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BAD TASTE(S)
BY PETER KURTH (published 08.03.05)
How
is it that anyone, anywhere, still cares that Lance Armstrong has won his
seventh Tour de France? How many
times is he supposed to do that?
This “cancer survivor” thing is wearing a bit thin.
Alternatively,
how much suspense can we endure about the “space shuttle,”
whether they send it up or not, raining or shining, tiles damaged or
undamaged? Let’s face it, the only really exciting thing about the
space shuttle in recent times is that it blew up twice — though God
forbid it should ever happen again.
I’m
sorry. That’s in bad
taste. But so much is nowadays. It was in bad taste for President Bush to
“flip the bird” at journalists on his way to yet another
vacation in Texas, as he reportedly did last week, when they asked him some
questions about the CAFTA agreement.
It’s in bad taste for Bush, ever, to call his wife Laura
“the lump next to me in bed,” as he has definitely done in the
past.
It
was in bad taste for the president’s mother, the stinking-rich
Barbara Bush, to appear with him at another of his Social Security
“stumps” and declare again how “worried” she is
about the financial future of her grandchildren. It was in bad taste for his father, the
first and only slightly less murderous President Bush, to complain in an
interview how “hurt” he is whenever he hears his little boy
criticized in the press.
It
was in terrible taste for Bush to leave 40,000 Boy Scouts sweltering in
near-100-degree temperatures at their jamboree last Wednesday because it
was “too hot” for him to appear, and then to stand them up
again the next day because of the threat of
“thunderstorms.” The Boy Scouts had had such a bad week
already, what with all those electrocutions, and inasmuch as about 300 of
them had to be treated for dehydration, heat prostration and exposure while
waiting in vain for Ding-Dong to appear.
(That he finally did appear, in the cool of Sunday evening, was in
even worse taste, obviously an exercise in damage control.)
It
was in dreadful taste, also last week, for Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice to announce plans to "accelerate the demise of Castro's
tyranny" in Cuba by appointing “a transition coordinator"
to hasten his downfall by any means necessary. (Assassination, maybe? Oh, wait, we tried that before.)
It
was in rotten taste for the U.S. Congress to grant $14.5 billion in tax
breaks to energy companies at the very moment that the world’s
largest oil giant, ExxonMobil, announced a $7.5 billion profit in the last
three months alone. It was in
disgusting taste for the same Congress to grant immunity from lawsuits to
gun makers, just because “po' widdle Smith & Wesson,” as
columnist Greg Palast observes, didn’t actually pull the triggers
that killed 32,436 Americans with handguns last year.
And
it’s in really execrable taste for Bush and his British lapdog, Prime
Minister Tony Blair, to keep insisting that we need to “fight the
terrorists over there so that we don't need to fight them over here”
– the clear implication being that foreign lives are worth less than
our own.
The
list goes on and on. You might say
that Bad Taste is Bush’s middle name.
And
about that space shuttle:
Don’t imagine that it has anything to do with “exploring
space” or "furthering our understanding of the solar
system" because it doesn’t.
It has to do with the perfection of war – war from the
skies. And even then it’s a
bust -- a great, big Edsel of a federally funded project that’s kept
NASA afloat ever since Americans landed on the moon and discovered there
was nothing there.
That
was in 1969, for those who don’t recall – just a few weeks
after Judy Garland was found dead on a toilet in London – a drug
overdose? cirrhosis of the liver? -- and about a month before actress
Sharon Tate and some of her friends were brutally murdered by the Manson
gang.
I
mention these events together not to be outrageous, but because they were
closely connected in our minds at the time.
Garland, Manson and the moon – what better juxtaposition could
there be of American dreams gone sour, American violence on the rampage,
and American know-how all for naught?
Garland’s death, at least, led to the Stonewall riots in New
York, when urban “homosexuals,” grieving their favorite
cultural icon, got tired of having their bars raided and threw anything at
hand – mainly their drinks – at the police, thus giving birth
to the gay rights movement. But can
you think of a single thing the American moon landing accomplished besides
making us feel like “Number One?”
Now
Bush wants the “Star Wars” missile system back, even though
American taxpayers have already expended $130 billion on this turkey (more
than is spent on cancer research, according to the TrueMajority campaign)
and even though not one aspect of it has so far proved workable. Worse, the U.S. “is planning its
first production since the cold war of plutonium 238 -- one of the most
deadly forms of the element -- for use in secret missions, possibly
including spy satellites and undersea devices,” while still bullying
and chastising and lording it over other nations about the proliferation of
“weapons of mass destruction.”
We’re
Number One, all right – number one in military spending, arms sales,
foreign debt and useless consumption. And, I would say, we're Number
One among warmongers, hypocrites and goddamn fools on the planet. But it might be in bad taste to say so.
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