Living With It

Almost as a companion piece to my 3,000+ word bloviation posted this last week is this introspection from Esquire:

What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years

“The ironies of the Bush Years were ironies that exposed the consequences of our assent, guided — missile ironies that were unerringly aimed at point after point of the American creed, which began 2001 as the foundation of our belief and ended 2008 as the scaffolding of our credulity. America does not attack countries that have not attacked us. America does not torture. America takes care of its own. America follows the rule of law. America’s laws are built upon the principle of habeas corpus. America’s distinction is its system of checks and balances. American democracy is the inspiration of the world, and American capitalism the envy. America is better than that, no matter what ‘that’ might be.”

and:

“The irony, then, was irony of a new kind, an irony of incessant exposure, authored by technology that was at once decentralized and corporatist, democratizing without necessarily being democratic. The technology of distributed digitized information — the Internet — became the primary means by which we freed ourselves from the administration’s overarching and overreaching narrative, and at the same time the means by which we were implicated in it.”

It’s an indictment of sorts. And one I take a special care in reading, as a budding entrepreneur who started a couple of businesses during the Bush years.

“Because over the last eight years — since our president rejected the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001 — what we’ve done with global warming is what we’ve done with the war on terror and the war in Iraq and the authorization and outsourcing of torture and the creation of a security state and the creation of an insecurity state, in terms of the marketplace: We’ve lived with it.”

I think this is the reason that while I’m hopeful (probably naively so; there’s another post for another day…), we’ve lived through a few shitstorms these past eight years and we’ll likely see a few more essays and rants from people who need to get it out of their system. Then we can start whining about the mistakes the Obama administration is making.

I’m hoping to be able to make the time to write more this year, with my goal to explain myself and my views better. I’m going to keep the photography going as well. Now that it’s close to February, seems like I need to get cracking.