Here’s what I remember about President George Herbert Walker Bush, on the occasion of his passing.
In 1990, on a meandering cross-country road trip, I drove out of Yosemite National Park to see an enormous column of smoke reaching into the sky, so titanic and towering I at first wasn’t able to make sense of it or understand what it was.
The park was on fire, one of the epically huge fires of our times, and listening to the radio as I drove down out of the park, this gigantic pillar of sacrificial smoke and flame pouring in slow-mo up into the sky, I learned also that Operation Desert Shield had commenced.
Desert Shield … setting the stage for all the war and terror that has consumed the Middle East and the world since. If only we had given up oil and the carbon economy 10 years earlier, none of that military intervention would have been deemed strategically necessary by President George Herbert Walker Bush.
I ended up in D.C. and became a bike messenger for a spell. The big march on Washington happened and I participated. It seemed like a very happy event, full of drums and facepaint and all such. My thought was that if everyone were marching silently instead of banging drums — wearing black with tears painted on their cheeks instead of clown faces — that would have been a stronger statement, but, I get it. Joyous resistance and all.
A year later I moved west, to San Francisco, and I saw pictures of the Highway of Death, a chilling and grotesque monument to the blood we’ll shed to protect American access to oil resources. And around that time my car was parked on a hill and got hit and totaled by a driver that lost control … I collected the settlement, and haven’t owned a car since.
Many patterns were set in motion that are still playing out today.
I can still hear his strident, pinched tones decrying Michael Dukakis as a “card carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union” during his successful presidential campaign.
And those are my memories of President George Herbert Walker Bush.
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