MONDAY, AFTER THE MIRACLE

Dare I believe my eyes? A fix? Wonder of wonders!


MONDAY, BEFORE THE MIRACLE

The Bush Diaries
~ by Peter Clothier ~
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It was a truly unsettling week, last week. I arrived back from Las Vegas with high hopes, as I say, for a bump in our readership and for a good launch for the book version, The Real Bush Diaries. My intention had been to send out the first salvo of PR on my return, but then the blog went down and it would have seemed the worst of timing to get people interested in the book without a strong reference to the blog. So that effort got delayed. I'm still in two minds as to whether to restart it now, or await the repair of the original Bush Diaries.

Now as I sit back and survey the ruins of a week gone badly awry, I ask myself what the gift might be. I always believe, Bush, that there's a gift wrapped in the shit that comes my way. Some lesson to be learned. In this particular bundle of excrement, I suppose the gift must be the acknowledgement of that Buddhist wisdom of non-attachment: things do happen beyond our control, sometimes precisely those things we would have most wished to avoid.

In the case of The Bush Diaries, I had become deeply enmeshed with the daily process of it and with the expectations I had developed along the way. I had made assumptions about its importance to myself and others, and was unpleasantly humbled when those assumptions were rudely snatched away with a word of warning.

So I suppose the wisdom here has been to find a different path through the technology, and to begin again; and to hold off on the PR for the book until a more propitious moment comes. A well-deserved lesson in patience, perhaps--since I am not a patient man--and in understanding that things do not always fall my way.

I would imagine, Bush, that this is a lesson that you too would need to be learning slowly: when the universe keeps slapping us down and souring the outcome of our best-laid plans, it's time to learn the humility that enables us to re-evaluate them. It would behoove you, in my view, to bear this in mind as you insist, in your various but unchanging ways, on "staying the course" in Iraq. I do believe that you, and the country that you claim to lead, will continue to reap nothing but suffering as a result of the experience over there, and that we need to step back for a moment, question our assumptions, curb our arrogance, and listen up to what the universe has to say.