New York, again

Well, here we are, Bush. Back in the USA, as the Beatles nearly said. They actually said USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are. An invidious implied comparison, perhaps—sorry about that. But yes, there are many things for which we must consider ourselves lucky, most notably on my mind this morning, the plumbing, and fresh, drinkable water from the taps. After two weeks of being warned against so much as cleaning my teeth with water in the bathrooms of the very respectable hotels we stayed at, or eating salad because it might not have been washed in bottloed water, this simple expectation seems like a privilege.

A propos of which, I was speaking just yesterday with one of our group about how important it is for Americans to travel outside their country, to get some kind of perspective on the world. We have it so good, Bush, and life is so easy for the vast majority of us (let’s not forget, though, those many for whom it’s not) that the hardship of lives in almost every other country throughout the world is unimaginable to those who have never had the opportunity to experience it at first hand—even if only through the windows of a bus and brief encounters outside the tourist bubble. It’s one of the things that worried me most about your original candidacy, Bush—the fact that you had traveled so little abroad. As a matter of fact, I believe you have traveled little outside the bubble of your own privilege in this country. But that's another story.

I wonder if you and your people are worried about the polls, Bush? The morning after our return, I hear that your approval rating is now a mere 44%, and your disapproval rating 54%. The weird thing about this is that you seem to be managing to implement your agenda anyway, despite the overwhelming disapproval of the electorate. You seem to have been able to make political capital out of the Terri Schiavo situation, despite the fact that almost every thinking person in America disagreed with you. It’s the whole “What’s the Matter with Kansas” syndrome. What’s happening to us in this country, that we allow you and your frankly extremist base to get away with those things with which we fundamentally disagree, and which serve only to harm our interests? A question that seems all the fresher and more urgent to one returning from the world out-there to our seemingly insular subcontinent.

Listen, Bush, I arrived back in New York in time to get a copy of the Sunday Times, and this morning I read the deeply disturbing Frank Rich column on death, and its co-option not only by the religious right for their peculiar agenda, but also by the media, with an eye to boosting ratings. We have become a nation mesmerized by death—perhaps as the last frontier from which no entitlement in the world can offer us the protection that we crave. I have just arrived back here from a country that, four thousand years ago, was already mesmerized by death. But I think there are very important and interesting distinctions there, and I do plan to explore them in this dialogue of ours, some time soon, when my brain is restored from its present state of jet-lagged befuddlement.

Remind me, will you, Bush? I learned a lot on this trip, on this and other matters, and I don’t want to let it all slip away unrecorded. For today, the Big Apple awaits, with all its glorious museums! I could revist Egypt at the Met! Have a good one. Hope you can work things out with Sharon (he’s not particularly popular in Egypt, Bush, as you might imagine: they worry a lot about the Palestinians there, and see the resolution of this problem as being the key to peace in the Middle East. I expect you know that.) But I won’t get started on this one. Not this morning.