George Bush’s Nostalgia and Our Itinerary
According to Director OIiver Stone, George Bush has “set America back ten years.” How inaccurate! It seems that Stone’s arithmetic is as bad as his history. (Considering Bush’s English and Stone’s everything else, shouldn’t Yale lose its accreditation?) Ten years minus 2006 would place us back in the prosperous, peaceful if somewhat venereal Clinton days. George Bush has regressed this country much further than that. He has reestablished the hereditary rule of WASP upper class twits. In short, it could be 1774 again.
But wait, it is unfair to compare our reigning Commandude with England’s George III. At least the British monarch never presumed the Divine Right of Kings. On the contrary, he knew that his dynasty had been hired by Parliament, on the Hanoverian merits of being breathing Protestants.
A Parliament with authority and respect? The 18th century is too avant-garde for our sovereign!
No, we are going back to the 1530s. That was the Golden Age for the Executive Branch, when Henry VIII even had right to fire God. Henry’s Parliament knew how to behave: a royal kennel of happy curs who only required an occasional kick.
But wait, paper-training a Parliament is still a bother. No, our descent is to to a time when there was no Parliament or even a bureaucratic nuisance like habeas corpus. King John was frivolous, petulant, tyrannical and incompetent: an obvious role model.
So welcome back to 1214. And hope for some barons!