A sign board has appeared along a Minnesota road asking passerby’s if they miss the days of George W. Bush’s presidential rule. Apparently times are so bad for some that they will go to that length in nostalgia. Some seem to remember fondly the days when we believed in simpler things, like a ‘won’ war in Iraq in which no one counted the dollar cost of it or the body count on both sides.
Also, the economy was much easier to understand- one just believed in the illusion of eternal gain with little input, in mortgaging homes with flimsy backing and buying homes with equally flimsy financing. The financial future was rosy, although curiously it was those already on the greener side of the fence telling us this. Yes, those were the days as we gazed out at a wonderful America through rose colored glasses.
Then came Obama, the anti-capitalist, the destroyer of all things American, all things Norman Rockwellish, apple pieish, Yankee Doodle Dandyish, baseballish (wait a moment, forget that. All black guys are good at baseball), Peanuts cartoonish and any number of other ‘ish’s you care to throw in there. He came in and told us things straight and we couldn’t handle it. Now he stands before us like an Uncle Remus tar baby ready to have all the blame stuck on him as fast as the Right can throw it at him.
Give us back please the old days of having the wool over our eyes. Please! We sleep so much better at night when we’ve been tucked in and had someone read us a bedtime story. Give us back the good ‘ole days of George W, the days when martial law almost became the norm. As Jack Nicholson said in the movie A Few Good Men when he played a Cheneyesque super American patriot- we “can’t handle the truth.”
Curiously enough, parts of Iraq are undergoing a nostalgia towards the good old days of Saddam Hussein, including having a new television channel called ‘The Saddam Channel’ devoted to his memory. Interestingly the nostalgia is mostly amongst the families of those who made up his lieutenants and advisors.