Williams: Portrait of Bush as Cowboy
[Statement] Portrait of George W. Bush as a Cowboy, or: America’s Foreign Policy of Peace
Terry Tempest Williams’ straightforward essay on President George Bush that follows is in direct response for the U.S. government’s decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein or as so many poets insist, to go to war against the people of Iraq. Williams sarcastically takes on the “wild west, gun totting” image of a leader verses a more compassionate approach that nurtures dialogue and works towards the assurance of democracy.
(Warning: This is a rant and may not be good for your mental health)
Old myths die hard as they say in the American West, and perhaps no lie is as captivating as the romance of the American Cowboy. Talk about a sacred cow that lives on in Texas. What I want to know is how George W. Blue-blood Bush has spun his identity to the point where we believe him when he says his preference is “home on the range” rather than commander-in-chief.” Karl Rove, his trusty genius-in-residence, actually said, “Given the choice of Wall Street over Main Street, the President would choose Main Street every time.” Yup, he’s just a regular ‘ole guy in a Stetson and Levis who just happens to live in The White House.
He is a man who wears a Stetson and Levis with a relentless appetite for war. Yee-haw! Ride e’m cowboy, all the way to Iraq. Forgive me, but that’s what it feels like every day in the USA, where conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh tells his viewers to “relax, we’ll get our war” as he called the anti-war demonstrations, anti-American demonstrations fueled by communists and environmental “wackos.” Never mind that freedom of speech is a tenet of American democracy or that dissent is what this country was founded on in the first place. Bush and his conservative army of listeners wants blood, not ours, but theirs. And theirs is no longer Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, but rather Saddam Hussein and Iraqi dissidents who are a more stable target, not prone to hiding in caves or shape shifting. We want to show what we’ve got by way of military prowess, in case the world has forgotten.
Just the other day, Dan Rather exposed the latest military scheme called “Shock and Awe,” a strategy developed with the hopes it would “have this simultaneous effect rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes” to destroy the enemy. Three hundred to four hundred cruise missiles would be deployed at once, more than the number launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before,” a Pentagon official said. “There will be not be a safe place in Baghdad.” “The horror and destruction will be so vast and fast it will inspire nothing but shock and awe.” Within minutes, blood-soaked handkerchiefs will be waving from the rubble begging for mercy, and then presto, the war will be over. Nice and neat, clap the dust off our hands. In and out, mission accomplished.
One lariat thrown around the neck of Saddam Hussein, and it's the end of the rodeo. George W. Bush will wave his white hat to the crowd as he takes a bow from the saddle of his fast-riding horse in the middle of the arena. “Shock and awe.” Read all about it. Barrel riders secure the Iraqi oil for themselves in record time.
It is time to expose the myth of the American Cowboy for what it is, a lie designed to perpetuate the rugged loner who takes the law into his own hands. It doesn’t matter if in truth, he’s just a hired hand of the people who pay him. Or that his real home is not on the range, but simply moving through with no sense of responsibility to the folks who live there. What matters is that he can speak in simple verse and smoke his Marlboro cigarettes with style at the same time he rides off into the sunset with his silver pistols lashed to his thighs as he feels his trustworthy horse between his legs. Bodies left behind or broken fences never mended don't trouble him. He is the perfect image for American individualism.Take what's yours and move on.
Of course we can “go it alone,” says George W. to the increasing world-wide opposition to war in Iraq. That’s the American way. “You’re either with us or against us.” As the president so eloquently said, “I don’t do nuance.”
The cowboy president doesn’t talk details, he just points his pistol in the general direction of fear and starts shooting off his rhetoric like those three quick bullets, “Axis of Evil,” that were heard around the world. North Korea flashes news of nuclear weapons and then it's our turn to reply that our missiles are bigger than their missiles and now it’s no longer rodeo time, but Super Bowl Sunday, with the United States Cowboy on the starting line with George as quarterback, his arm cocked and ready for a military touchdown.
George W. Bush loves a good game. The problem is—war is not a game. And for those of us who do not view this man as our legitimate president, how do we get his attention?
I used to think democracy was a good place to start, but since September 11, and the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security, our civil liberties are being whittled and eroded away. Our voices raised in question are discredited and quelled. Fear has replaced reason. Confrontation has overruled contemplation. Entitlement has replaced respect as we watch environmental laws slashed and sensitive wild lands ravaged for their oil and ancient trees in the name of national security. The "war on terror" is first being waged here at home.
To those of you living in Europe, we thank you for your leadership of resistance. We thank you for gathering in the hundreds of thousands in London, Florence, Madrid, and Paris, showing us what is possible and inspiring our own demonstrations. And our numbers in the anti-war movement in America are growing. We thank you for crying foul on what we Americans have only dared to think to ourselves until now. And we thank you for your prayers and we pray with you believing there is a "conservative compassion" that can stay the violence of war. What we are learning from you is that those with a memory of war on their own soil are the first to call for patience and pause....
Perhaps, it will continue to be this kind of pressure from countries with a memory of fascism and a history of empires that have risen and fallen, that in the end will remind our cowboy culture in America that the poster with burnt edges, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” has never translated well in international law. America right now, under the Bush Regime, has a very destructive, call it foreign, policy for peace.
What I fear in America right now is this: War is the body bag flown home with a nice note from the president that reads, “She served our country well in the fight for freedom.” War is also amnesia, so that in the grief of that moment, Americans will choose to believe him and find ourselves imprisoned by our own arrogance.
Old myths die hard as they say in the American West, and perhaps no lie is as captivating as the romance of the American Cowboy. Talk about a sacred cow that lives on in Texas. What I want to know is how George W. Blue-blood Bush has spun his identity to the point where we believe him when he says his preference is “home on the range” rather than commander-in-chief.” Karl Rove, his trusty genius-in-residence, actually said, “Given the choice of Wall Street over Main Street, the President would choose Main Street every time.” Yup, he’s just a regular ‘ole guy in a Stetson and Levis who just happens to live in The White House.
He is a man who wears a Stetson and Levis with a relentless appetite for war. Yee-haw! Ride e’m cowboy, all the way to Iraq. Forgive me, but that’s what it feels like every day in the USA, where conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh tells his viewers to “relax, we’ll get our war” as he called the anti-war demonstrations, anti-American demonstrations fueled by communists and environmental “wackos.” Never mind that freedom of speech is a tenet of American democracy or that dissent is what this country was founded on in the first place. Bush and his conservative army of listeners wants blood, not ours, but theirs. And theirs is no longer Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, but rather Saddam Hussein and Iraqi dissidents who are a more stable target, not prone to hiding in caves or shape shifting. We want to show what we’ve got by way of military prowess, in case the world has forgotten.
Just the other day, Dan Rather exposed the latest military scheme called “Shock and Awe,” a strategy developed with the hopes it would “have this simultaneous effect rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes” to destroy the enemy. Three hundred to four hundred cruise missiles would be deployed at once, more than the number launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before,” a Pentagon official said. “There will be not be a safe place in Baghdad.” “The horror and destruction will be so vast and fast it will inspire nothing but shock and awe.” Within minutes, blood-soaked handkerchiefs will be waving from the rubble begging for mercy, and then presto, the war will be over. Nice and neat, clap the dust off our hands. In and out, mission accomplished.
One lariat thrown around the neck of Saddam Hussein, and it's the end of the rodeo. George W. Bush will wave his white hat to the crowd as he takes a bow from the saddle of his fast-riding horse in the middle of the arena. “Shock and awe.” Read all about it. Barrel riders secure the Iraqi oil for themselves in record time.
It is time to expose the myth of the American Cowboy for what it is, a lie designed to perpetuate the rugged loner who takes the law into his own hands. It doesn’t matter if in truth, he’s just a hired hand of the people who pay him. Or that his real home is not on the range, but simply moving through with no sense of responsibility to the folks who live there. What matters is that he can speak in simple verse and smoke his Marlboro cigarettes with style at the same time he rides off into the sunset with his silver pistols lashed to his thighs as he feels his trustworthy horse between his legs. Bodies left behind or broken fences never mended don't trouble him. He is the perfect image for American individualism.Take what's yours and move on.
Of course we can “go it alone,” says George W. to the increasing world-wide opposition to war in Iraq. That’s the American way. “You’re either with us or against us.” As the president so eloquently said, “I don’t do nuance.”
The cowboy president doesn’t talk details, he just points his pistol in the general direction of fear and starts shooting off his rhetoric like those three quick bullets, “Axis of Evil,” that were heard around the world. North Korea flashes news of nuclear weapons and then it's our turn to reply that our missiles are bigger than their missiles and now it’s no longer rodeo time, but Super Bowl Sunday, with the United States Cowboy on the starting line with George as quarterback, his arm cocked and ready for a military touchdown.
George W. Bush loves a good game. The problem is—war is not a game. And for those of us who do not view this man as our legitimate president, how do we get his attention?
I used to think democracy was a good place to start, but since September 11, and the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security, our civil liberties are being whittled and eroded away. Our voices raised in question are discredited and quelled. Fear has replaced reason. Confrontation has overruled contemplation. Entitlement has replaced respect as we watch environmental laws slashed and sensitive wild lands ravaged for their oil and ancient trees in the name of national security. The "war on terror" is first being waged here at home.
To those of you living in Europe, we thank you for your leadership of resistance. We thank you for gathering in the hundreds of thousands in London, Florence, Madrid, and Paris, showing us what is possible and inspiring our own demonstrations. And our numbers in the anti-war movement in America are growing. We thank you for crying foul on what we Americans have only dared to think to ourselves until now. And we thank you for your prayers and we pray with you believing there is a "conservative compassion" that can stay the violence of war. What we are learning from you is that those with a memory of war on their own soil are the first to call for patience and pause....
Perhaps, it will continue to be this kind of pressure from countries with a memory of fascism and a history of empires that have risen and fallen, that in the end will remind our cowboy culture in America that the poster with burnt edges, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” has never translated well in international law. America right now, under the Bush Regime, has a very destructive, call it foreign, policy for peace.
What I fear in America right now is this: War is the body bag flown home with a nice note from the president that reads, “She served our country well in the fight for freedom.” War is also amnesia, so that in the grief of that moment, Americans will choose to believe him and find ourselves imprisoned by our own arrogance.
Questions for Discussion: [Statement] Portrait of George W. Bush as a Cowboy, or: America’s Foreign Policy of Peace
- Why does Terry Tempest Williams call her statement a rave? What topics does she cover in her rave? What metaphors does she use?
- What political realities does Williams question?
- Why does Williams hold democracy as being so important?
- What do we have to learn from those who have experienced war differently than we have?
- Speak to Williams’ statement that “war is amnesia.”