The President Gets It Right

Somewhere, over the Atlantic Ocean, aboard Air Force One, sometime on December 14 or 15, President Bush was asked about the status of negotiations, relative to funding a bail out and/or bridge loans for the US auto industry. The President stated that he wouldn’t give a precise timetable, and that, “This will not be a long process

Because of the economic fragility of the autos”.

Precision, the King’s English and eloquence all struck like proverbial lightning, at the same place and time and all at once, together, simultaneously. You betcha.

The news is this: The President of the United States has finally figured out what the crux ,central core, and hugely responsible issues are at the center of the country’s current economic crisis: freaking autos are economically fragile. Whew. Finally. What a goddam relief. I was afraid we would go another few weeks (five, to be exact) before someone figured out just exactly what the sam-hill was wrong with America. It must be Christmas. We have been given a gift.

But as with all “gifts” that come from the government, I suspected something else was in play, and I chose not to be entirely euphoric.

While I was reading the report of this presidential revelation/proclamation, I was also reading about and watching videos telling about and showing the shoes of an Iraqi reporter, being hurled through the air at Bush’s head, during a press conference in Baghdad. Suddenly I had an epiphany, and I am guessing that W had epiphanied, as well. I realized the great likelihood that, for perhaps the first time in his life, without alcohol or drugs, George W. Bush had been faced with real trauma.

We need to keep this incident in its’ proper perspective if we are to fully appreciate the devastating implications of what really happened here. W was on foreign soil, in a newly liberated country (Cheney says so, anyway), standing behind an unfamiliar lectern, next to a world leader (?), amid a sea of doubt and potential hostility (only because he has been lying about this country, liberation, democracy and war for years), and suddenly, unexpectedly, without warning, two pieces of footwear came flying through the conference room, aimed more or less directly at his head. The shock and awe must have been terrifying. Unfathomable fear and previously undreamt-of terror must have grasped the President by his very being and shaken him to his ephemeral core. This manner of precarious and fright-laden situation is what many would call trauma inducing ,and it is highly likely that it indeed descended on the mind (?) of George W. Bush, as he stood, there, chock full of hubris and assumed self-righteousness.

Such an assault, coming as it were, from out of a crowd of reporters, previously assumed to be filled with adoration, must have been the penultimate shock. I know it would have rattled my underpinnings, and I don’t even lie that much (and if I did, or you did, I, or we, would not get caught so often).

Sometime later, during an interview, the President attempted to brush off the severity of the event, saying that it was no different that when “people wave at you, using less than five fingers”, and claiming to fail to see what “his beef” was ,when it came to the Iraqi version of a shoe-bomber. However, I suspect that the incident had a lot more to do with the remarks about “auto fragility”, quoted above.

Trauma can be truly revelatory. It can be a real eye-opener, after the fact. Trauma, neurologically speaking, induces autonomic reactions of fight or flight. Since the president stood his ground, ducking the missiles very effectively, as he has ducked morality, vision, common decency , logic and good grammar for eight years, indicated that he did not choose flight: he stood his Texas cowboy ground and remained steadfast, clutching the lectern with both hands. To reinforce the impression that he was not shaken or unduly moved by what had happened during the attempted sole-ful attack, he conjectured that this little skirmish did not “reflect the broad attitude” of the Iraqi people (I though it would have been a broad “spectrum”, but that word is much too big for him). Clearly the depth of the traumatization caused him to lose sight of the symbolism involved when, many years earlier, as the statute of Saddam was pulled down in the Baghdad square, the Iraqi citizenry pounded it with their shoes. This public behavior is generally believed to be a display of contempt and hatred in the Arab world. . But when you have been traumatized to the extent that W obviously was, some of the details get a little blurry, in hindsight. Like, ya know, lookin’ over yer shoulder?

Nevertheless, I am led to believe that this very event is what caused the president to proclaim, just a short time later, that our economic woes could be laid squarely at the feet (tires) of fragile auto economics. I am grateful that, in his somewhat unstable state, he did not refer to either “auto erotics” or any form of frigidity rather than fragility ( either mispsokeness, while probably not being any big surprise, would have been a dead give-away about his condition). My guess is that Hank Paulson might have come to a similarly grand economic revelation if he had been hit on the head by a falling brick from the Lehman Bros. building on Wall Street. But we have not been so lucky as to have that “befall” us, so to speak. .

As it stands now, we are vey fortunate to know that our President has “got it right”, as Monty Python might perchance observe. Surely, now that we (and W) are armed with such valuable insight as to why we have no money to spend on Christmas gifts, while the financial and banking CEO’s of New York are in Dubais, on holiday, and why Detroit products cost so much, break down so often and consume so much gasoline, time and energy, that our national quality of life will improve, shortly. Or at least as soon as W forms a Presidential commission to investigate the auto economic fragility problem. Perhaps Mitt Romney can head that up, as the (sic) Car economic fragility czar.

The alleged assailant, by the way, is being held in jail, apparently for attempting to induce harm, or creating an environment of danger, or something like that, in the presence of a world leader. Of the two men behind the lectern, the authorities in Iraq have chosen to say that it was the Iranian President they were referring to. I think we all know how and why they made their distinction.

However, we should consider one other nasty eventuality that might have come about: had either one (or both ) of the shoes hit their intended target, there would have been the recorded sound of the non-resonating thud of the shoe(s) hitting an empty vessel. Had that occurred, the main stream media would have given us much more coverage to wade through, the pundits and analysts would be almost as busy as they were covering the gaffs of Sarah Palin, and Christmas would not have something like the “economic fragility of the autos” to blame for our aggregate misery. It could have been worse.