May 24, 2007

• The Violence Of Impeachment

  SuSu linked to an article over at Salon, wherein Gary Kamiya gets it:
  

  But there's a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off -- and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush's warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America's support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It's a national myth. It's John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we're not ready to do that.

  Ba-da-bing. We are Bush and Bush is us. We can't find it within ourselves to reject ourselves.
  

  This doesn't mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we're too confused -- not least by our own complicity -- to work up the cold, final anger we'd need to go through impeachment. We haven't done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy -- not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

  This is one reason critics of the war were so vehemently and violently opposed. People who were right about the war, and were right about the 'war on terror,' have been vilified because no one likes a told-you-so. And in the metaphor of marriage, no one wants to be the cuckolded spouse.

  • 3:41 pm
  • 3 Comments