Who Let the Dogs In? (45 page)

Take any area—environment, labor, education, taxes, health—and go to the websites of public-interest groups in that field. You will find page after page of minor adjustments, quiet repeals, no-big-deal new policies, all of them cruel, destructive, and harmful. A silent change in regulations, an executive order, a funding cutoff. No headlines. Below the radar. Again and again and again. Head Start, everybody’s favorite government program, is being targeted for “improvement” by leaving it to the tender mercies of Mississippi and Alabama. An AIDS program that helps refugees in Africa and Asia gets its funding cut because one of the seven groups involved once worked with the United Nations, which once worked with the Chinese government, which once supported forced abortions.

So what manner of monster is behind these outrages? I have known George W. Bush slightly since we were both in high school, and I studied him closely as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo. They all play well politically with certain constituencies.

Let’s assume the religiosity is genuine; no one is in a position to know otherwise. I leave it to more learned commentators to address what “Christian” might actually mean in terms of public policy.

The anti-intellectualism is also authentic. This is a grudge Bush has carried at least since his college days when he felt looked down on as a frat rat by more cerebral types. Despite his pedigree and prep schools, he ran into Eastern stereotypes of Texans at Yale, a common experience at Ivy schools in that time. John F. Kennedy, the consummate, effortlessly graceful, classy Harvard man, had just been assassinated in ugly old Dallas, and Lyndon Johnson’s public piety gave many people the creeps. Texans were more or less thought of as yahoo barbarians somewhere between
The Beverly Hillbillies
and
Deliverance.
I do not exaggerate by much. To have a Texas accent in the East in those days was to have twenty points automatically deducted from your estimated IQ. And Texans have this habit of playing to the stereotype—it’s irresistible. One proud Texan I know had never owned a pair of cowboy boots in his life until he got a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard. Just didn’t want to let anyone down.

For most of us who grow up in the “boonies” and go to school in the East, it’s like speaking two languages—Bill Clinton, for example, is perfectly bilingual. But it’s not unusual for a spell in the East to reinforce one’s Texanness rather than erode it, and that’s what happened to Bush. Bush had always had trouble reading—we assume it is dyslexia (although
Slate
’s Jacob Weisberg attributes it to aphasia); his mom was still doing flash cards with him when he was in junior high. Feeling intellectually inferior apparently fed into his resentment of Easterners and other known forms of snob.

Bush once said, “There’s a West Texas populist streak in me, and it irritates me when these people come out to Midland and look at my friends with just the utmost disdain.” In his mind, Midland is the true-blue heartland of the old vox pop. The irony is that Midland along with its twin city, Odessa, is one of the most stratified and narrow places in the country. Both are oil towns with amazingly strict class segregation. Midland is the white-collar, Republican town; Odessa is the blue-collar, Democratic town. The class conflict plays out in an annual football rivalry so intense that H. G. Bissinger featured it in his bestselling book,
Friday Night Lights.
To mistake Midland for the
volk
heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, is Levittown.

In fact, people in Midland are real nice folks: I can’t prove that with statistics, but I know West Texas and it’s just a fact. Open, friendly, no side to ’em. The problem is, they’re way isolated out there and way limited too. You can have dinner at the Petroleum Club anytime with a bunch of them and you’ll come away saying, “Damn, those are nice people. Sure glad they don’t run the world.” It is still such a closed, narrow place, where everybody is white, Protestant, and agrees with everybody else.

The machismo is what I suspect is fake. The minute he is questioned, he becomes testy and defensive. That’s one reason they won’t let him hold many press conferences. When he tells stories about his dealings with two of the toughest men who ever worked in politics—the late Lee Atwater and the late Bob Bullock—Bush, improbably, comes off as the toughest mother in the face-down. I wouldn’t put money on it being true. Bullock, the late lieutenant governor and W’s political mentor in Texas, could be and often was meaner than a skilletful of rattlesnakes. Bush’s story is that one time, Bullock cordially informed him that he was about to fuck him. Bush stood up and kissed Bullock, saying, “If I’m gonna get fucked, at least I should be kissed.” It probably happened, but I guarantee you Bullock won the fight. Bush never got what made Bullock more than just a supermacho pol—the old son of a bitch was on the side of the people. Mostly.

The perfect absurdity of all this, of course, is that Bush’s identification with the sturdy yeomen of Midland (actually, oil-company executives almost to a man) is so wildly at variance with his real background. Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father is that, “He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.” He did. For one year. Then his family moved to a posh neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the second-best prep school in town (couldn’t get into the best one) before going off to Andover as a legacy.

Jim Hightower’s great line about Bush, “Born on third and thinks he hit a triple,” is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth—he’s been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn’t admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn’t just get a head start by being his father’s son—it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School). He got into the Texas Air National Guard—and sat out Vietnam—through Daddy’s influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of FANGers, as regular air force referred to the “Fucking Air National Guard,” included not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but some actual black members as well—they just happened to play football for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father. He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some fellow Yalies.

That Bush’s administration is salted with the sons of somebody-or-other should come as no surprise. I doubt it has ever even occurred to Bush that there is anything wrong with a class-driven good-ol’-boy system. That would explain why he surrounds himself with people like Eugene Scalia (son of Justice Antonin Scalia), whom he named solicitor of the Department of Labor—apparently as a cruel joke. Before taking that job, the younger Scalia was a handsomely paid lobbyist working against ergonomic regulations designed to prevent repetitive stress injuries. His favorite technique was sarcastic invective against workers who supposedly faked injuries when the biggest hazard they faced was “dissatisfaction with co-workers and supervisors.” More than five million Americans are injured on the job every year, and more die annually from work-related causes than were killed on September 11. Neither Scalia nor Bush has ever held a job requiring physical labor.

What is the disconnect? One can see it from the other side—people’s lives are being horribly affected by the Bush administration’s policies, but they make no connection between what happens to them and the decisions made in Washington. I think I understand why so many people who are getting screwed do not know who is screwing them. What I don’t get is the disconnect at the top. Is it that Bush doesn’t want to see? No one brought it to his attention? He doesn’t care?

Okay, we cut taxes for the rich and so we have to cut services for the poor. Presumably there is some right-wing justification along the lines that helping poor people just makes them more dependent or something. If there were a rationale Bush could express, it would be one thing, but to watch him not see, not make the connection, is another thing entirely. Welfare, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps—horrors, they breed dependency. Whereas inheriting millions of dollars and having your whole life handed to you on a platter is good for the grit in your immortal soul? What we’re dealing with here is a man in such serious denial it would be pathetic if it weren’t damaging so many lives.

Bush’s lies now fill volumes. He lied us into two hideously unfair tax cuts; he lied us into an unnecessary war with disastrous consequences; he lied us into the PATRIOT Act, eviscerating our freedoms. But when it comes to dealing with those less privileged, Bush’s real problem is not deception, but self-deception.

November/December 2003

Jessica Mitford

J
ESSICA
MITFORD ROMILLY
Treuhaft, known as Decca, who died last month, was among the handful of great muckraking journalists of our time. Peter Sussman of the Society of Professional Journalists puts her in a class with Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, and Ralph Nader. “Only funny.”

Always funny. Lord knows, she could bring ’em down. She drove the entire funeral industry into collective apoplexy with
The American Way of Death
(1963), eventually leading the Federal Trade Commission to issue regulations for the industry; drove the Famous Writers School into richly deserved bankruptcy; and, in general, had quite a string of notches on her gun. She was also a wit, a charmer, a rebel, an ex-Communist, a lifelong radical, a beauty, and a lady. She led the most extraordinary life, with honor and with humor throughout.

Think of the leftist women writers of her generation and ask yourself whom you would have wanted to be friends with. Lillian Hellman, with all that Sturm und Drang? Mary McCarthy, with that backstabbing streak? Nonsense. You would have wanted to know Decca, of course, because she was such fun.

Toward the end of her life she was working on an update of
The American Way of Death,
for which reason she arrived in Houston last summer to visit the American Funeral Museum, of which it must be said, it’s there. In fact, it’s a multimedia museum. We toddled through the exhibits until we reached Embalming, where we perched on a bench to view a short documentary. Pyramids appeared on-screen and the narrator announced portentously, “The art of embalming was first discovered by the ancient Egyptians.”

Decca said quietly, “Now
there
was a culture where the funeral directors got
completely
out of control.”

She was hot on the trail of the story of the astonishing new concentration of ownership in the funeral industry. Except it’s now called “the death-services industry,” with that penchant for ghastly euphemism Decca pilloried so memorably. Something called Service Corporation International is swallowing its competition at such a clip that before long we’ll all have to pay them to get planted. Decca went off incognito to price crypts at a local SCI crematorium. The “grief counselor” started by showing her the el cheapo model. “Wouldn’t be caught dead in it,” she snorted.