Let us now, just for a paragraph or three, recall the sad and soiled era of one George W. Bush, AKA the Dark Times, the Era of Lost Souls, when all felt calamitous and miserable and not a single day went by without some nefarious scandal, abuse, global humiliation, blunder, illegal war or Creationist kiddiebabble to molest your heart, scar your soul and humiliate your finer sensibilities.
Do you remember? I know, I'm very sorry to make you do it. But it just might save us all.
See, there are those who tentatively argue -- I've done so myself, more or less, in this very space -- that we actually owe Dubya a huge dose of (reluctant, teeth-gritted, soul-clenched) gratitude.
There are those who say that, had it not been for The Worst President of the Modern Era, his epic blunderstorm of war, environmental abuse and a deep suckling love for/from the deeply disturbed fundamentalist right, well, the potent groundswell for change and upheaval would not have occurred, the GOP might not have collapsed so violently under the weight of its own repellant misprision, and Obama might never have succeeded as well as he did.
So we come to the great BP spill of 2010, the most gruesomely epic man-made disaster of our age. How do we parse? Through what lens do we observe? Using the Dark Days as a model, I'm here to suggest the possibility that we look at BP, its horrible disaster, its slimy executives, its Republican apologists, its roots in pure evil -- and actually, by short extension, its direct ties to the Bush Administration itself -- and set our sour fatalism aside for a moment, and instead offer up a perverse sort of gratitude.
I would dearly love to express gratitude to Georgie et al for testing the breaking strength of a hangman's rope.
Maybe it's the wrong way to look at it. Of course, the BP spill is nowhere near as traumatic, nation-scarring and historically destructive as a decade of Bush. His reach was wide and deep, the damage decades in the unraveling and recovery, the innocent lives lost counted in the hundreds of thousands; Dubya was a whole-body cancer.
But it's still worth recalling. Because sometimes the gifts come in hideous packages. Sometimes the enlightenment, the higher consciousness only comes after you've been beaten over the head with the oily baseball bat of what the f-- is wrong with you. Thanks for the brutal, nightmarish beating, BP. We'll see if we regain consciousness.
A hideous gift indeed, worthy of regifting to Bush, BP, and the Repugs.
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