From Bush to Romo to the Future

Bush's Gamble. The surge is essentially the gamble that George Bush is taking to not be a failure. If the surge and ultimtely the whole mission fail, everything about George W. Bush was wrong, things that George Bush believes in just as much as Karl Marx believed in the downfall of capitalism. The strutting, the smirk, the bombast, the big gestures, the cockiness, the confrontationalism--if the surge fails, these were all impotent hot air . . . talking the talk but not being able to either get the job done or understand what the job is. From George W's point of view, the invasion of Iraq was supposed to be the ultimate testimony to the validity of his worldview and worth as a man. If the surge fails, the war will mock his worldview and trumpet his failure as a man right through the last phony tribute at his state funeral.

But Bush would be wrong to heap all his failures onto himself. Bush's bombastic cockiness is the style among both and white and black males and Southern white guys in particular. Bush's style is practically the only style that right-wingers allow themselves to adopt. Bush and Cheney represent a particularly narrow, contemporary American style of masculinity that's pitched in opposition to the liberal acceptance of feminism. The failure of the war in Iraq represents not only a personal failure for Bush, but a collective failure for the right-wing and faux macho manliness. Bush can take comfort in that he hasn't failed alone. It "takes a village," actually a very big village, to create a failure as monumental as the failed war in Iraq.

Tony Romo. Tony Romo mishandled a snap and cost the Dallas Cowboys their playoff game with the Seattle Seahawks. But Tony Romo isn't George Bush. Romo showed in his first year as a starter that he is a championship caliber quarterback. Where George Bush's way of living his life has brought himself and the United States as a country to the brink of disaster, Romo's performance this year shows that he has been living the right way as he prepared to become an NFL quarterback. He may have blown the Seattle game, but Romo showed that he can compete at the top of an extremely demanding profession and fans should have patience with him.

Post-2008--In January, 2009, George Bush will be gone, but his shadow will still hang over Washington and the country. The "Ricky Bobby" style of macho bluster that George Bush adopted (or did the movie copy Bush) will still be a force in American culture. If American society is going to pull itself out of the muck of the Bush administration, we're going to have to adopt a new political ethic. As an alternative to macho bluster, we should look at the energetic problem-solving ethic in American offices, factory-floors, military units, housebuilding sites, locker rooms, and NASCAR garages. In a problem solving ethic, the first virtue is having the maturity and self-confidence needed to recognize problems and opportunities and take responsibility for the reality of the situation. This is the virtue that we need to extend from workplaces all over the country to the political arena as we shovel our way out from under the legacy of the Bush era.