An Unexpected Existential Trap
So, I was just surfing (and not working) and came across this over at one of the webcomics I browse over.
I don't really know what to say about this. I mean, the humor is broad and sort of disposable. What got me on this is the fact that there is a picture out there of Bush crying. And I wonder, outside of the manufactured context of the joke, what caused him to do so?
And that's when it hit me. Here is someone whom I have come to vilify magnificently, someone with whom I have made empathy and compassion mutually-exclusive terms, who is physically expressing grief. He is capable of loss, capable of sorrow, capable of all those essential human sufferings which plague our existence. It is humanizing, and that is threatening to my conception of Bush as a figurehead, an institution, an icon. That's sort of unsettling.
And, of course, I have to temper this with the knowledge that the individual, the human whom I now must recognize, has perpetrated, authorized, propaganized, and legitimized the most vile inhumanities and bodily and spiritual degradations to the dignity of a nation and a staggering number of non-American humans. I believe he has done this knowingly, consciously, pre-meditatively, and with negligible to absent regret or remorse for the murder, exploitation, and oppression his actions have caused or lack of action has enabled. I cannot believe that he is weeping or has ever wept with the pentient, soul-crushing agony that results from the acknowledging, self-effacing revelation that he has been guilty of such monstrous deeds.
I believe that Bush is not weeping for any of those things.
Which leads me to the question: What is he weeping for?
What atrocities would he consider shedding a tear for, if he is able to withstand those already present? What could break such an impenetrable facade if not what has already come before?
I don't know. It might annihilate me to consider it; worse, to discover it.
-12th
I don't really know what to say about this. I mean, the humor is broad and sort of disposable. What got me on this is the fact that there is a picture out there of Bush crying. And I wonder, outside of the manufactured context of the joke, what caused him to do so?
And that's when it hit me. Here is someone whom I have come to vilify magnificently, someone with whom I have made empathy and compassion mutually-exclusive terms, who is physically expressing grief. He is capable of loss, capable of sorrow, capable of all those essential human sufferings which plague our existence. It is humanizing, and that is threatening to my conception of Bush as a figurehead, an institution, an icon. That's sort of unsettling.
And, of course, I have to temper this with the knowledge that the individual, the human whom I now must recognize, has perpetrated, authorized, propaganized, and legitimized the most vile inhumanities and bodily and spiritual degradations to the dignity of a nation and a staggering number of non-American humans. I believe he has done this knowingly, consciously, pre-meditatively, and with negligible to absent regret or remorse for the murder, exploitation, and oppression his actions have caused or lack of action has enabled. I cannot believe that he is weeping or has ever wept with the pentient, soul-crushing agony that results from the acknowledging, self-effacing revelation that he has been guilty of such monstrous deeds.
I believe that Bush is not weeping for any of those things.
Which leads me to the question: What is he weeping for?
What atrocities would he consider shedding a tear for, if he is able to withstand those already present? What could break such an impenetrable facade if not what has already come before?
I don't know. It might annihilate me to consider it; worse, to discover it.
-12th