Bush’s Soul: Peering Into the Abyss

There’s a popular political opinion show here in America called “Hardball.” It’s a baseball metaphor, but I can’t believe the softballs George Bush has been lobbing pundits’ way lately. He’s saying things like, "I didn't compromise my soul to be a popular guy."

That pitch is so fat and soft that it’s almost too easy to hit out of the park.

The Alfred E. Newman boy who entered the White House, making monstrous mischief on the world stage, leaves a gray old boy, detested in almost every nation on the globe.

Lest I become soft and sentimental myself (a characteristic of most of the men in the Bush Dynasty, though certainly not the women, as Barbara Bush attests), one needs to ask the question: What is to be done with this war criminal?

Before we can address that question in the court of collective consciousness called the Internet, it’s necessary to speak about the spiritual dimension of George Bush’s presidency. I know…the very idea evokes paroxysms of derisive laughter from anyone who has even a single chamber of their heart pumping.

But I don’t mean a spiritual dimension in any uplifting sense, unless some inscrutable intelligence is using the most powerful conduits of darkness in human consciousness for the edification and growth of the human being.

Like his father, George Senior, George Junior had a clear malevolent mission. Dear old Dad, Mr. CIA, provided the bale (with Gulf War I) that broke the American spirit. Of course the momentum of America’s spiritual bankruptcy was unstoppable well before one of our former stooges, Saddam Hussein, was given a wink and nod to invade Kuwait. And that was the good Gulf War.

It has taken 17 years since America lost its soul, and 7 years since the collapse of triumphalism, for the truth to really begin to hit home. As long as most Americans could buy-buy-buy at either Saks or Old Navy, they didn’t care that the emperor had no clothes.

No rational person would argue now that the country and world are better off for having endured eight years Bush-Cheney degeneracy.

Indeed, the degree of darkness released since Bush-Cheney took power can only lead a spiritually inclined person to conclude that their mission was to throw open the gates of hell, and spew the filth of millennia upon the world.

Bush’s baleful job was to do to humankind as a whole what his father did to America in particular. The Decider was meant to provide, in metaphysical collusion with al Qaeda, the last bale to break the human spirit.

I’m not saying George Junior is the devil. Nor am I ‘demonizing’ him. Indeed, I pity the pathetic man. I want him to be given a fair trial--not the show trial of victor’s justice he gave Hussein.

You have to give George Bush one thing; he’s got brass balls. But in way he’s right in saying, “I didn’t compromise my soul,” because if you long ago lost your soul, you can’t compromise it.

It’s much easier to forgive people who set out to destroy humanity if human beings clearly prevail over them. But the paradox is that to truly prevail over one’s enemies, even the devil’s own, one has to forgive.

Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Columbian politician held for six years by FARC rebels in Columbia, said recently that forgiveness is the most important thing. She said it was easier to forgive her captors than to “forgive those you loved and didn’t move a finger to help you.”

And strange as it sounds coming from a woman who had six years of her life stolen from her, Betancourt said that the hardest thing “is to forgive oneself.”

As George W. Bush continues telling his feeble, insulting lies at Christmas time, it’s hard to think about forgiving reprobates like him and Cheney for plunging the world into the sum of all dark ages.

More than anything however, Jesus (who was a man, not God) taught forgiveness. Even on the cross he forgave not only the Romans, but his own people, who chose to free the murderer Barabas rather than him.

Nevertheless, the question stands: Did the actual ‘axis of evil’—between al Qaeda and the Bush-Cheney Administration—succeed? Has the human spirit been broken, at least at this hinge of history?

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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