiritual descendants who are the mist assiduous practitioners of said moral relativism.
In fact, it has to be said, that many of the people I knew (of all races) who were conservatives, or Republicans, or both fell by the wayside along the way. For my Grandpa Thompson, it was the gun debate, and the fact that he didn't think anybody needed anything more than a deer rifle or a shotgun (a stance I disagreed with at the time, but kind of agree with now) for my Mom it was college, and that she came around to supporting Bill Clinton a long time before I decided to support Barack Obama's candidacy over that of John McCain. For other, church people, friends, family members, etc. it was their Union membership, or health-care issues or LGBT rights issues or wars or whatever.
No, not all of these people are liberals now, in point of fact most of them either aren't...or like me they are "liberals" only because that's where their fixed values or whatever point on the line that they chose to settle on has landed them. My Bush 41-era Republicanism...which has in fact changed little except for my views on certain social issues and understanding the fact that people need to take care of each other, our country and our environment...regularly gets me branded as a socialist by what few Trump Supporters I know.
As I've said before, the Republicans finally lost me in 2008. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's that I work in a diverse place and have for 15 years now, but at the time I was one of the last outspoken Republicans on my shift that most people knew. Ironically a lot of the people I know who are, or support, Democrats now do so for the same reasons people like them, or me, used to be Republicans.
For both the bad and the good in America right now, it's taken us a long time to get here.
But the truth is, that they should have started reaping those consequences a long time ago. In point of fact, had people showed up to vote in previous mid-term elections at the rate they did last month it could be argued that we'd have damn few of these problems right now, Trump or no Trump.
The Republican Party is dead. Republicans killed it, I'd like to say they did so with a million little compromises of principles or values in the name of expediency. But the truth is, that in today's Republican Party Ayn Rand, Lee Atwater and Mitch McConnell or their ideas have far more power than Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan could ever dream of having...and this has led us directly to Donald Trump.
You can tell Trump doesn't understand what "A thousand points of light" meant, because he's never even considered service to any cause greater than himself.
If he doesn't understand that, I can't explain it to him.
It's not just that the Republican Party is no longer the party of George H.W. Bush or John McCain. It's that I've seen both men be viciously mocked on Twitter by people who are presumably both conservatives and Republicans, egged on by Russian bots. What the hell is that, indeed.
And who were we against, all throughout the Cold War? But I digress...
As I have said, Republicans have traded greatness for...Donald Trump.
And one of their last, and most underrated, great men slipped the surly bonds of Earth last night.
It's been telling, who has said what since.
In any case, fair winds and following seas, Mr. President.
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