"Obituaries from the Future:

Former President George W. Bush Dead at 72"

Greil Marcus, CityPages

Policy Review, October 5, 2018 — George W. Bush, the
43rd president of the United States, died today at
Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. He was 72. The
cause of death was announced as heart failure.

Mr. Bush's always controversial presidency left behind
a changed nation and a changed world. Taking office in
2001 after a disputed election settled only by a 5-4
decision by a bitterly divided Supreme Court, and
decisively reelected in 2004, President Bush led the
United States into four wars, oversaw the dismantling
of Social Security and Medicare, and enforced a drastic
shrinking of elementary, secondary, and collegiate
education.

He spearheaded the transformation of
President Bill Clinton's budget surpluses of 1999 and
2000 into permanent deficits of more than a trillion
dollars a year, thus profoundly reducing the amount of
capital available to address the needs of the vast
majority of citizens and inhibiting the creation of new
jobs with any promise of advancement or financial
security, while at the same time pursuing tax
reductions that increased the differences between the
income and assets of, in his own terminology, "owners"
and "pre-owners" of "the American ownership society" to
extremes almost beyond measure. When he left office,
taxation of personal and corporate incomes, while still
legally extant, had been effectively replaced by a new
payroll tax, so that almost all investment,
inheritance, and interest income was left tax-free."Those with the greatest stake in America," President
Bush often said throughout his second term, "have the
greatest stake in defending it. Thus we as a nation
must do all that we can to ensure that the commitment
of those with the greatest stake to the rest of us, a
commitment on which our freedom and security rests,
only grows greater."

Adding to Mr. Bush's statutory and administrative
economic policies were a series of decisions by the
"Bush Court," as the Supreme Court was known after
2005, when in that year Mr. Bush replaced three
retiring members with very conservative justices (a
fourth was replaced in 2006), depriving government
regulation of corporations and the environment of any
legal basis — decisions which many analysts considered
more significant than the repudiation by the Bush Court
of previous decisions upholding a woman's right to
privacy in the matter of abortion and certain
applications of affirmative action. Even with the Bush
Court seated, however, the Republican-controlled
Congress that Mr. Bush enjoyed throughout his
presidency repeatedly passed legislation removing issue
after issue from the purview of the state and federal
courts, including questions of freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the
right to trial by jury.

Despite these prohibitions of
judicial review, the government, under Mr. Bush, did
not press for any legislation curtailing what had
previously been referred to as "First Amendment
freedoms," but simply refrained from challenging such
legislation passed by many states, rather filing
supportive briefs before the Supreme Court when such
measures were contested. Ultimately the reversal of the
series of 20th-century Supreme Court decisions
subjecting the states to the Bill of Rights, long-
sought by certain conservatives, was achieved not de
jure but de facto. "The press is legally free," the
former New York Times columnist Frank Rich put it in
2007, writing in his online journal
Thatsrichbrother.com. "It merely refrains from
practicing freedom." Some said the same of the nation
as a whole; others said the country was freer than it
had ever been.

Mr. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6,
1946, and raised in Houston and Midland, Texas, where
his father, the former President George H. W. Bush,
began his careers in oil and politics. Mr. Bush
attended Andover Academy and graduated from Yale
University in 1968. During the Vietnam War he was a
member of the Texas Air National Guard, known at the
time as a safe haven from combat duty; whether Mr. Bush
did in fact fulfill his military obligations became a
subject of dispute during his second election campaign.

In 1975 Mr. Bush graduated from Harvard Business School
and began careers in oil and politics in Texas; neither
flourished. Though he married the former Laura Welch in
1977 and fathered twin daughters Jenna (named for Mrs.
Bush's mother) and Barbara (named for Mr. Bush's
mother) in 1981, Mr. Bush's life through his early 40s
was characterized by business failures, accusations of
insider trading, reports of silent bailouts, and self-
confessed "drinking." (Mr. Bush claimed to have
renounced drinking — the word alcoholism was never
used — the day after his 40th birthday, as the result of
divine intervention and an act of will.)

He became a
public figure in 1989 when, through a questioned
investment, he became part of the consortium that
bought the Texas Rangers baseball franchise; his title
as managing partner produced an impression of
competence and good humor. In 1994 Mr. Bush ran for
governor of Texas and proved himself a first-rate
campaigner. When he was elected, Texas was a bipartisan
state; as Mr. Bush's advisor Karl Rove once said, "He
charmed Democrats into riding on his strong back as he
forded the river of discord." When Mr. Bush left office
as president, the Texas government was all Republican.

Mr. Bush was a politician opponents underestimated at
their peril, and throughout his career his opponents
did just that. He cultivated an aura of know-
nothingness, of "a fine disregard" of inconvenient
facts or opinions, but he was devastating on the
attack, able to present himself as an ordinary man
outraged by the self-superiority of whoever might be
opposing him at any time and on any issue. Even as
president, before the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on
Washington, D.C., and New York City, in 2001, he was
not always taken seriously by political commentators or
the public at large; after that event he became a
heroic figure, standing in defense of the United States
as if that historic responsibility were his alone.

He launched an assault against Afghanistan, where al
Qaeda had its headquarters and training grounds, weeks
after the 2001 attacks, leading to the immediate fall
of the totalitarian Islamic regime of the Taliban,
which had given al Qaeda sanctuary. Though Osama bin
Laden, the leader of the worldwide Islamist movement,
escaped capture, his forces were severely weakened and
scattered; during Mr. Bush's first term there was,
against all expectations and predictions, no further
terrorist attack on American soil. Arguing that Saddam
Hussein's government in Iraq was a center of terrorist
plotting and a repository of terrorist weaponry, from
what turned out to be nonexistent chemical and
biological arms to equally chimerical nuclear
technology, Mr. Bush in 2003 led a limited
international coalition into Iraq and replaced Mr.
Hussein with an occupying force, which over the next
year was pushed back into consistently shrinking
enclaves in the face of a fierce insurgency.

Following
his reelection in 2004, Mr. Bush ordered the
destruction of the cities where the insurgents were
thought to be concentrated; though the cities were
destroyed, the insurgency continued. Mr. Bush then
pressed on to Iran and North Korea, which he had
identified as "rogue states."

With U.S. Armed Forces tied down in Iraq, Mr. Bush
turned to what critics called a "private army subject
to no law and operating at the whim of a single
individual" — that is, to large numbers of private
contractors employed by U. S., Serbian, Nigerian, and
Saudi corporations — to launch land, sea, and air
attacks meant to destroy nuclear facilities in both
Iran and North Korea. While the Afghan and Iraqi armies
and governments had collapsed almost at the first sign
of American assault, the Iranian and North Korean
invasions were beaten back by sustained resistance and,
in North Korea, the use of explosives that Mr. Bush
denounced as "tactical nuclear weapons," though this
was later proved not to be the case. Nonetheless Mr.
Bush then ordered what he described as "pinpoint"
nuclear attacks on the nuclear sites in Iran and North
Korea, which, while achieving their goals, also led to
the One-Day War, a nuclear exchange between India and
Pakistan that left Bombay and Karachi in ruins and led
to the fall of the governments of both countries, and
to the withdrawal of the American-led coalition forces
from Iraq. The result was the series of still-
continuing civil wars throughout the Middle East and
the Indian subcontinent that, while involving no
unconventional weapons since 2006 have, according to
the United Nations, caused the deaths of 12 million
people and the displacement of millions more. Mr.
Bush's claim in action if not in words that the United
States retained an international monopoly on the
legitimate use of force left allies such as Great
Britain and alliances such as NATO crippled; it also
left the United States at least formally unchallenged.

It was often said, during Mr. Bush's first term, that
he saw himself as a messianic figure, ordained by God
to carry the flag of freedom ("God's gift," in Mr.
Bush's words, "to every individual") to the corners of
the earth, and that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
at least, were part of a crusade of transcendent
significance. After Mr. Bush's reelection, it was
increasingly argued that his wars were a diversionary
and obfuscatory tactic meant to raise Mr. Bush's
standing, and the power of the Republican Party both in
Congress and in the states, solely for the benefit of
Mr. Bush's domestic agenda, and that, as the poet
Donald Hall wrote, "it was the United States itself
that was the true object of conquest."

While that is a
matter for history to settle (when, as Mr. Bush himself
once put it, "we'll all be dead"), few would dispute
that Mr. Bush left the United States if not conquered
then irrevocably changed — and, according to the
American novelist Philip Roth, who in 2008, cited by
the Swedish Academy as "the voice of a lost republic,"
was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, "less a
nation governed by its citizenry, where each of us has
one vote, than a stock exchange owned by its
shareholders, according to the number of their shares."

Mr. Bush's Republican Party had, during his time in
office, so effectively marginalized the opposition
Democratic Party that it all but ceased to function in
many states. After the suspension of the filibuster
rule in the U.S. Senate, the remaining 45 Democratic
senators were unable to block any of Mr. Bush's
appointments to the federal courts or the executive
branch of government. The Republicans had so
successfully supported Mr. Bush as an infallible and
irreplaceable leader that he came to seem, in fact,
irreplaceable. There was no figure in the party who did
not appear diminished as soon as his or her name was
mentioned alongside of his, and the notion of any
ordinary Republican actually succeeding Mr. Bush
became, in the words of William Kristol, editor of the
conservative journal The Daily Standard, "unthinkable."

Thus was the strategy devised to introduce a
constitutional amendment to remove the requirement in
Article 1 that no one could be elected president were
he or she not native born, supposedly to permit the
presidential candidacy of the native-born Austrian
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the enormously popular and
skillful governor of California and the one Republican
other than Mr. Bush who did sometimes appear larger
than life.

It later transpired that the amendment was a
ruse: When Democrats attempted to "poison" the
amendment by proposing that all restrictions on who
might become president be removed (the requirement that
a president be at least 35 years old, the two-term
limit), the Republicans immediately acquiesced, and as
a result of the passage of the 28th Amendment in 2006
and its ratification by the states the next year, in
2008 Mr. Bush announced his candidacy for a third term.
He was overwhelmingly defeated that November by former
President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Bush's life after his presidency was marked by
misfortune. He soon lost interest in his status as the
standard-bearer of his party and its chief fundraiser;
many believed he had again begun drinking, and in any
case he seemed to spend most of his time at private
clubs in Houston, where he established residence in
2010 after selling his property in Crawford, Texas.
("At least I won't have to cut that f--- brush again,"
Mr. Bush was heard to say after his last election.)

Then on May 1, 2011, Jenna and Barbara Bush were killed
in a drunken driving accident in New York City, an
incident that also took the lives of seven other
people, four of them friends of the Bush daughters.
Rumors that a Bush family friend attempted to bribe the
police to report that a person other than Jenna or
Barbara Bush was driving (the body of Barbara Bush was
in the driver's seat) were never confirmed.

Four years
later, in 2015, Laura Bush, like her father, died of
Parkinson's disease; she was 68. After a period of
mourning, Mr. Bush announced that, to find his way back
into "productive service" and "do God's will," he would
welcome the opportunity to act as commissioner of
baseball. But while Commissioner Bud Selig said that he
would be honored to yield the position to Mr. Bush, he
cautioned that the exigencies of the job would probably
require him to remain in office "for another year, or
maybe two," and the question was not raised again.

Mr. Bush was preceded in death by his sister Robin
Bush, his brothers John "Jeb" Bush, the former governor
of Florida, Neil Bush, and Marvin Bush, and his sister
Dorothy Bush Koch. He is survived by his parents.

[Greil Marcus is with Sean Wilentz co-editor of just
published The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty
in the American Ballad (Norton); his book Like a
Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads will be
published next May by PublicAffairs. He is working on a
book about prophecy and American identity.]