Multimedia: Articles and Essays
The Unconflicted White Man
The Progressive, March 13, 2008
My Indian girlfriend makes me capture crickets using a humane catch and release program, that would make a Lou Dobbs Minuteman Border Patrol pitch an epi. I go quickly to the door and, at a decent distance from the house, release the critter into the wild. I can be driven to violence by night sounds, but when it comes to crickets, I bow to my skittish, delegative partner's wishes. I honor her loosely held belief in reincarnation.
One morning, while reading the paper, she announced, as if I'd asked, that she finally knew her preferred form of reincarnation. Still drowsy from my night patrol, and frowsy from trying to make sense of Maureen Dowd*, I asked, "And?" As if she were declaring a Halloween outfit, she stated that she wanted to come back as an Unconflicted White Man. The "straight" was understood.
While my fallen away catholic beliefs still imbue my eschatological hopes for an afterlife, I have totally embraced her tenet. Not George Tenet. Though he is a perfect example of UWM. In the midst of endless war, UWM are perfectly at peace with themselves. Wide-awake from cricket racket, I think, "He must have some regret for what he has done." It is pure projection on my part.
The UWM roster grows each day. Donald Rumsfeld, who demurs that he is now "out of the loop" on the war, wants to start an institute to encourage more civic participation in government. In the Vanity Fair that finally chronicles the media goring of Al Gore, Gung-ho war ho, Christopher Hitchens, chronicled not his war makeover but his spa treatment. Karl Rove angles to captain the "Swift Boat Veterans Threatened by Powerful Women" aka, the Giuliani campaign. Dick Cheney continues in his role as head of the Execulative Branch of government.
In China, when officials err, they have the decency to kill themselves. In the US, they go on victory-lap, book tours.
The press rollout of UWM Alan Greenspan's pre-emptive save-facebook, could serve as a model for a coordinated, well-executed exit strategy. Like a bad penny, Greenspan was everywhere - Newsweek, Jon Stewart, The News Hour. On Sixty Minutes, he cheshired as the blindingly blonde, embedded reporter Leslie Stahl dimpled, "You were a jazz player?" The under-reported party spoiler was Naomi Klein's simultaneously released, Shock Doctrine, as welcomed in the discourse as an unclaimed backpack in a bus terminal. If I Did It v. You Know You Did It.
The Grandmaster of UWM, If-I-Didiot in Chief, announced in a recent legacy building interview, that when he leaves office, he wants to start a Freedom Institute. "In other words, people can come to the institute and talk about freedom." His tight tautologies make Miss Teen South Carolina's ramblings sound sane. Mostly he noticed that you can make big bucks speechifying, his Dad, Bill Clinton, such as. "Got ta fill up the coffers, y'know."
Southern Methodist University is resisting housing the Bush Presidential Lie-brary. I think they should put the Bush Shelf at the Creation Museum. Nestle it into one of the Six C's of Creation Dioramas. It would fit perfectly in Corruption and Catastrophe. Rapture Man is divinely unconflicted because he has done his job as independent contractor of pre-collision intelligent design. The landing strip for the second coming is ready. His work here is done. He is the one in whom only he is well-pleased.
Kate "*Dowd is still big; it's the paper that got narrower." Clinton is a humorist.
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