I think I’ve had three people that don’t really speak to each other about talk how the Bush years were actually worse than the current years with the “with-us-or-against-us“ thing. With Trump, it’s a small, if loud and shrill group, but in those years it seemed like the damn nation thought people against the Iraq war were purely evil traitors.
Freedom fries. You didn’t even have to be explicitly against the war, just being okay with the concept of France was enough to justify a boot in your ass.
There’s a Boston Legal episode about an Edwin Starr impersonator who’s not allowed to sing “War” (huh, what is it good for…) because it could be construed as anti troops/bush/government. It’s a very realistic plot.
I know I say this a lot but anyone too young to remember the Bush years should watch that show, it’s a very good example of the sorts of insane shit that people were arguing about back then.
Yeah. Trump may be worse (and the Republican Party may be crazier/more openly awful), but Trump doesn’t have Dick Cheney. Or anyone half as competent/evil.
Knock on wood.
Does anyone remember Trent Reznor not going to the… vmas one year I think it was, because he wanted to perform “Capital G”, a song criticizing the government, in front of a picture of Bush and they told him he couldn’t? And he was like fuck you then and just didn’t show?
If y’all wonder why older tumblerians get twitchy about censorship that shit is why.
Hell, one day when I was in grad school I was walking around and said something like “I hate Bush” to the person I was with and they shushed me in obvious fear.
If you wonder why I think free speech is an idea, not just the letter of a law… there you go.
The Bush years were awful.
Something that I just realized that younger tumblrites or folks outside of the US might not get:
“Doing X is letting the terrorists win” has become a hyperbolic meme but people were fucking serious about that.
I was just a wee baby high schooler for discussions about the patriot act and libraries handing over information and the government tracking searches, but I knew I didn’t like it, I knew that it was a bad idea and said so.
“What, do you want the terrorists to win? We’re just going to let everyone buy explosives with no oversight because you wanna read fanfic at the library? What if your mom had been on those planes, how would you feel about it then? We have to do this to keep everyone safe, what is wrong with you that you don’t want to stop this from happening again?”
In early 2002 I was a wee baby high schooler at an airport for a school conference. I’d left my boarding pass at the security station and ran back to get it once I’d realized it was lost. When I stumbled up to the metal detector (which seems so quaint in this era of full body scans) two national guardsmen in full BDUs with helmets and armor turned and pointed their M4s at me. “Are you Allison?” one barked and I unfroze long enough to nod. He handed me my boarding pass. “Be more careful!” When I got back to my group I was bawling and having what I didn’t realize at the time was a panic attack (having guns pointed at you is extremely scary).
“Well what did you think, you can’t just go running around an airport! They’ve gotta keep everyone safe - of course they’ve got military guns at the terminal, what, you think terrorists should just be able to waltz onto an airplane whenever they please?”
(Sidenote, I don’t check bags anymore because they always get opened and examined for “random” searches and I get pulled aside and patted down more than anyone else I know and I’m 100% convinced that’s because of this one mislaid boarding pass when I was 15)
Don’t want people tortured in prison? You’re letting the terrorists win. Questioning the validity of invading Iraq? You’re anti-american and letting the terrorists win. Sitting for the pledge of allegiance? You hate this country, which is what the terrorists want and you are therefore letting the terrorists win.
Saying “if we change our whole way of life and stop protecting people’s rights and freedoms then the terrorists HAVE won and we’re sacrificing liberty for security which is exactly the kind of thing you assholes say we shouldn’t do” to your political science professor in college? Oh my god maybe you are a terrorist.
Also tumblr kiddos - read up on the Dixie Chicks:
During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks performed in concert in London on March 10, 2003, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre in England. This concert kicked off their Top of the World Tour. During the introduction to their song “Travelin’ Soldier”, Natalie Maines, who along with Robison and Maguire is also a native of Texas, said:
“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”[41][…]
Maines’s remark sparked intense criticism;[44] media commentators claimed that she should not criticize Bush on foreign soil. Maines responded, “I said it there ‘cause that’s where I was.”[45]
[…] Maines attempted to clarify matters on March 12 by saying, “I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.”[47]
The statement failed to appease her critics, and Maines issued an apology on March 14: “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers’ lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American.”[48][49]
In wake of the statement against Bush, many supporters of the group dropped their support. […] In one famous anti-Dixie Chicks display, former fans were encouraged to bring their CDs to a demonstration at which they would be crushed by a bulldozer. […] Bruce Springsteen and Madonna both felt compelled to come out in support of the right of the band to express their opinions freely; however, Madonna herself postponed and then altered the April 1 release of her “American Life” video in which she threw a hand grenade toward a Bush look-alike, after witnessing the backlash against the Chicks.[51][52]
Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two of its disc jockeys on May 6 for playing music by the Dixie Chicks.[60] On May 22, at the Academy of Country Music awards ceremony in Las Vegas, there were boos when the band’s nomination for Entertainer of the Year award was announced. However, the broadcast’s host, Vince Gill, reminded the audience that everyone is entitled to freedom of speech. The academy gave the award to Toby Keith, who had been engaged in a public feud with Maines ever since she had denounced his number one hit “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry American)” as “ignorant” the year before.
That Toby Keith song was the one I kind of obliquely referenced in my post up there, the one with the lyrics:
Justice will be served and the battle will rage
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with
The U.S. of A.
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American wayThe hyper-militarization of the police, invasive overreach and surveillance of our digital lives by the NSA, the jingoism and mandatory patriotism that have transmuted into virulent nationalism, and the longest war in US history are relics of Bush.
*Fuck* Bush and the awful, imposing, frothing all-or-nothing patriotism that so many people were expressing at that time.
Ofextremelycourse fuck Trump and his nationalist, paternalist, misogynist supporters too.
The impression I’m getting is that while Trump as a person/president is more awful than Bush, probably >50% of the country thinks he’s terrible (just like 3 percentage points of that not enough to vote for Clinton), whereas in the Bush years there was strong public support?
Honestly even if I thought the two wars were good ideas I’d be pretty horrified by that level of grassroots censorship; maybe what we’re looking at here is less the president himself and more the public as a whole.
You gotta remember that Afghanistan, Iraq, the PATRIOT act, all of it were supported by both parties. Trump polarized everyone right off the bat, but then you would have senior democrats saying you were divisive or naive for going against those Bush policies. The antiwar crowd were all Dumb Fucking Hippies to everyone.
the decadent left in their coastal enclaves who may mount a fifth column, indeed
being in the UK and ‘bush/ iraq war sucks’ seemed to be the consensus i assumed the same was true in the US, but wow.
Experientially for most rat-tumb people, the difference was: you knew Bush voters, and had to argue with them, and put up with their bullshit arguments. This meant it was constantly infuriating to argue against, but also you were aware of some of their justifications.
Trump’s support is so class-shifted, and we’ve filtered our cohort so much, that most of you don’t know Trump supporters - not in large and frequent numbers - and so you experience him only as bizarre parodies of what the people you read or what trolls are the loudest.
It’s also worth noting that the Bush Thing and the Trump Thing, independent of their internal inherent qualities, arose during very different cultural / political moments.
The late ‘90s was the End of History, remember, the point at which most of the country thought that we’d Solved Government and that politics didn’t really matter anymore. The dittoheads with their Clinton Derangement Syndrome Mk. I were a fringey phenomenon, and anything remotely resembling a passionate active left was even fringier. The Republican party elites kept trying to engulf the country in a passionate culture war, culminating in the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and…the country just kept laughing at them.
The 2000 election was played out in most of the mainstream media – and, I believe, in the hearts of most Americans – as Gush v. Bore, a pointless dumb-show that wouldn’t really matter to anything, relevant mostly insofar as it produced goofy SNL jokes.
So when 9/11 landed like a brick in our laps, we genuinely did not know what to do, we were in a situation for which our political thinking-of-the-time had no script. A lot of people and institutions fell back on WWII-style thinking: y’know, “this is the Moment of Crisis, time to pull together as a nation and put aside our petty squabbles and stand behind our brave leaders etc.” Hillary Clinton supported Bush’s war plans. The New York Times supported Bush’s war plans. All sorts of notionally left/liberal thinkers supported Bush’s war plans.
…which meant that, if you were genuinely anti-war, if you were sufficiently political (on the anti-Bush side) that you weren’t inclined to get swept up in the zeitgeist – if you were embedded in a little cultural bubble of Super Leftism, for example, as I was at the time – it was incredibly scary. The world was turning upside down, factions were dissolving and realigning, everything was happening super fast. You were watching almost everyone around you, including everyone in a position of power, going nuts.
When the Bush regime started screwing up enough that the WWII thing became totally non-viable, and Bush became an official Bad Guy for half the country, a lot of the resulting cultural fallout was driven by the panicky paranoia that had taken root on the residual angry left during that period. And a lot of it was driven by the sense of deep betrayal that the mainstream-left was feeling.
When the Trump phenomenon began, the country had been riven by a vicious internal culture war for something like a decade. If you’re a denizen of Blue America, Trump is just the culmination of all the things you’d already been thinking about Red America – yeah, OK they really are that stupid, that crass, that mean, that corrupt, that racist, etc. etc. etc. His presence on the political stage is driving a few elite-conservative-thinker types like Douthat into paroxysms of identity crisis, but mostly he’s inspiring people on the left to retrench and Fight Even Harder in the battles that they were already fighting. We may feel a certain level of horrified awe as we ask ourselves “how low can he go?,” but honestly no one is really surprised by anything that’s come out of his regime.