...Then the Pig Got Up and Slowly Walked Away
Our president continues to hunt for his legacy. No, not his real legacy: an empty treasury, torture, Constitutional violations, a dying ecosystem, an abandonment of the working class, and above all thousands of American deaths and uncounted Iraqi deaths in a pointless and continuing war, fought over a lie. See, the president wants a good legacy. He feels entitled to it, as he has felt entitled to everything else in life. Ronald Reagan has a international goddamn airport named for him, for chrissakes, and he caused a sharp rise in air traffic accidents by firing the air traffic controllers, because the free market has no room for people who want to choose the price at which they sell their skilled labor. And, since Bush the lesser is fantastically talented at ignoring anything he doesn’t want to know, and all we have to report from his presidency is bad, he’s beginning to wonder what he’s been doing for the past eight years. Must have been something; eight years don’t just vanish on you. Well, not unless you’re on a bender, and George is pretty sure the Secret Service would prevent that. Something really good of course, really decider-person-y. Weren’t people hailing him as a hero or something when New York blew up? Oh, that was Rudy. Well, how ‘bout that time I expressed concernitude for that New Orlen City thingie? Oh. Well, why not? But I bet my sudden decision to make Israel and those other guys peaceful worked, right? That’s a real, uh, no other president, this historic, old, peace finally flies again in over the land of our forefathers. Lemme see that speech again.
So the president expects to leave a highly flattering legacy, but he’s having some trouble at figuring out what it is supposed to be.
He’d better come up with something fast, or someone’s going to think one up for him, those who haven’t already decided his legacy is debt, torture, treason, ecological disaster, poverty, and lying to start a pointless war. I’m delighted by this initiative to have a sewage treatment plant renamed after him. This may not be an ideal monument—I rather like the suggestion of a hole in the ground, which we just keep digging—but it’s pretty good.
Naturally, the proposal has some opposition. Most of it comes from local Republicans, who, unable to distinguish between disrespect for the office of the president and disrespect for the tragically inept and immoral individual occupying it, considers the very idea inappropriate, possibly treasonous. Their objections are unimportant—not because they’re wrong (and they are), but because they only account for 15% of the vote in San Francisco county. It’s a very blue dot on the map.
No, the real opposition, the argument that gives me pause, comes from the sewage treatment plant’s manager, who also finds the equation of Bush the lesser with sewage unfair. His plant, after all, serves a useful purpose and functions efficiently. He’s proud of his plant, and offended at the thought of Bush’s name on the sign out front.
You know things are bad when the professional authorities feel sewage is too good to be associated with the president.