Reading Freely

I have a ….complicated relationship with George W. Bush. He was the president when I was in high school, and most importantly during 9/11: his “I can hear you!” response still makes me want to find a table, stand on it, and go “Oh captain my captain!”. I voted to reelect him in 2004, and then I voted straight-line Democrat in 2006. Reaction to his expansion of the military/police/surveillance state from 2005-forward was the beginning of my political consciousness; he made me a civil libertarian by opposition to his policies, which eventually made me a regular ol’ libertarian. I look at him and my multi-folded brain produces a dissonant chorus: the teenager who would stand on a desk for him, the early 20-something whose lip curled in rage at his name; the adult who wrestles with both. I’ve never read Decision Points, but somehow learning that he’d narrated it made me want to listen to it. So….read this knowing that it’s not a formal book review, but the record of a complicated man listening to another complicated man and trying to find a reckoning. (For what it’s worth, I have a similarly complicated relationship with Obama, who made me Believe again and then crushed my spirits.) The book is not a ‘biography’ as such, but rather Bush looking back at some of the hard calls of his life and presidency, and explaining why he made the decisions he did. What the reader gets out of this depends on what they went in for.

I listen to audiobooks in my car, not because I have a long commute but because my ladyfriend lives two hours away and I tend to speed if I listen to music. I have to say that spending hours listening to Bush talk about the Patriot Act, and dealing with two different versions of me arguing with one another while present-me tried to moderate and watch traffic at the same time (dude, I am not going to speed up for you, I am going to keep going slower and slower until you pass me) is a…unique experience. It’s also fairly depressing, to be honest, especially when he says stuff like “The liberation of Afghanistan had begun”. Bush frames this book not as a conventional biography, but a series of life-changing (and later on, world-changing) decisions: he begins with his decision to quit drinking, moves on to his decision to pursue a life in politics, and then discusses his political decisions. He opens his admin with a discussion on the stem cell debate instead of the obvious 9/11 / War on Terror track, but the latter dominates the midsection of the book, so it makes sense to address that first. It really wouldn’t fit in anywhere else. I will say up front that while I am a Southerner who enjoys listening to Bush’s Texas drawl, he is not as good a reader as Richard Nixon. When I listened to In the Arena by RN, I felt like the man was sitting opposite of me, bourbon in hand, earnestly talking to me about his life. When I listened to this, I distinctly felt like I was being read to from a book. There’s personality, there’s..some performance, but it’s worlds more static than RN’s delivery. This is especially obvious when he’s quoting himself and his self at the time was definitely more emotional.

Content-wise, the book itself is a mixed bag. I enjoyed hearing Bush’s behind-the-scenes offerings, but his rationale for doing this or that was not markedly different than the same rote we heard at the time. Granted, he published this fairly soon after he was out of office, in 2010, so perspective has not had much chance to form. The fine wine of hindsight was an off-tasting grape juice at that point. He admits that the intelligence that led him to invade Iraq at the time was flawed, but maintains that he had no idea at the time — and, if he were in the same position now, with the same intelligence and circumstances, he’d do it again. My memory can support this to an extent: assuming memories old enough to drink are valid, Afghanistan turned quiescent, and then Iraq happened and the insurgency, and it was the ‘bad war’; then we settled Iraq and Afghanistan became more and more complicated and it hung around our national neck like a millstone until Trump made the decision to cut bait and run, and Biden fulfilled it. When Bush was writing, we were still in that “Afghanistan War good, Iraq War bad” stage. Of course, now we know that the Iraq War’s repercussions were far worse, because they led to the rise of ISIS and to the Syrian war in which DC funded al-Queda to take down Assad (insert your favorite profanity here) — but we didn’t at the time. While I am old enough to know that politicians often lie, I am also old enough to know that the establishment also lies to the president, so I’m hesitant to go off on his rationales of all these decisions. Frankly, I already went off on them, 20 years ago, and I found it weird and amusing to listen to him offer defenses for the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, the FISA act, etc. I remember at the time being radicalized by these, but now so much time has passed, and we’ve all become so accustomed to gross abuses of government power, that I couldn’t really remember why I’d been angry about them. (This, despite going off on lectures on people at the time!) Listening to Bush defend them, though, awoke my 2006-2007 self (who is still very angry) while my 2002 self just shrunk back feeling confused and heartbroken. Books are not for the faint of heart, I must say.

This was an interesting experience. I imagine reading the book would have been less impactful than listening to George W. read it, because — I like listening to him. It’s not just the drawl to my Southern ears, either, it’s hearing a voice from a past that, despite its problems, invokes comfort and nostalgia. That’s the funny thing about growing old, I suppose: in high school we were forced to look at the future with fear and trembling at the time by al-Queda’s actions, but at the same time I was exploring the brave new world of the internet in the early 2000s, and then — as I approached adulthood — I was getting invested in politics and remember being earnestly angry about it. Now that I’m beginning my forties, I’ve seen so much scandal that it’s very nearly water off a duck’s back — a kind of a ‘same (stuff), different day” mentality. Listening to this made me feel a sense of loss for my former self — someone who believed in something, someone who cared. I still believe in things, but not politicians. There’s a part of me that died in the car while listening to a debate between Obama and Clinton, thinking “they’re all the same, aren’t they?”, and he’s never come back. I suppose he never will, but I kind of miss him even my ‘older and wiser’ self writes him off as young and foolish. I suppose it’s telling that my 2026 self wound up just switching to a physical copy to finish the rest of the book, which hit on things like Hurricane Katrina and the economic hemorrhage.

This one is a hard one to summarize because I was listening to it — and reading — through a haze of strong emotions. These were my formative years in politics, so it’s hard to be objective. Bottom line, it was interesting to see Bush’s perspective on these events, however curated; I enjoyed hearing his voice, but he does not have a calling as an Audible narrator. His father is much better at it, but alas my listen-to of “Poppy’s” letters has been PETRIFOCUS TOTALUS!’d by the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, full cast audio. Ultimately, I don’t think W was a bad man: I think he made a lot of decisions under intense pressure, some of which were good and some of which were bad. That judgement is not made with the virtue of hindsight: I’m not judging Iraq as bad simply because of what happened a decade later, but by the principle that America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy: the so-called ’empire of liberty’ is a lie. Empire must be imperial; we cannot wield the One Ring without being subverted by its sickness.

I should maybe schedule something with kittens and flowers soon.