"On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.'' —H L Mencken, Baltimore Sun, 1920

The aura of despair settling upon this country is undeniable. Not that there ever was a great deal of peace of mind in The United States of Distractions to start with. The act of being in perpetual flight from reality requires a great amount of energy; it's quite a workout pushing down dread. Over the years, our relentless selling of ourselves to the world became about as genuine as Bush's forced smile when he's in the presence of cameras, or African Americans.

Mortified by what we’ve witnessed during these Bush-afflicted years, we ask ourselves: How did this come to be?

We cannot lay all the blame on Bush. Our nation’s aura of insularity and hysteria was present long before him. Bush is merely emblematic of the depth of our collective denial about how cheaply we’ve sold ourselves to the exploitive corporate state and the concomitant unease engendered by this Faustian bargain.

Although many of his former supporters may be growing weary of him, we should not mistake these developments for any sort of vast, societal awakening. Bush’s steady decline in popular support is merely the result of Americans beginning to personally feel the effects of his administration’s mixture of ruthlessness and incompetence.

But this fact alone will not effect change. One needn’t have been graced with extraordinary powers of perception to notice that Bush is a fraud. What is more difficult to apprehend is this: The emergence of Bush is not an anomaly. Bush is a symptom of the pathologies of corporate capitalism. He is not the disease.

Bush was packaged like any other corporate icon; accordingly, the war in Iraq was sold in the manner of any other corporate PR campaign. Bush is simply a product, designed by and marketed for the benefit of the elites of the corporate state.

Bush’s manufactured image is a hack's construct of mythic American manhood: He was sold as an uncomplicated man of action, a Christian cowboy redeemer, a man who could kill evil-doers at fifty paces. Just a single whiff of his manly musk, and our enemies would flee back to their caves and cower in abject terror.

The sad and tragic circumstances of our times are much larger than Bush. Bush's grandiosity mirrors us, a people who have lost all sense of proportion. Look around: notice how huge and grotesque the objects and accoutrements of our age have become: colossal motor vehicles, the portions of food we crave, gaudy, land-devouring McMansions; American consumer's enormous sea-to-shining-sea asses. These things are manic compensations antecedent to the crash to come. Apropos, our SUVs, oversized pickup trucks, and Hummers are no longer large enough to compensate for our feelings of powerlessness; our epic servings of food no longer serve to push down the sense of dread; we cannot find enough room in our McMansions to hideaway all of our anger, sorrow, and regret.

Mojo Nixon sang, “Everybody has a little Elvis in them.” Nowadays, regrettably, we must sing: “Everybody has far too much Bush in them.” To one degree or another, we’re all George W Bush. Bush is the corporate state's dancing monkey as, to one degree or another, we all are. The corporate state necessitates that we become, like Bush, all puffed up phonies, in order to face a daily life ruled by its mandates, and to compensate for our inner emptiness, borne of our internalization of it.

To listen to the mangled syntax of Bush’s speech patterns is to hear the sound of the national infrastructure crack and buckle; his booze and cocaine decimated brain cells mirror the earth's diminishing bio-diversity; his snits of entitlement and his ruthlessness echo the entropic forces of global capitalism that are driving the engines of extinction.

There is a feeling of flimsiness and haphazardness present in our daily lives here in the empire. Even the landscape before us has been inflicted with an ugly, ad hoc quality. The structures of our age evince a lack of substance. The shoddy, quick buck-snatching stripmall, big box store, fast food outlet, prefab no-where-land of the present day United States is reflective of our shoddy, quick buck-snatching leaders, who are, in turn, a reflection of us. We have come to dwell within this Architecture of Denial; we have come to call this House of Distorted Mirrors our “way of life.”

Big Pharma factories and rural crystal meth labs can't manufacture enough product to prevent this sinking spell. Soon, even the ruling elites will begin to buckle beneath the weight of their self-deception. We the laboring classes already know the feeling, due to the fact that we’ve been carrying those bloated bastards, plus their delusions of infinite entitlement, on our backs for quite some time now.

Corporate culture is based on mendacity made palatable for mass consumption: Public relations and advertising firms exist to create cute, cartoon animal icons to mask the realities of the slaughterhouse. In corporate life, there is scant reward for depth and authenticity; conversely, an amicable ruthlessness pays off well.

Corporate “reality” is all about “perception management.” Hence, a corporate, utterly commodified, life usurps, exploits and diminishes not only the outer environments, but our internal ones as well. How can one spend all day in a so-called "work environment," spending a large percentage of one's life beneath fluorescent lights wearing sweatshop-cobbled shoes touching industrial carpeting, with our bodies supported by bland, utilitarian office furniture, then return, by way of a hideously dangerous freeway, home to some ugly suburb or exurb where one's senses are incessantly inundated with commercial imagery calculated to hypnotize one into a particular way of viewing the world, and not fall prey to a sort of psychic pathology? Living thus day by day, how could we not have conjured Bush and company? Bush is only a byproduct of the present corporate order; he is but a reflection of the everyday hubris, denial, mendacity, and exploitation of daily life in the corporate state.

Personally and collectively, our fate will be determined by how honest we’re willing to be with ourselves. We have summoned Bush by the incantation of our hidden intentions; perhaps, if we were to awaken to the George W Bush concealed within, we might understand our own collaboration in creating him, and then, at long last, we can begin the process of dismissing him and all he represents.

philangie2000@yahoo.com