I Am So Popular: Ima Let You Finish But F*#$K Bush

Mostly what happened when I wore the shirt—to protests, parties, HEB— was that people smiled. Really big. As if to thank me for just putting it out there, FUCK BUSH being the more blunt equivalent of NAKED EMPEROR ON BOARD. (Although there was one time I posed wearing it in front of a Bush billboard right outside of Crawford after attending a protest, and I swear I thought I was going to get shot.)

I didn’t forget Bush when he went away, but as he was out of sight, I tried to put him out of mind. I stopped yelling at the radio the way I used to every time I heard his stupid piehole emitting more lies. I settled into not having to look at his idiotic grin on the front page of the paper every day. Fully exhaling was, of course, impossible. After what Bush did to the economy, after the sick games his administration played, after all the other things that have left this country devastated quite possibly beyond repair, exhaling seems a little over-reactive.

But of all the shit that asshole and his crew mired us in, all that rob-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich crap, one thing stands out above all others: George W. Bush, who recently reemerged from his gilt-insulated glory-hole to peddle his “non-fiction memoir” to the masses and break ground up at SMU for his library, is a war criminal. That man has so much blood on his hands that he makes Lady MacBeth seem like Mother Teresa.

Technically, thanks to Obama, the war in Iraq is “over” and now we are enjoying another phase, also with a name clearly created by an ace marketing team: Operation New Dawn. (Wait, listen, can you hear Nina Simone singing in the background?) But the troops remain—killing, being killed.

And as the years have dragged on with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, we the people just keep getting more and more complacent. I count myself among the ranks of the disconnected. Whereas once I used to keep a running tab, updated weekly, of US Troops and Iraqi Civilian Deaths writ huge on a billboard on my front lawn, these days my lawn is blank and my heart hovers in that vicinity. I can listen to war reports now like I’m listening to a Phil Collins song. What I hear makes me sick, yes, but I can just change the station because I learned long away protesting doesn’t work.

Bush claims, in his new book, that the lowest point of his presidency was when Kanye West called him a racist after what happened during and after Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans. Apparently this really, really, really hurt the feelings of the man who stole the presidency.

The lowest point of your presidency, W? REALLY?

I have to put forth a conspiracy theory that Kanye and W are in cahoots. Because as it happens, Kanye’s next record is about to drop and as W is out there babbling about the rapper making him so gosh darn mad, Kanye is out there saying, you know, he feels bad about the whole racist comment. If Amazon rankings can act as proof to my theory witness this: Bush’s book is ranked #1 at the bookselling giant, and Kanye’s not-even-yet-released CD is in the top thirty overall for music and occupying the #1 slot in rap and hip hop. The boys are helping each other out, I’m telling you.

Since we’re talking numbers, I’ve got some more to share. Icasualties.org reports that thus far 4427 US Troops have been killed in Iraq since 2003 and 1395 US Troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, over 2,000 independent contractors (read: civilian soldiers) have perished. Iraqbodycount.org puts the number of documented Iraqi civilian deaths at somewhere between 98,000ish and just shy of 108,000. For this math problem, let’s split the difference and call it 103,000. There are no reliable numbers on Afghan civilian deaths and good luck trying to find some—that’s not a record the US is especially interested in tracking. I’m going to super lowball that one at 1,271, which is actually just the number reported in the first six months of 2010 by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. So okay, that’s a very conservative estimate of 112,093 deaths so far courtesy of the war games Bush & Company set into action.

I’d really like to rehash the whole bit about non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, but no time for that. I’ve got more numbers for you. These come from U.S. Military Casualty Statistics: Operation New Dawn, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom by Hannah Fischer, reported September, 2010. (Which means, yes, as with the above numbers, you can figure the totals have already gone up.)

Ms. Fischer reports that 66,935 deployed troops have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, an affliction that does not mix well with people who happen to be highly trained in taking out other people with fancy weapons. 178,876 US Troops have some Traumatic Brain Injury, which the military is reluctant to even acknowledge as a condition, often sending the injured straight back into the field. 1,621 US Troops have had amputations, though admittedly around 200 of these did not occur as a result of OEF and OIF. Of those that do relate to the conflicts, 816 amputations were of a major limb. (I’m not sure if the kid who lost both arms and both legs counts as four here, or just one.) Getting back to PTSD not being the best mental state for knowing how to use a gun, as of August this year, 260 soldiers have offed themselves.

A couple of more numbers and then Ima let y'all finish ignoring the wars. 731—that’s the current ranking at Amazon of Jon Krakauer’s most recent book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. Pat Tillman was the NFL star who traded shoulder pads for an Army uniform out of a sense of duty right after 9/11 only to discover, very quickly, just how fucked up the wars were. Krakaeur quotes Tillman’s life-during-wartime journal entries heavily. Spoiler alert: Tillman basically had his head blown off. Friendly Fire. Yep, his own guys took him out.

Despite the wishes of the Bush administration to exploit Tillman’s fame, the football player wanted no part of the media spotlight and refused to be used as a poster boy for the administration. Then, his death-by-comrade was hugely covered up. The dude brought in to eulogize Tillman was duped by the Bush folks into misleading thousands of mourners into believing Tillman was killed by the enemy. Well, okay, he was taken down by the enemy in a way: the Bush administration, knowing Tillman could not speak from the grave, exploited the shit out of him anyway.

So, yeah, FUCK BUSH. Fuck him and his fucking library, which will have about as much in common with facts and reality as Disney FuckingLand. Fuck him for the lies, the economic devastation, Gitmo, waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, Jessica Lynch, and all the good-old-boy can’t-touch-this silver-foot-in-mouth assholism that set so much of the current vitriolic political landscape into motion. Fuck Pappy, too, for that other Gulf War and the ban on photographing soldiers coffins, a ban that served Junior well, helping us all to collectively not have to see the reality of war and so not to have to believe it.

News reports suggest 3,000 supporters joined Bush to celebrate the groundbreaking of the library where spin-masters are surely already conspiring to make W out to be some squeaky-clean saint. Maybe they’ll have wax figures of W and Kanye embracing in the lobby.

How I wish that just one representative from every family of every person maimed and killed in connection to Bush’s war crimes—the enlisted, the civilians, the little children, the mentally destroyed—had shown up, too, all wearing the same t-shirt: FUCK BUSH.

Spike Gillespie tries hard to be very good so she won’t wind up in hell with W. She blogs at www.spikeg.com where she is currently scheming ways to raise money for her next surgery, since she can’t get insurance. You can sign up for her Winter Writing Workshops if you want.